Marcello Genovese’s early career in entertainment is at the core of why he wants to make sure Vinivia content creators can earn money for their passions.
If you haven't heard of Marcello Genovese just yet, don’t worry, you will soon enough.
One of the newest innovators in the tech world, Genovese is the co-founder of Vinivia, a groundbreaking new livestreaming platform that’s changing the way users and creators connect in real time — and the way creators are compensated.
But just like Vinivia isn’t your average social media app, Marcello Genovese isn’t your typical tech bro. No, Genovese may be a power player in the sector, but at his core, he’s an artist and entertainer.
When you look at his unusual backstory, it’s easy to see why.
An Entertaining Childhood
Genovese, who was raised in Germany, isn’t the son of a billionaire CEO or a software engineering wiz. His father was a professional singer.
“I grew up with singing and entertainment,” he says. “Since I was a little kid, I was always going with him to events where he was singing. Instead of going hiking or skiing or whatever, we were going to events, making music, and doing business.”
Unsurprisingly, those experiences of seeing firsthand how a performance could bring people joy had a profound effect on the young Genovese.
“My father was always my mentor,” he confesses. “This influenced me a lot, and is one of the reasons I am who I am now.”
Those experiences with his father also showed Genovese the darker side of artistic life. He saw how simply having raw talent wasn’t always enough to earn a living and put food on the table. Early on, Marcello Genovese realized that having the ability to get the word out and promote one’s art was nearly as important as the art itself, even if it required a completely different skill set.
Genovese was still a child when he put his own artistic and design abilities to work to help his father get the word out there.
“I started to make my first website when I was 8 years old,” Genovese says. That site, which he “fully developed” on his own, was for his father’s artist agency.
Bitten by the Performing Bug
It wasn’t long before Genovese himself was bitten by the bug to perform. At 15, he started working as an event entertainer. Under the name DJ MarciG, he spun the turntables and got guests moving on the dance floor as a DJ, and he followed in his dad’s footsteps and worked as a wedding singer. Soon, he had quite the following, playing at some of the region’s most famous venues. He would also go into clubs and take photographs and make pictures.
“I'm an entertainer, I love to entertain people,” he says. “That’s what I've done when I was a photographer. That’s what I’ve done when I was a singer, that's what I've done when I was a DJ, I was entertaining people.”
But as he had discovered as a young child accompanying his father to singing gigs, Genovese was also a businessman. In addition to all those entertaining gigs, he was designing websites. Initially, he worked for family members and close friends, but soon it became a profitable side hustle.
“I was working, and I discovered working was my passion,” he says, adding he was also heavily involved in his school’s IT and audiovisual groups.
“I have this introverted, nerdy side, where if I get into something, I want to learn [all about it], and I can if I want to, but if I don’t want to learn all about it, I could never do that,” he says.
Alas, one thing the teen had very little interest in learning all about was high school.
“I was doing so many things instead of going to school,” he says. “I tried to avoid going to the exams and to the lessons.”
So Genovese, never one to do things in half measures, decided he would drop out of school when he was just 15.
“I made the decision, ‘OK, I want to do my own business,” he says.
And the young artist and entrepreneur has never looked back.
Marcello Genovese: Applying Everything He Learned
Genovese eventually found a kindred soul in fellow entrepreneur Stefan Graf, and the pair quickly partnered up.
“My business partner, he was another one of my biggest mentors, pushing me in the right direction into being more the business guy instead of just the nerd,” Genovese explains.
Together, the two launched a handful of diverse business ventures.
“It’s coming from our belly, that’s how we make our decisions,” Genovese says. “We pursue the ideas that we have a good gut feeling on.”
But even though he had firmly entered the tech business, Genovese never lost his artistic sensibilities and love for entertaining. No one who knows him well was particularly surprised when he landed in the livestreaming space and became fixated on how to make it better for those offering up their talents via the medium.
“I love livestreaming; it's a multibillion-dollar market, and we want [Vinivia] to do something for the creators in a different way,” Genovese says. “Our app is designed for creators, by creators — allowing them to monetize their passions."
Since 2015, he and Graf have been developing Vinivia, with one of Marcello Genovese’s biggest goals being to make sure creators — the artists, so to speak — get paid their fair share.
“We have a better way of monetization,” he explains. “Other platforms are paying out only 50% to 60% of the revenues to the content creators. We are paying out 80% of the revenues to the content creators. We are really giving our technology for a cheap price to the creators and helping them to make revenue and monetize their content.”
It was also important to him that those artist-creators maintain all the rights to their content when they post it on the site.
And Genovese wanted to ensure that any creator would be able to use the Vinivia interface. Just like he designed that website to help bolster his father’s singing career all those years ago, Genovese wants Vinivia content creators to be able to spend their time perfecting their craft — be it wailing on the electric guitar or commenting on the levels of Fortnite — and not trying to figure out how to use the tech and jump through hoops of promotion.
“We are enabling users to be creators from day one,” Genovese states. “You don't need to have 10,000 followers to become a livestreamer or 50,000 followers to monetize your content. You can start today with one follower or even zero followers to monetize your content and to become a livestreamer at Vinivia.”
Really, it makes total sense for the artist in him.
“In the end, it's all entertainment,” Genovese says. “For me, Vinivia is the perfect place because you can be a singer, and you can be a DJ, and you can be a photographer, and you can entertain people through livestreaming.”
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