About the author
Vittorio
Viarengo.
Grew up in his parents' bakery in Genoa. Thirty years inside Silicon Valley. Author of Dalla Focaccia alla Silicon Valley, a memoir in Italian.
Grew up in his parents' bakery in Genoa. Thirty years inside Silicon Valley. Author of Dalla Focaccia alla Silicon Valley, a memoir in Italian.
Vittorio Viarengo grew up in his parents' bakery in Genoa. Entrepreneur and executive, he spent thirty years inside Silicon Valley, working at companies like Oracle and VMware. He lives in California with his wife Paola. Today he splits his time between music, sports and camper trips. He teaches bread and focaccia making on VivaLaFocaccia.com.
Vittorio Viarengo was born in Genoa in 1965. He grew up in his parents' bakery, in the alleys of Genoa. He studied at the Niccolò Paganini Conservatory (clarinet) and at scientific high school. He did not finish the conservatory and left university (Engineering); in his third year Professor Giorgio Olimpo brought him into a research project at the Institute for Educational Technology of Italy's CNR.
In 1993 he co-founded ViVi Software with Carlo Innocenti, in a basement on Corso Dogali in Genoa. They built tooling for object databases. In 1997 the company was acquired by Object Design (Burlington, Massachusetts). Between 2000 and 2001 he moved to Silicon Valley.
Over the following thirty years he held senior R&D and Marketing roles at some of the companies that shaped modern software: BEA Systems, Oracle, VMware (twice), KEAS, MobileIron, Skyhigh Networks, McAfee. He worked alongside Adam Bosworth, Tod Nielsen, Paul Maritz, Raghu Raghuram, Larry Ellison, Chris Young.
Today he lives in California with his wife Paola. Dalla Focaccia alla Silicon Valley is his first book, in Italian.
Dalla Focaccia alla Silicon Valley — subtitled L’incoscienza di provarci. Le acrobazie per riuscirci (an irreverent memoir from behind the scenes) — is a memoir of thirty years inside Silicon Valley, told from the perspective of a Genoese baker's son. Larry Ellison, a twenty-two-year-old who delivers in forty minutes what would have taken days, millions in stock options that never quite made it to the bank, an illness, music, family. And, in the end, the choice to be the owner of one's own time. The manuscript is complete. The book is in Italian.
For interviews, reviews, podcast appearances and everything else: vittorio@gmail.com.