Alessandro Loprieno: ‘Short films are our asset!
“In Short We Trust!” is the motto of the 31-year-old entrepreneur from Puglia, who believes in a totally new approach to “short cinema”
Alessandro Loprieno, a 31-year-old from Puglia, is the founder and CEO of WeShort and believes in a totally new approach to “short cinema”. His background is in foreign languages and literature, cinema, finance and technology, and he has made short films an interesting and innovative field.
In fact, after nine years working for the airline Ryanair, he began a path in the film industry. Since 2018 he has been connected with the world of Hollywood, having collaborated and become a partner in Media Capital Technologies, a technology finance company applied to the film industry, founded by the same producers who have financially supported films such as high impact “Birdman”.
He is also a founding partner of ‘Crowducers’, a company dedicated to finding risk capital for the film industry. His personal motto is emblematic: ‘Fellini said that “cinema is light”, I add that I am happy to pay the bill’.
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How would you describe your company? What can you tell us about its development? What are its mission, values and vision?
“My startup wants to become a big company, and I would describe it as ambitious, young, innovative, agile and concrete. We have been on the market for less than a year, the validation and beta-testing phase took about six months from September 2020 to February 2021, after which on 21 March last year we put the first version of the streaming platform on the web, closed the first pre-seed investment round and, after a few months of traction, in September we put the first version of the mobile application on the iOS and Android stores. Immediately afterwards, we closed another seed round of investment and attracted the interest of large partner companies such as Chili and TCL; in addition to these, there was also interest from the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and its industry festival, called ‘Short’. WeShort’s mission is to bring short films as an everyday choice of entertainment to the general public all over the world, and our vision is to become the major of short films. Our main values are sharing, unity, passion and frugality”.
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What projects do you have in the pipeline and what do they consist of? Which are the flagship products of your business and which are worthy of development?
“We are currently finalising the integration with the major Chinese company TCL, to bring the entire WeShort library available and pre-installed on all their SmartTVs. We are working on other deals of similar importance with major international partners. Certainly our only product, and therefore the flagship product, on which we have based our identity is the short film, which is why we have acquired the best short films in the world, and we will continue to do so constantly in the present and in the future, as there are many high-quality short films that the public has not yet been able to discover. A deserving side of our enterprise, which is under development, and which facilitates the fruition of content on the platform is undoubtedly WeShort AI, a proprietary artificial intelligence algorithm that, among other things, will make a difference in the user experience”.
How do you fill your free time? Is there anything you would like to do that you haven’t had the opportunity to do yet, the famous personal “dream in the drawer”?
“I used to watch films as a hobby, lots of films; today, as a good founder, I devote myself full-time, often up to fourteen hours a day, to guiding WeShort to become a great company. To be honest, I don’t mean to be a workaholic, but I haven’t had much free time in the last year and a half. On the other hand, I’m doing what I love best in life and fulfilling what was my childhood dream. Today everything is exciting in my life, I am happy, I find myself interacting with my idols, with the same people that I used to look up on Wikipedia as a film buff. This is an incredible feeling, maybe it’s hard to understand, when I was a kid I wanted to ‘make Hollywood movies’; today, thanks to the creation of WeShort, I sometimes find myself working with people who make movies at a very high level, even really Hollywood ones. Instead, in my free time from WeShort, I spend time with my family. My mother and father have made so many sacrifices for me and my brother, who is also a partner in WeShort. I enjoy spending time with them and sharing my blood the good things that are happening”.
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What do you expect from your colleagues and friends? Which attitudes annoy you the most and which ones do you appreciate in others? Are you a tolerant person or do you find it difficult to forgive misunderstandings or insults? What ‘sanctions’ or reward mechanisms do you use, if any?
“I have the same healthy expectations of others that I have of myself. I never tell on myself, I don’t let others weigh my things down. For better or for worse, I am a person who shares what he has. I don’t judge myself and I don’t judge others, which is why I have learned to keep away from people who live by pointing fingers at themselves and others, or who are prejudiced against what they don’t know. I am a very tolerant person. I believe in the fact that we have to be leaders and that, if a situation does not make us feel good, we can walk away quietly, simply”.
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What are your biggest regrets and regrets? Is there anything you regret having done or, on the contrary, not having done, in life as well as in your career? Why?
“This is a difficult question, I usually live by giving more than 100 per cent. I always push to the maximum, I think that the biggest regret of my life over time is that I have given attention, energy and time to people who did not deserve it at all, denying it to those who would have appreciated it more. At the same time, I also understand that this is part of personal growth. Apart from that, I would do it all again. I like the film of my life so far, and I am a fan of the mythical Silicon Valley saying: ‘Fail fast, fail big’…”.
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How was your experience as a finalist for the International Award for Innovative Start-Ups/SMEs “Swiss Federalism, GCBL and Milton Friedman”, which was held in Zurich on 18 September 2021?
“I have to say that it was very exciting, especially my arrival at the award location was unique: I heard my partner Carlo Fusco on the phone as I was walking down the street to the station. He told me some crazy news, which I cannot reveal in this interview, but which you will certainly find out later. After learning the great news, I was so excited that I got lost in the streets of Zurich city centre, even though I was following the directions on Maps. That’s what it means to do what you love. Presenting WeShort at such an important event was an experience that I told many people close to me about. What’s more, we were among the first four start-ups involved, and in the entertainment sector we were the first…”.
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You are from southern Italy, so I would like to ask you what opportunities and difficulties, based on your experience, can be found today for a person approaching the world of entrepreneurship, especially if young, compared to other areas of Italy?
“Certainly the place I come from, Puglia, has changed its face in recent years, but we are only in the very early stages of a long growth and transformation. In 2009, as a university student, I saw it as a place to run away from and look for opportunities elsewhere; today, however, I think it is the best place to do business or create start-ups, if you know how to patiently build the right conditions. After living in Spain, in Madrid and Tenerife, in London and Frankfurt, I returned to Puglia with the dream of setting up a large company that could innovate and make what has always been my dream come true, cinema. Over the last ten years, Apulia has also grown a lot in terms of cinema, welcoming major productions from all over the world thanks to the Apulia Film Commission. I have to say that the cinematographic and technological evolution of my land combined with the propensity to influence my environment and my perhaps only innate talent, networking, have meant that not only was WeShort born in Apulia with the same ambitions as a start-up with origins in Silicon Valley, but that in the first year it was already gaining consensus and partnerships with international companies, as was the case with TCL. The only real difficulty was to get away from all the limiting beliefs that surround us: this also happens in big cities, not only in southern Italy, and to have the courage to really believe in it, thinking big.
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Do you think that in the future your company could become an S.p.A. and one day even aim for a market listing?
“Not only do I think WeShort could become a joint-stock company, the way we are working and building, but I think it could even become an Inc. for a Wall Street listing. Let me tell you something: first of all, WeShort has a very strong financial connotation, and this comes from my financial-insurance background, especially since I qualified as a financial educator years ago. WeShort treats short films as real assets. I often joke that at WeShort we do ‘asset management of short films’… But we don’t do short selling’ (he adds smiling). Certainly my knowledge of insurance funds and asset management companies inspires what will become the similar management, the performance of the platform and the distribution of royalties to the various producers for their ‘shorts’. This can certainly be a clue as to where our payoff comes from. I’ll explain: one day I was looking at a picture of a nickel, the five-cent US dollar coin, and I noticed the words ‘In God We Trust’. It was at that moment that I thought of starting a business with short films and, therefore, ‘In Short We Trust!’…”.
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