About me
Posted on November 11, 2023 (Last modified on June 6, 2024) • 6 min read • 1,212 wordsPapà, husband, coder, reader, home-cook, startup founder
Hi, I’m Paolo Ferdinando Bongiovanni. Thanks for visiting!
Be warned, most of what follows has my brand of humour: hard to understand - yeah, I’m always puzzled that my jokes fall flat- and hard to decide if I’m being serious or not. If in doubt, I was probably attempting to be facetious.
I was born in far 1977, on November 25th. It happened in Belgium, where my mum is originally from. She took the bet of marrying an Italian immigrant 7 years her senior, even after he initially lied about his age.
At the time of writing, they were still happily married.
We lived in Belgium for three years after my birth, welcoming my sister Giusy when I was 2. Then, my father received the fateful call from the Italian state railways. He was going to be a train driver!
So we moved to Friuli-Venezia-Giulia. When people ask him where I’m from, and I answer Brighton, and they say, no, I mean initially, and I say London, and they say nooo, for gosh sake, hear your accent, man, and I eventually relent; I tell them that my parents live in the north-east of Italy, not far from Venice, on the border with Slovenia.
It’s a lovely part of Italy: the seaside, mountains, good food, and lovely wine. Some may challenge me about the excellent food. My wife and I like it, so you have it there.
The interesting fact about where I grew up is that my dad’s family live about as far from there as my mum’s family in Belgium. You see, I left something out of my initial storytelling. Where is my dad from, you ask? Think of dead horse heads in your bed on a cold morning, and you’ll have your answer.
I had an enjoyable and safe childhood, got a second sister called Natalie when I was nine, and did well in primary and middle school, started high school horribly, repeating my first year in a less demanding environment after hitting for the first time the wall between my lazy intelligence and places that required me to abandon that laziness.
Once I changed, I returned to acing my classes with little effort until it was time for university. But in those crucial years, something significant happened. My inner nerd awoke, consumed me, possessed me. I was an avid tabletop roleplaying player and developed my deepest friendships that are still strong nearly 30 years later.
Then it was time for university, where I discovered yet again that being smartish but lazy is not enough when you are surrounded by many brains, some with better hardware and software and switched on more often than yours.
So, I struggled at university until I discovered I could go abroad during my student life. And so off I went, never to look back.
I returned to half of my roots, Belgium, in the ancient university town of Leuven. There, I met many amazing friends, some of whom I still frequent 20 years on, and an extraordinary Belgian lady who lived a couple of miles from where I lived when we were babies. If that’s not destiny, what is?!
How did I seduce that lovely young lady, now my loving wife? The Italian way: food and wine. It’s a surprisingly strong combo; it remains the bedrock of our relationship more than 20 years after it started.
So, my initial year of stay in Belgium extended to three. Those three years included: Graduating from university. Starting to live with the young Belgian lady. Getting my first job as an operations engineer at the now-defunct Wall Street Journal Europe.
After 18 months as a glorified tech support for journalists and all the great folk who produce a newspaper, I didn’t get the promotion I had applied for, cried a bit, and decided I wanted to experience a big city. So did my girlfriend. London it was.
The first apartment my wife and I lived in in London wasn’t an apartment. It was a single room in a two-floor house in Catford, south-east of London. It was tiny, yet we had a lot of fun, and we enjoyed the Polish friends who occupied the house’s other rooms.
I joined a company called Retain International, which was a very fortunate move. I stayed there for nine years, going from junior developer to technical director and part-owner of the business.
I suffered, laughed, learned, flirted with a nervous breakdown, experienced the thrill of selling to a big company, and then ungracefully bowed out, unhappy with having a boss above me again after a year and a half under the new ownership,
I think I must have developed some form of trauma around that period because I subconsciously distanced myself from the ex-colleagues and the idea of the company. Even today, I tend to avoid thinking of those years, and it is a pity because I had fun, talented, and helpful colleagues with whom I shared highs and lows. At some point, I will be able to move on and reconnect with them—I hope!
After that, in 2016, I launched Mindiply—multiply the power of the mind. The idea behind it, the why, the inspiration, was to translate findings in the cognitive science literature into software that would assist humans in getting more out of their brains.
The software we launched included a (now-defunct) brainstorming platform, an anonymous group decision-making application and lastly, a project timeline tool.
I’ve yet to make it a sustainable business. After so many years of effort, money and energy, I’m pondering how to move forward. I intend to write extensively about the Mindiply journey and how I’m approaching the decision of the future direction. I will signpost where this is going when I do write it.
The first few years in London were precisely what my wife and I had hoped for: experiencing many new places, events, art forms, restaurants, and shops and meeting plenty of interesting people.
We rented for about three years, then bought our first house in Bromley in 2009.
Then we did what many do: We got married and had children. We still loved London, and our daughter was born there in 2013, while our son was born there in 2016. But as the kids started growing, we discovered a place that had captured our hearts: Brighton.
We moved to Brighton in 2018 and are still here. I often tell people, “If cities were girls, Brighton would be my girlfriend.” Someone told me about Brighton (trauma alert): “It’s the place where people who don’t make it in London end up.” I doubt there is much validity to the claim. From my side, I love this city. It has issues, plenty of homelessness, drug consumption, and hen and stag dos. But it is vibrant, colourful, liberal, full of restaurants and nice people. There are good schools for both our kids and the sea has a healing effect on the soul in turmoil. We have no plans to leave.