Q: Tell us an interesting fact about you.

GC: My son Alexander, who is almost three years old, was born exactly one year after the foundation of Hive Power, and I just realised it a few weeks ago.

Q: What are your other interests asides from creating energy solutions?

GC: When I have free time, I usually spend it with my family, which is the best way to distract from work. I also like to play tennis, snowboarding, and like every Italian, playing football!

Q: What is one word that best describes you?

GC: I am curious, and I always try to understand the mechanisms behind what happens in front of my eyes, especially at the societal level. For example, now I am very interested in understanding how the adoption of electric vehicles will evolve in Europe.

Q: How do you see Hive Power in the next two years?

GC: I see Hive Power with a bigger team, working in different geographies, and, very important, bringing on partnerships with some of the major hardware and software providers in the energy and mobility fields. In this field, you can not disrupt the system alone, unless you are Elon Musk.

Q: Pitch Hive Power to us in a few sentences.

GC: Hive Power is building a Software as a Service platform to improve how we manage flexibilities. With flexibilities, we mean all the devices that generate or consume electric energy, which could be shifted in time, without affecting the comfort of the users, e.g. the charging of an electric vehicle or the operation of an industrial engine. We call this extensive framework our Flexibility Orchestrator, recalling a now common paradigm used in software engineering. We implemented a layer of digital solutions on top of the orchestration, now available thanks to the ongoing digitalisation, for dynamic pricing of energy, energy communities, and energy analytics for final users.

Q: What is your biggest achievement so far, leading Hive Power?

GC: In the last year, we have proven our market fit with our applications for Flexibility Orchestration used in operation by our customers. In parallel, we are testing future relevant solutions, e.g. V2G, with important industrial partners, helping us shape the first release soon.

Q: How would you describe the company culture of Hive Power?

GC: In Hive Power, I see three central values, which are familiar to the whole team. Integrity, with big respect of our counterparties, like partners, contractors, or customers. The desire for innovation and improvement, which push us to always look for a better solution. The collaboration, well described by the Swiss unofficial motto: Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno.

Q: Do you have some books to recommend to readers?

GC: For startuppers, I recommend The Personal MBA, by Josh Kaufman, and The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz. They are great books to learn business lessons on building new ventures. For everyone, I have been impressed by the work of Yuval Noah Harari and Tim Marshall and their ability to summarise history and geography in a limited number of pages.

There you have it! Subscribe to our newsletter to catch more exclusive news and updates.

‍