Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. - Bill Hicks - Not what I was expecting when I sat down to speak with Alessandro Desantis on the Struggle Bus a few weeks ago. Then he hits me with the fact he loves Irish folk music - Officially, mind blown.

Someone whose work I admire from a distance and who has infused interesting approaches with a lot of humour in the last number of months. They are lucky to have this type of thinker over at Nebulab - an Italian man, into the comedic arts from an engineering background developing better commerce experiences.

Alessandro is incredibly self aware, self deprecating and has a challenger mentality without needing to seem like it is a burden. It is a matter of fact. He started writing code at 11. He grew up in Italy. And he arrived in ecommerce from the outside, via software engineering and product thinking.

He explains his path like this:

“My background is not in ecommerce. It's actually in software engineering… I started writing code when I was 11, and I kept at it for a very long time.”

Nebulab itself began as a pure software shop:

“Nebulab back then… was defining itself as an ecommerce agency, but the reality is we were, for the most part, just a software house.”

That outsider origin is important. He’s not emotionally attached to “how ecommerce has always been done.” He sees the industry the way a product person sees a messy codebase: full of accidental complexity, half-copied patterns and rituals nobody remembers the reason for.

Then layer on the culture. I wanted to probe because I find European friends to have interested and interesting minds and points of view.

He’s not shy about being Italian/European, and how that shapes his lens:

“More than anything technical, what being Italian or European maybe for us is… the ability to disconnect ourselves from the work…”

In a world of 24/7 hustle p*rn, that’s borderline subversive. He connects it to effectiveness, not laziness. Because he’s not fused to the work, he can actually see it:

“You actually, ironically, become much more effective at work because you still care about your craft… but you also have the time and the mental space to look at how you're executing and then try to optimize that.”

He even reaches for Bill Hicks’ It’s Just a Ride bit to explain his philosophy: if you stop believing the ride is the whole universe, you become more intentional about how you ride it.

He’s surprisingly optimistic and thoughtful.

“A lot of the playbooks and the best practices are basically a floor… they're not a ceiling.”

There was a lot here so I wrote more on substack.

Thank you to Trustap Omnisend and ParcelPlanet for making this possible- Happy BFCM weekend to you all.