Being an engineer with a technical background, my mission is to make venture capital from technologist to technologist. Having in-depth knowledge to understand the technology involved in a company is one of the most significant gaps often separating founders from investors. 

My journey is about reducing this gap. 

I work as a fractional leader for startups and gaining my way in Venture Capital with Venture Institute by VC Lab. 

My expertise spans in:

 🌍  Geospatial analytics
 🌱  Climate science
 🚲  Mobility
 🌉  Civil Engineering, Infrastructures and Construction


Beyond my professional journey, the great outdoors calls to me. I'm there, whether it's mountain biking trails, catching waves while surfing, scaling peaks in climbing, or exploring snowy terrains through ski mountaineering. For this reason, I am in business to preserve our playground and I work with companies with a positive outcome on the planet.

From November I went back to my "old job".

Old because my "new job" or what it was supposed to be came after an MBA title, a bloody resing, being a freelance, being hired in a software startup as Chief Commercial Officer, took a VC course in the meanwhile.

But still I realised how something was missing. Back in my university days, I decided to enroll for a civil engineering course because I wanted to do "concrete" thing (please excuse my joke). And that's probably what I was missing in my "new job": creating something that you can see and touch. Something as dirty as the ground I always worked with.

So basically, I made my "old job" my "new job" again. New because I transferred everything I learned for Marketing, GTM and s*t like that to my very unsexy, unglamorous, dirty old job. 

So here I am. Geotechnical engineer by trade, with a slightly unusual backstory. Let's see where this goes.

Eugenio Doglione

Civil Engineering | Wastewater and Envirorment | |Tech

When I started my freelance business, I built it over three pillars: autonomy, independence, and at least one day a week in nature.

I've always been passionate about outdoor sports. I could easily say that most of my life has revolved around them. When my daughter was born, I had a brutal wake-up call — it was almost impossible to reconcile a regular 9-to-5 job, a newborn, and being outdoors on weekends.

That's why, when I took the step to leave a salaried job, I decided that my working life should be calibrated around this standard.

One day in nature means many things: when I can, it's at least one day off during the week; if I'm busy, it could be a quick MTB ride in the morning. Sometimes it's none of that — but that's my KPI that something has gone off track.

And so far, the score is good.

In the past few months, I took a break from the LinkedIn game.

Due to my previous role at SWITCH, I massively used LinkedIn for reaching out to people, and despite that actually working, I was exposed for several hours a day to the content published here.

In November, I stepped back as Chief Commercial Officer at SWITCH to dedicate full time to my Civil Engineering consulting business. Since then I barely touched or opened LinkedIn, as I was fed up with it. Luckily, a coincidence — an iOS update was required to log in again on my phone, which I never did, and so I was cut off on mobile too.

What I realise in general is how toxic the culture here is, and how much relief I felt not spending my time reading about some dude's bragging.

But I do recognise how powerful this tool is for talking to people, so right now I am trying to get back in the game. There will be no consensus talk, not grammatically or politically correct, and definitely no "stay consistent", no high conversion headlines.

I will run this experiment and keep you updated xxx

Generally speaking, light-asset enterprise is dead—which is why I think I made a smart move getting back into Civil Engineering (as long as I won't be replaced by a robot).
In my last post, I talked about my decision to return to the Civil Engineering business, despite the world seemingly moving in another direction
.
Civil Engineering speaks the language of the heavy-asset economy, and that's exactly why I think we're so far behind in the AI hype cycle.

First: the AI revolution is a heavy-asset economy. You have to BUILD datacenters. You have to BUILD energy infrastructure. There's no cloud without concrete.

Second: Civil Engineering has a unique edge—it certifies safety. And safety certification is very hard to outsource to a machine. You need a third party that can take legal responsibility for failure, and that cannot (yet) be a machine.

The future is physical. Always has been. We just forgot for a decade.

Very interesting reading about how data centres are really built. 

It's a long post, so don't expect quick answers or a TLDR — you have to dive in.
My key takeaways:

- the real bottlenecks are physical: hyperscalers are placing multi-billion dollar capex orders, but actual deployment takes years
 - we can't defy thermodynamics — we'll probably melt the processor before reaching AGI

Two interesting aspects for us geotechnical nerds:

- to reduce land acquisition costs, developers are purchasing acres of swampland. This requires extensive geotechnical study, since the soil there is closer to the marmalade you spread at breakfast than to proper ground. Expect every type of ground improvement intervention (rigid inclusions, stone columns... you name it)
 - increasing computing capacity means denser racks, which translates to higher loads on your slab — and hence more sophisticated structural studies (read: FEM models)

We are so back

Open article: The Datacenter Bible - From Layman to Expert in 100 Pages by open.substack.com

The Datacenter Bible - From Layman to Expert in 100 Pages

taplio

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