Interview With Wonderminds Founder
Fall has finally descended on Los Angeles and the city is starting to slow down as many important holidays approach, which marks a rare lull in many tech-facing industries.
To that end, we thought we’d take some time to share with you a brief interview with the Founder of Wonderminds, Fabio Parodi, led by a brand-new member of the Wonderminds team, Martina Fantato. We hope it gives you a deeper understanding about the degree of insight, experience, and connections he brings to Wonderminds.
So, Fabio, let’s take it back and start from the beginning.
Tell me a little bit about your story.
Well, Martina, I was born in Italy started my career in the technology business there in 1982. I’ve had the amazing opportunity to be able to work in the IT Industry my whole life and throughout those years I’ve explored several aspects of it: starting from being a system programmer analyst in a big data center to switching to the personal computer industry at Olivetti in 1989. It was the first big paradigm shift in my career. the first of many, as it ended up turning out.
At Olivetti, I had a team of a dozen engineers reporting to me. I experienced the introduction of many new PC architecture designs like the IBM PS/2, EISA, and finally, the PCI. It was the same with the CPU: I witnessed many of it’s key evolutions. From the i286 to i386 and i486 and, eventually, Pentium processors.
In 1996, I had the opportunity to move to the USA and I worked as a software manager in a private medium-sized company: American Megatrends (AMI), headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
During that experience, I tested myself on managing a geographically dispersed team for the very first time. I managed people in America, India, and Taiwan. And no, we didn’t have Zoom back then, just emails and old-fashioned phones! It was a great adventure as I had the chance to work on the first Write Once Read Many (WORM) optical storage device: it was as big as a shoebox!
In 1999, I moved to California where I spent almost 15 years working at Cisco Systems. That required a new shift in my expertise: from personal computers to network protocols and embedded systems. It was the golden age of the dot-com and internet boom, and I had the luxury to work on many top-notch devices such as the first OC-48 WAN optical line cards, the first 10GE Ethernet ASIC chip, and many more. I was also part of the team tasked with designing a brand new router: the c7304. As part of this journey, I as well became an expert on IP Multicast and IPv6 network protocols.
In 2015 I moved again to a different segment of the industry when I joined LinkedIn. There, I worked in the Product Engineering department as a Technical Program Manager (TPM) and contributed to designing, developing, implementing, and deploying a new data center architecture used in all new data centers the company planned to deploy.
During that time as a TPM, I also led the design, development, productization, and deployment of a new hardware open source-architecture called Open19 under the leadership of Yuval Bachal. It included new data center specific switches, servers, cabling and much more.
One of my last projects at LinkedIn before retiring was the design, implementation, and deployment of the Software Define Storage (SDS): the decoupling of server hardware from storage devices.
That’s quite the amazing journey!
So how does Wonderminds fit into all of this?
The seed of the idea was planted in me during my collaboration with two Italian organizations in 2015 while I was at LinkedIn. Silicon Valley Study Tours (SVST) contacted me first, and soon after came Italiani di Frontiera (IdF).
Both of these organizations coordinate tours in the Silicon Valley for Italian undergraduate and graduate students as well as young entrepreneurs. They asked me to be a host and speaker for some of their events while in the Valley. That is when I started to get involved in helping these young up-and-comers understand how the tech industry worked here in Silicon Valley and began to share my hard-learned experiences to give advice on how to evolve their careers or businesses. I continued to collaborate with these two organization for my entire stay at LinkedIn, working with up to four visiting groups every year.
When I moved to Los Angeles in 2021, I started to get to know the local tech scene and, to my personal, and pleasant, surprise, I found a very active, fertile and multi-faceted industry with lots of forward-facing research actively being done. So, the thought came to me. Why can’t we import the SVST model to the LA area as well? With that, Wonderminds was born.
Do you still keep in touch with the folks at SVST and IdF?
Absolutely! We actually work in partnership and continue to collaborate in many ways. In the meantime, SVST has expanded their tour offerings to the Boston area as well, so now, with our support, they can now offer tours in San Francisco, Boston, and Los Angeles.
I understand Wonderminds already had its first tour this year. How did that go?
You’re absolutely right. We had our inaugural tour this past September.
It was an absolute success! Participants had the opportunity to meet and talk to experts from many different realities. They were able to tour tech companies like Meta, Netflix, CalStart, AT&T, and Evolution Photonics, as well as meet researchers and professors in various fields of the industry at CalTech and NYU. We were also lucky enough to be able to introduce them to both Pre-accellerator and M-accelerator, which are two great startup accelerators and funders. We were even able to connect participants with representatives from the Italian Trade Agency. And much much more. Those were just the highlights.
That’s great! I’m so glad it was so successful.
So, let’s talk about the future.
What does Wonderminds have planned for 2025?
We have two tours in the works right now: one in the Spring and one in the Fall. We are also working on a specific program geared towards young entrepreneurs with a dedicated focus on business best practices and how to do business here in the USA.