Why I decided to found Platformatic / Luca

“Right time, right place, right people.” My grandpa gave me this answer when I asked him what the secret recipe for creating something impactful was. At the time, I didn’t know what “impact” really was, but I associated it with “greatness.” Celso, my grandpa, died a few days after sharing this with me. Since then, I have been on the quest to find the intersection between these three ingredients, and here I am today, starting this incredible journey called Platformatic.

Right time

The digital transformation space has been seeing a positive evolution with “the cloud” and DevOps: the infrastructure’s barrier was taken down, and teams started moving towards more agile ways of working. For the first time, we heard the term “commodity” associated with technology.

With the exponential growth of digital experiences and users, the so-called “front-end” has been massively disrupted in the past few years, commoditizing the creation and delivery process to just a few commands. This has led to a growing sentiment of empowerment within the developer community, which was all enabled by a small change that led to a substantial social impact.

But what about APIs? Micro-services have been the last significant evolution in this space, together with more recent steps around “gateway” and “service-mesh.” These changes focused primarily on the operators, leaving the “doers”, more often than not developers, lagging. As part of this new phase of digital evolution, bringing developers to the forefront is more important than ever.

Right place

In the last decade, organizations and teams have constantly been transforming. The rise of agile methodology has, on one hand, enabled people to embrace creativity more than ever before, while on the other hand, it has added more pressure on distributed coordination. Developers have been focusing on solving the result of distribution: foundations. While infrastructure and front-end/UX have benefited from evolving solutions, the APIs and their developers have been stuck into delivery loops at the fulcrum of these connections.

Backend development is the missing piece of a complete puzzle called Digital Platforms.

Right people

The last, and most certainly not least important, ingredient for creating something impactful is people. I was fortunate to meet incredible industry colleagues during my consultancy and leadership journey. Some of them became dear friends of mine, people who have positively impacted my life. Others have been inspirational and ultimately pivotal to the idea that has become Platformatic. Over the years, the hundreds of developers I have met along the way are the reason why I knew that Platformatic had to be created.. And then, there is my co-founder & CTO, Matteo Collina, who has inspired me and made me truly excited to be on this journey. As we embark on the journey that is a startup, I call myself lucky to be working with not only a friend but one of the people I respect most. Thank you to my friends, my parents, my lovely wife Julia, and my little boy Nico for your support, patience, and your unwavering belief in me. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Luca

Co-Founder and CEO - Platformatic