Roberto Croci

Hi, I’m Roberto Croci. It’s been a while, and with a new year starting, it felt like a good time to reintroduce myself. After all, it’s always nice to actually know the person behind the posts. 2003 - I completed my final degree and soon after joined DMR Consulting as a consultant, where I spent a year learning how business really works. 2004 -  I moved to BravoSolution S.p.A as a Senior Manager, leading sales. 2006 -  I joined PwC as a Senior Advisory Manager, focusing on project management. 2008 - Took me into the world of e-commerce with WebScience, where I worked as E-commerce Director. 2010 - It was a turning point. I joined Google as a Manager Solution Consultant and ended up staying 9 years. Over time, I grew into the Regional Head in Dubai. During this journey, we grew revenue and clients by over 5x in just 3 years, consistently beat sales targets for 11 quarters straight, and saw our product suite adopted by many of the largest advertisers across Southern & Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. More than the numbers, those years shaped my thinking, leadership, and resilience. 2019 - I joined Microsoft as Managing Director, where I built and launched a new VC fund, raised $15M from UAE and Saudi government entities, and deployed initial investments across 15 startups. 2022 -  I founded Constructive Rebels to help corporates and government entities drive innovation through startups, while also working part-time as an advisor and head across several organizations. 2023 -  I joined PIF as Director of Value Creation & Transformation 2025 - I was promoted to Senior Director. Outside of work, I’m usually: - Reading - Traveling and trying new experiences - Talking about leadership and startup growth - Or simply spending time with friends and family I started taking X more seriously only a few months ago, and I’m enjoying it here. If you like what I share, welcome to my world. Let’s learn, build, and have meaningful conversations together.📷

When anyone can copy your product in a weekend with AI, features stop being a moat. The things that are hard to copy are the ones that were always hard. - The trust you have built with customers. - The speed at which you learn and ship. - The brand people reach for without thinking. Companies that compete on having a better feature are in for a difficult few years. And companies that compete on relationships and speed are about to pull further ahead.

The best time to fix a company is while it is still doing well, and almost nobody does it. When the numbers are good, there is no appetite to change a winning formula, so the small cracks get ignored. And by the time the business is clearly struggling, you are fixing it with less money, less time, less goodwill and a nervous team. The leaders I admire most make changes when they do not have to. It looks unnecessary from the outside, but it is the cheapest change you will ever make.

In AI, compute and talent get all the attention, and they are not the scarce part anymore. The scarce things are proprietary data nobody else has, and distribution to customers who already trust you. Models are becoming a commodity.

AI can now hand you a hundred good answers in seconds, which sounds like it should make decisions easier. But it does the opposite. When everyone has the same instant answers, the advantage stops being information and starts being judgement. - Knowing which question was worth asking. - Knowing which of the hundred answers to actually trust. - Knowing what the model cannot see. For twenty years we rewarded people for knowing things, the next twenty will reward people for knowing what matters.

Trust is the single biggest factor in how fast an organisation can move, and people keep filing it under soft skills. It is one of the hardest and most practical things there is. Where trust is high, a decision happens in a quick conversation and everyone moves. Where it is low, the same decision needs a process, a committee, three approvals and a paper trail to protect everyone involved. All of that is the cost of not trusting each other. Low trust never shows up as a line in the budget, but you pay it on everything you try to do.

Almost every overnight success I have met was years in the making. People see the breakthrough, the funding round, the sudden rise, and assume it happened quickly. What they miss is the long stretch before it. The years of unglamorous work with no audience and no applause, when quitting would have been easy and nobody would have noticed. When you only see people at their peak, it is worth remembering the climb you did not see.

When I hire, I care less about where someone is today and more about how fast they are climbing. A steep learning curve is always better than an impressive starting point almost every time. Hire for the slope of the curve, and the title on the CV matters a lot less.

The most underrated competitive advantage is the speed of your decisions. Give two companies the same information, the same money and the same people, and they will still get completely different results. The difference is how fast they can make a call and move. While one company spends three months building consensus, the other has already tried, learned and adjusted twice. In a fast market, deciding with eighty percent of the information beats waiting for a hundred.

The best hires and the best investments have one thing in common. You back the person before it is obvious. While they still need you, while the price is low, while nobody else is paying attention. By the time it is obvious to everyone, the window has closed and the premium is gone. The whole game is seeing it early.

Success slowly separates you from everyday people. The bigger the wins, the better the rooms, and the farther you drift from where you started. It happens so slowly you rarely notice, until one day you realise you are only talking to people who sound just like you. So the question worth asking is: How fast can I close that gap again? Because people can always tell whether a conversation is about them or about you.

Your best engineer often becomes your worst manager, and it is not their fault. We take someone brilliant at the work and reward them with a team, a job that uses almost none of the same skills. Then we hand them ten people and hope they figure it out. The biggest capability gap in most companies has little to do with technology. It is middle managers who were never taught to lead. Fix that, and everything else you spend money on starts to work better.

We ask finance to bet on the future, then score them with a tool built to audit the past. Price the brand, the culture, the AI readiness, they are told. Then prove all of it this quarter. So they play safe, default to what fits in a spreadsheet, and we act surprised. The problem was never their ambition.

If your company runs on someone else’s AI model, you are also running on someone else’s assumptions. The data it was trained on, the language it thinks in, the defaults of the people who built it. That is fine until the model starts making decisions that matter. Who gets approved, what gets flagged, how a customer is treated. Owning the model means owning the judgment inside those decisions. For a company, and even more for a country, that is worth far more than it first sounds.

People treat culture as the soft stuff, separate from results. That is a mistake. Culture decides how fast decisions move, whether good people stay, and whether the plan survives contact with reality. It shows up in the numbers whether you choose to measure it or not.

“Move fast” means something different everywhere. In a startup, fast is about survival. In a big company, it is about getting everyone to move together. For a country, it is about sequencing things that will outlast you. People trip up when they bring one kind of speed into the wrong place.

In every gold rush, the steady money is made selling picks and shovels. The same is true in AI. The apps come and go, but the compute, the data and the people underneath keep paying off for years. Build or own the layer everyone else has to rent.

The first 100 days after buying a company decide the next five years. It is the one window where you have full authority and nobody is defending the old way yet. A lot of owners spend it on introductions and polite meetings, but the best ones use it to make the hard changes while change is still welcome.

A lot of companies confuse being busy with making progress. Meetings, decks, updates, milestones hit. It all feels like movement. But if the business is not better at the end of the quarter, none of it counts. Activity is not the same as impact.

For years you could make money in private equity without being good at it. Buy a company, add cheap debt, wait for the market to lift the price, sell for more. That is over. Debt is expensive, buyers are careful, and nobody can count on selling for a higher multiple. What is left is the one skill that always mattered. Making the business better while you own it. I think it is one of the healthiest things to happen to this industry in years.

I used to think hiring great people was enough, but I was clearly wrong. I have seen rooms full of brilliant people go nowhere, and ordinary teams do extraordinary things. The difference was always the conditions around them. Clear ownership, work that means something, people who can count on each other, and room to be themselves. Get those right, and ordinary people will surprise you.