Paolo Pedrazzi
I’ve always done the same thing. Only the material changed.
I take pieces, hold them together, and out comes something that didn’t exist before and has to actually work. For years the pieces were type, paper and ink. Today they’re AI agents and software in production.
Underneath, the craft is identical: choose what’s worth doing, give it a shape that holds up, and own the result when someone uses it.
How I got here
In order, without skipping the awkward parts.
A print shop
I started out in a print shop. Presses to adjust, paper to choose, ink that dries on its own schedule. That’s where I learned the two things that have stuck with me ever since: form shapes meaning, and a job either comes out right or it doesn’t come out at all. That attention to detail is still where I start.
Sales rep, then area manager
Years of selling face to face, with samples in the trunk and real miles on the odometer. Then managing the people who sold. It’s the piece technical people almost always lack: a product only exists once someone buys it, and whoever sits across from the customer knows things no document will ever capture.
Book publisher
Thirteen years in publishing. Deciding what gets released and what doesn’t, working on manuscripts with authors, picking a cover, watching the return figures. A catalog works exactly like a product portfolio: a few titles carry everything else, many will never earn back, and the craft is figuring out fast which are which.
Satisfiction
I founded Satisfiction, a literary magazine. It started with no budget and was kept alive by an editorial team that believed in it. It taught me how to build an audience from nothing: by consistently publishing what nobody else would, and by not stopping when nobody was watching.
Technical leadership
I moved to the other side of the table: architectures, teams, products to ship to production and, above all, to keep running. With an unfair advantage: I came from sales and publishing, so I asked “who are we building this for?” before “which stack?”
Incubator, AI agents, portfolio
Today I run an incubator where AI-first startups are born, and I manage a portfolio of software products operated by AI agents: they write code, support customers, and keep operations running. My job is to direct them (set mandates, define constraints, check the results) and to teach other companies how to do the same. This isn’t a prediction about the future: it’s how this very page is maintained.
My family builds church organs
Handmade instruments, one at a time, using techniques that are centuries old. An organ is designed for the church it will live in: the pipes are voiced right there, by ear, one by one. Then it keeps playing for generations.
My work sits at the opposite extreme for speed: an agent can rebuild a product overnight. That’s exactly why I keep the organ in front of me. It’s a reminder that what matters isn’t how fast you made it, but how long it lasts and how it sounds when someone else plays it.
The rest of the day
I cook, and it’s the only thing that forces me to run on someone else’s timing. I play basketball and tennis, I run, I go to the gym: I need a place where you can’t cheat and the result shows up right away.
I play guitar and sing, badly enough that I do it purely for the fun of it. And then there’s computing, which was a game for me long before it became a job, and still is during the hours when nobody’s paying me to do it.
Let’s talk about what you want to make work
A real hour, with a diagnosis at the end. If I have nothing useful to tell you, I’ll say so right away.