11 Wednesday evenings at SAA School of Management, free to join. You arrive with a problem worth solving. You leave knowing whether it is real, and with the people to build it with.
Two kinds of evening, alternating. Practitioners who have built companies in Turin tell you what they wish they had known. Workshops put you to work with the rest of the room: finding a problem, talking to users, hearing other people's ideas, choosing who to build with. It ends with a showcase of the problems worth pursuing, and the bridge to what comes next.
No session
Oct 21Most startups don’t fail because they can’t build. They fail because they never found out what real people need. This week we work on the skill that fixes that: talking to users. Our guest, Gianluca Centraco, is a growth consultant who helps startups with tracking, paid ads and idea validation, and a PhD candidate in Turin. He’ll show you how to run a real user conversation: what to ask, what to avoid, and how to tell real interest from polite interest. Your homework: two conversations with people who might have your problem, to bring to the session on 18 November. No startup idea needed.
Break
Dec 23, 2026 – Jan 12, 2027Practitioners in the room every week, for the whole evening — not a recorded video, and not a panel that leaves at eight.
Showing 8
Co-founder & CPO · Geiby S.R.L
Co-founder and CPO of Geiby, building software for heating and plumbing installers. Mentor at SAS Startup Lab.
Pitch Coach
Builder of the Hi!Founders community · Hi!Founders
Over ten years in startups
Chief Executive Officer · Mamazen
CEO of Mamazen, a startup studio
Space Law & Policy · Polo Nazionale Droni
Space law and policy
Founder & CEO · Archibuzz
Founder & CEO of Archibuzz, Venture Builder at Strateego.ai
Venture Builder · Mamazen Startup Studio
Entrepreneur and venture builder, fifteen years across the UK and the US
Associate Professor of Business Management · Università di Torino
Director of the Master in Startup, Entrepreneurship and Open Innovation at SAA
No, and about half of each cohort arrives without one. Five of the eleven evenings are workshops built for finding a problem worth solving and the people to work on it with. Joining someone else's idea counts exactly as much as bringing your own.
Yes. No fee, nothing to buy during the programme, and no equity. The room is provided by SAA School of Management and the speakers come for nothing.
Anyone over eighteen. Students and people already working both take part, and you do not need to be enrolled at the university or studying anything in particular.
Italian and English. Most evenings run in Italian, with English whenever the speaker or the room needs it. Teams work in whichever language suits them and the final showcase can be in either.
A practitioner evening is one person who has done the thing — priced a product, raised money, signed the contracts — talking about the part they know, then answering questions for as long as the room keeps asking. A peer workshop has no speaker: a mediator runs the room and the work is done by the people in it, on their own problems.
One deliberate break, a fortnight in. The two opening evenings are talks; the workshops that follow ask you to turn up with a problem you have actually thought about, and that week is for doing exactly that.
Nothing happens — there is no penalty and nobody chases you. The certificate is the one place attendance matters: it asks for most of the evenings that count, and the exact figure is on your own page once you enrol.
Come to what is useful. The workshops build on each other more than the talks do, so the middle stretch rewards turning up; the talk evenings stand alone and you can pick the ones you want.
Yes — every evening has an open slot. Practitioner evenings want somebody who has done the thing in question; workshops want a mediator who can run a room without dominating it. Write to the programme and say which evening and why.
The last evening is a showcase: teams put their problem in front of the room and the mentors. What comes after that is yours — some teams keep going, some people join another team, and some decide the problem was not worth it, which is also a result.
66 still free for the next cohort. Applications close when they run out.
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