20. August 2015

    Interview-Series: Paolo Piffaretti

    Paolo Piffaretti just finished his Assessment year at the University of St. Gallen. Besides his studies, he already found his passion in entrepreneurship, started his own project together with his business partner Tobias Bienz and was actively involved in the YEC Incubator program.


    With Drive4Less, the two guys want to make "learning how to drive" more affordable. Therefore they founded an association to make this happen. More features and exciting news are coming soon so make sure to check their website. You can find their page here: http://drive4less.ch/


    Now let's move to the questions - thanks a lot to you, Paolo, for taking the time and answering all my questions and for your nice inputs.


    • How did the idea for your business come about?
      • The idea of Drive4less came to me with my current experience as a young driving student. After having paid more than a 1’000.- in driving lessons, I realized that I needed more practice than learning. Sadly as for most young people nowadays I couldn’t rely on my parents or relatives to help me practice. Therefore the only solution left for me was to pay again for driving lessons where I only needed practice. This made me think, and with that problem in mind I set out with my business partner Tobias Bienz to find a solution.
    • What three pieces of advice would you give to college students who want to become entrepreneurs?
      • I don’t know if one can call it an advice, but a very important step for me was to find out that  “everything is informal”. I always thought that to start a business you would need to do a lot of formal stuff, stuff only “special people do or can achieve” and that I wasn’t ready. Well no! Everybody can! Starting something is super easy, and you just have to believe in it and do it seriously, don’t count on other people to do it for you.
      • Secondly don’t believe everything people tell you, make your own rules, there is no special recipe, don’t waste time in trying to find out the best “tips and tricks”. You have to go and experience them with your own ideas.
    • What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur?
      • 1.     Perseverance
      • 2.     Faith - you need to believe in your project, even against all odds
      • 3.     Independence
    • What have been some of your failures, and what have you learned from them?
      • Well I’m super hasty, I don’t like waiting, so in the heat of the moment I made some mistakes. I learned from those mistakes that asking for guidance and council prevents us from making them. Don’t be shy or too proud to share your weaknesses. Every time we have a problem at Drive4less we call at least 10 people to council us, and as a result we make less mistakes.
    • How do you go about marketing your business? What has been your most successful form of marketing?
      • Well I don’t know yet if we are super good at marketing, for that I can’t really share anything. Hopefully, we will soon!
    • Where you see yourself and your business in 10 years? 20 years?
      • I have problem seeing myself so far ahead, but for sure doing some crazy fun project and traveling around the world god willing.
    Tags: HSG, St, Gallen, Entrepreneurship, Blog, English, Interview, Series, Paolo, Piffaretti, Drive4Less, Make, Driving, Affordable

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