Matteo Pecchio, Finance '25 | Skis

Describe your company: Skis is a digital solution that plans the day for skiers based on their constraints, reducing the hassle of planning and increasing safety and overall enjoyment.

Why did you apply to Race To Revenue? What are you hoping to get out of this experience? I hope to get two main things out of R2R: 1. By August, the Skis' team wants to be able to launch the app in the market, potentially bringing in the first revenue. To get there, we need help to set up the company (legal issues), guidance in marketing, sales (we aim to get more letters of intent), and design (has to be easy to use but also bring value to users) 2. A learning and fun experience with a team of wonderful people. I am still very young and have limited knowledge about start-ups (even though I am trying to pick up things quickly), so I have an excellent opportunity to improve my app and myself with it.

When is a time you failed forward? It happened to me multiple times when I was a skier. Like in every sport, when skiing, there is success and failure. An example for me would be at the National Competition. I trained hard all year to qualify and try to do well there, and once it was time, I couldn't perform as I wanted to. I guess this can be considered a failure, but my team believes in the approach of "Did it go well, or did you learn?". By this, we mean that we don't consider anything a failure. Everything we do has a learning curve, so we learn something new when we fail. Hence, back to the prompt, we always fail forward. 

Where were you born? What is an interesting fact about your hometown? I was born in Milan (Italy) and lived most of my life there. Interestingly, it is the most similar city to the average US city we have in my country (and possibly in Europe).

Would you rather go back in time or be transported to the future? Transported to the future. I am a very curious person, and as I can read what happened in the past (with a decent level of certainty) and can only guess what will happen in the future, I rather go there and find out. 

Who is the fictional character that you have the most in common with, and why? I like to think it would be Spiderman.

• He likes to help the ones in need, and I like to think I have the same tendency to do so
• He, most of the time, tries to calculate what is going to happen, taking a very methodical approach
• He, sometimes, can get a bit emotional, which can lead to issues, and as much as I am trying to become a better version of myself, at times, I still have that issue

Fun fact about you: I think the funniest thing would be how we started working on Skeez. Simone had figured out there was a problem for a while, and he was already thinking about solving it. I invited him to my house in Italy to go skiing, and we got lost (despite our combined high skills). There he realized that the problem was even greater than he thought, so he asked me (a person who had 0 experience in start-ups at the time) to join him. It has been a wonderful time since. 

Lastly, what do you want to learn more about, relating to business development in general or your own company/venture specifically? As a second year in college, despite trying to convince myself that I have a lot of knowledge and am almost world ready if I think more deeply, I realize I still have a journey in front of me. So, I want to learn what exact factors we need to consider to be successful with our app, how managers think when faced with an opportunity (and how can I increase my chances of them like us), what things we are not focusing on that we should really be focusing on, how can we increase our reach? A big thing will also be focusing on not reinventing the wheel. Ask other "racers" what mistakes they have made in the past and what they have learned to help us make better decisions ourselves.