Fabrizio Capobianco

I am an Italian American, some days more Italian, some days more American.

I like to start companies and I did it on both sides of the pond. I am an Engineer by trade and I have a Ph.D. in Usability, which most days I feel looks cool on my resume.

In 1994 I started a company called Internet Graffiti, the first web company in Italy. I was 23 years old and I had a ton of fun going around and explaining people why the Internet was going to be big.

Then I tought the Internet was boring and I decided to focus on the Intranet, starting a company in 1997, still in Italy. Our web document management product was used by a lot of companies. It was awesome, but I felt I was in the wrong place to make it big.

So in 1999 I moved to Silicon Valley (I loved the place, since I spent some time here as an Invited Scientist at the HP Labs in 1995). I wanted to start a company but was told I needed a Visa. I found a job at a job fair, worked for Tibco Finance (then Reuters) for 2 1/2 years, got my Green Card, went back to Italy, started Funambol and came back to the Valley, where I currently live with my family.

For Funambol, I have raised almost $30M and built the largest open source project in mobile. Our mission is to keep your life in sync, across all the devices you might have. The R&D of Funambol is in Italy, because I believe it is the best place in the world to develop software.

At the end of 2010, I moved to the President and Chairman position to spend my time thinking about my next big thing. I launched it in 2012. It is called TOK.tv and it is going to change TV forever.