This article follows previous pieces in our series about the entrepreneurs currently building companies at Beam. None of them arrived with their own idea, that’s not incidental, it’s the model. This one picks up with Vincenzo De Salvo, the other half of the venture profiled in the piece before it.
Every founder in this series gets asked some version of the same question: why did you actually join Beam. Partway through our conversation, Vincenzo De Salvo turns it back around on me. What’s the common thread, he wants to know, across everyone else who’s answered it so far.
It’s a fair question. It’s also, more or less, the one this whole series is trying to answer, one founder at a time.
Vincenzo shares his venture with Johannes, the subject of the piece before this one. Johannes’s answer was about access, the deals, the speed, the doors that open faster inside a structure like Beam’s than they would alone. Vincenzo’s starts somewhere else. It’s not really about what Beam gets you in the door. It’s about who’s actually giving you direction once you’re through it, and he learned why that matters the expensive way, long before Beam existed for him at all.
The investor problem
Vincenzo came from Sony, and had already left to build a company of his own once before this. It taught him something specific: running your own business often means working with people who aren’t actually the right people for you. Investors put up money, and then tell you to do A when you want to do B, and it’s their money, so you do A. “They’re probably stubborn,” as he puts it, and there’s not much room to push back.
That’s the piece of his first venture he wanted to leave behind, not the ambition, not the risk, just that particular arrangement.
Someone worth answering to
Vincenzo is careful about the word he uses for what Beam gives him. Not acceleration, he corrects himself mid-thought, running a business is already about as high tempo as it gets. What actually changed is who he answers to. “Very structured, very organized, there’s no space for interpretation,” he says of how Beam runs things, which sounds restrictive until he explains what it buys him: focus, on a specific set of things, even though he’d happily be chasing twenty other ideas at once given the choice.
And then there’s Jesper, Beam’s Head of Venture Development, who Vincenzo describes as a real sparring partner rather than an authority to manage around. He can challenge Jesper. Jesper can challenge him. That’s the exact relationship his old investors never gave him room for, and it’s the real answer to the question he asked me back: across everyone in this series, the thing that keeps coming up isn’t freedom exactly, it’s having someone worth pushing back against.
He’s candid, in passing, that founding pays less than a corporate salary would. That was never the draw.
Two different reasons, one venture
Vincenzo’s role on the venture he shares with Johannes reflects the same instinct. He owns the commercial side, client relationships, the business case, while Johannes builds. Two different reasons for signing up, one about access and one about direction, sitting on either side of the same table. Which is, in the end, the whole point of building it together: someone worth pushing back against, and someone who’ll push back too.
That venture now has a name: Parcelvox, live at parcelvox.com. Its own tagline sums up the idea in one line: what one driver learns, the next one inherits. Drivers record what they notice on a route hands-free, a broken doorbell, a tricky access code, a spot that’s impossible to park in, Parcelvox turns those notes into something structured, and the next driver assigned that same stop gets the tip exactly when they need it. And It’s already getting outside recognition too: Parcelvox is a finalist for the C2P Startup Innovation Award at the Parcel+Post Expo in London.
Want to read the whole series?
- Not My Idea — Part 1, The intro
- The Founder Trying to Prove Herself Wrong — Part 2, Katriina
- Done This Before — Part 3, Johannes