ShowMe: what remains of a project that never became a company

ShowMe did not begin with an idea of mine. It began with an idea by Roberto Lorusso, which I later helped develop. This article explains how I became involved, the role Stefano Ceci played and why the project never became an established business. It is my account: I separate what I experienced from how I interpret it.

How I became involved

The original ShowMe idea belongs to Roberto Lorusso. We were introduced through a mutual friend who knew about my thesis, understood what I was working on and thought we should talk. It was not a meeting I had sought out; it was a word-of-mouth introduction that worked.

From there, I began contributing to the project's development. I did not conceive it: I joined something that already existed as an intuition and worked to give it an organised form. I am happy to preserve that distinction, because claiming authorship of somebody else's idea is the quickest way to make the rest of the story meaningless.

Stefano Ceci: mentor and shareholder

Stefano Ceci acted as a mentor and held an equity stake. As I experienced it, his contribution covered four areas: validating our assumptions, introducing us to investors, setting operational priorities and shaping the mindset with which we approached the work. The first three were concrete activities; the fourth was harder to measure and perhaps the most valuable.

This is an experience recounted by me, not a claim verified through public sources. I have no documents to cite and I am not looking for them: I am reporting the relationship as I remember it, with the limitations inherent in any memory.

The motto of his that stayed with me is a single word: “Forward!” I present it as a motto I remember hearing, not as a documented quotation. Its purpose was to end discussions that were lasting longer than the problem they were meant to solve.

How it ended, without euphemisms

ShowMe never became an established operation. It did not turn into a self-sustaining business, and there is little value in presenting it otherwise: it was not a project put on hold, nor a strategic pivot. It stopped before reaching that point.

What remained, however, matters. I learned to ask, before getting carried away, who would pay and precisely what they would pay for. I learned that validation does not mean collecting favourable opinions, but finding the smallest piece of evidence capable of disproving an assumption. And I learned that setting operational priorities is a decision, not an automatic consequence of circumstances.

I wrote separately about the difference between building something from scratch and working inside an established organisation in Start-ups and companies: two very different schools.

My interpretation

If I had to say what I took away from it, it would be this: joining a project conceived by someone else teaches you to be useful before trying to be the protagonist. It is not a general rule; it is how I read the experience today. But it is why, when someone brings me an idea, the first thing I try to understand is not whether I like it, but what is missing for it to exist.