10 years of OpenMove: milestones, memories, and moving forward

On November 11th, 2024, OpenMove turned 10.

But let’s hold off on the confetti: it’s just a symbolic milestone, and I’m not even sure how to celebrate it.

Those who’ve been through it know there’s nothing particularly special about it: you sit in front of the notary, sign a couple of documents, and that’s it. In fact, I couldn’t even find a photo from that day (except for this check, which I probably snapped to send to the accountant), and I didn’t even remember the exact date—I literally had to look it up in the registry.

But is it really that important? In the end, we had started working on it months before. There are other milestones worth celebrating: the first product on the market, the arrival of new colleagues, projects in new countries…

I mentioned there are no pictures, but what I can do is share a couple of little-known fun facts to make up for it.

The first one is that on that November 11, 2014, I dashed out of the notary’s office and hopped on a train for a startup event in Nova Gorica. I was in such a rush that I didn’t have time to buy a ticket. “Founder of smart mobility startup gets fined by the ticket inspector shortly after” — I could already see the embarrassing headline in the newspaper, but luckily there were tons of students on the train, and I, not yet 28, blended in by sprawling out and pretending to chew gum. Don’t ask me why!

Now for the second one. There are some good reasons (and others less so, let’s be honest) to have a company name different from the brand, and the sharp-eyed among you might have noticed in the photos that ours is “Lucian S.r.l.”. Why this invented name? Because – as my friends know – among my great passions are classical Greece and ancient Greek. And this name is a tribute to Lucian of Samosata, a Hellenistic writer who, in “A true story,” narrated the first (dreamlike) voyage of a ship to the Moon. And what’s remarkable about that? He was no scientist, yet he imagined the Moon as a celestial body and not just a bright point in the firmament, 1,400 years before Galileo.

Alright, let’s get serious now. Where are we gonna be in 10 years? A guy asked me this in a job interview earlier this year. Now he’s sitting across from me on the train. I told him we’d be ringing the bell on Wall Street. I lied. Economics is never the objective. I chuckle seeing startups declare they want to become unicorns: that’s not a goal; it’s a byproduct if you work well and if you work hard, as simple as it gets.

So I don’t know if an IPO – although I can’t rule it out – is the natural trajectory for a completely bootstrapped company.

What I do know for sure is that in our first 10 years, we’ve grown 40% year over year, and that’s what we intend to keep doing for the next 10. Game on. We’re lucky to work in a fantastic market, that of SaaS and ARR, where compound growth rules, which is basically exponential. Oh, so my old degree in mathematics actually came in handy.

Strong financials are not a goal; they’re just the result of a good product. I couldn’t care less about the money.

But Lorenzo, will you still be the CEO in 10 years? Who knows. Titles don’t really matter. What’s important is the growth and scalability of the company, and like every team member, I keep these goals top of mind. Curious, ambitious, and determined as I am, I’ll always strive to keep learning and teaching—those are the true motivations that get me out of bed in the morning.

Let me wrap up with the necessary thanks. OpenMove wasn’t the first nor the last company I founded, but it’s the one I’ve invested the most in and the one that’s given me the most in return. And it’s all thanks to the extraordinary team of people we’ve built over the years, every one of them, whom I wouldn’t trade for all the money in the world.