Welcome to the latest instalment of SaaSlife SPOTLIGHT, where we shine a light on innovative SaaS companies and their leaders. Today, we are thrilled to feature Giorgio Barnabo, CEO and Co-Founder of SylloTips.
Giorgio shared insights into his founder journey, the challenges of building a startup, and the exciting future of SylloTips.
Welcome to SaaS Life Spotlight
Dan: Hey there, welcome to the latest SaaS Live Spotlight episode. It's my pleasure to welcome the CEO and co-founder of SylloTips, Giorgio Barnabo. How are you today, sir?
Giorgio: Hi Dan, it’s a great pleasure being here with you. I’m doing fine. It’s pretty late here in Rome, 6 pm, but all good. It’s super hot.
Dan: Been a busy day?
Giorgio: Like every day for a startup founder. We tend to work around 12 hours per day, including weekends, but we’re doing what we like, so it doesn’t weigh too much on my shoulders.
Wearing Multiple Hats
Dan: Fantastic. A nice question that I like to start with: how many hats would you say that you wear within the organization at the moment? How many roles do you think you’re taking on?
Giorgio: To be honest, we’ve laid out a pretty organized organizational chart. So my work is mostly focused on revenue generation, sales, funding—raising funds—and also a bit of creating the company culture.
A lot of hiring, because we’re transitioning from a founder-based organization to a proper startup with 12 people, and I’m spending a lot of time hiring and building partnerships.
Before that, I did pretty much everything—product design, product management, AI development—because I was born as a scientist, not as an entrepreneur. I graduated in statistics and did a PhD in AI.
Early in our journey, I was in charge of prototyping all the AI pipelines for our solution, which my co-founders—who are more technical—later put into production. Now, after Texas, we’ve focused on designing a lean organization with clear reporting lines.
We have four co-founders, and one of them, Leonardo Martini, is a chief of operations who manages and designs all the internal processes. He’s based in Boston as a post-doc at Harvard. Meanwhile, I’m more of a free rider—everywhere and nowhere—because I think a good CEO has only two goals: raising funds and selling the product. That’s it.
What is SylloTips?
Dan: Cool. So in terms of SylloTips, how would you explain the business in the simplest possible form to someone new to the organization?
Giorgio: We are on a journey to build the first human-in-the-loop AI system. When we started working on artificial intelligence, we noticed that many competitors were building chatbots or retrieval-augmented generation systems—basically ChatGPT-like tools—that answer user queries based on company documents.
But we believe that’s the wrong approach. Companies are complex anthropological animals where most knowledge is still transmitted orally, through word of mouth. How can you build an AI system without company-specific knowledge?
Our goal is to build an AI agent that assists company employees by answering their questions automatically, but also allows them to easily reach out to expert colleagues who provide relevant sources and integrate them with their answers.
In this way, SylloTips helps companies capture their tacit knowledge and make it accessible through an AI system.
Dan: That makes perfect sense. You’re essentially eradicating single points of failure by sharing and preserving knowledge, which reduces risks.
Giorgio: Exactly. You also reduce redundancies because questions in a company follow a power law—very few questions represent the majority of what’s asked. Employees often complain that people keep pinging them with the same queries.
With SylloTips, we create a distributed ticketing system that captures knowledge informally and makes it reusable. This not only enables smarter AI but also formalizes a company’s undocumented knowledge.
The Spark Behind SylloTips
Dan: What inspired you and your co-founders to start SylloTips?
Giorgio: I’ve been working on this topic for over 10 years, with many failures along the way. When I was at university, I joined an advanced studies program where the best professors and students of Sapienza were gathered. Despite the talent, people didn’t collaborate because they didn’t know who knew what.
I realized there was inefficiency in how knowledge was allocated. I started experimenting, but AI wasn’t there yet, so my methods didn’t work.
Years later, during my PhD, I met Leonardo Martini, and we revisited the problem—this time in the scientific community. Initially, we thought of a B2C model where questions would be routed to global experts, but there were no incentives, and B2C is tough.
Eventually, we pivoted to SaaS, met our other co-founders, Tullio and Simone, and started working crazy hours to launch an MVP. It was a horrible product—naive and unstructured—but it taught us that companies work based on roles and responsibilities.
Now, SylloTips serves over seven large companies, and they’re happy with the value we provide.
Real-Life Success Stories
Dan: Do you have a standout use case for SylloTips that illustrates the results you’ve achieved?
Giorgio: Absolutely. There are three key use cases:
- Sales Enablement: Sales reps often have great relationship skills but limited product knowledge. They constantly need information about products or contracts from back-office teams. With SylloTips, they get faster answers, and back offices see fewer tickets because the answers are reused.
- IT Support: IT teams deal with the same questions repeatedly and rely on costly, complex ticketing systems like Jira or ServiceNow. SylloTips is cheaper, easier to set up, and works seamlessly within Microsoft Teams, making it more user-friendly.
- Employee Support: At Inuit, a large tech company, SylloTips centralizes employee support across HR, IT, legal, and compliance. Employees have a single entry point for all questions, which are routed to experts and turned into reusable knowledge.
The Future of SylloTips
Dan: Looking ahead, where do you see the company in 12 months?
Giorgio: We’re exiting the pilot phase and turning proof-of-concept customers into long-term clients. By mid-2025, we aim to reach €500,000 in ARR and €1 million by the end of 2025.
This requires navigating long sales cycles, especially with mid-market and enterprise clients. Right now, we have 20 companies in the pipeline, so I’m confident we’ll hit these milestones.
Achieving this will also position us to raise a substantial seed round. So far, we’ve raised €1.5 million—mostly in non-dilutive grants—and we want to grow revenues before pursuing further funding.
Personal Growth as a Leader
Dan: For yourself as a leader, what growth do you hope to achieve in the next 12 months?
Giorgio: Delegation will be key. I like having many direct reports to offer a helping hand, but that’s not scalable. Structuring reporting lines and hiring the right people are critical.
We’re not Amazon or Microsoft, so we need to attract people who align with our vision. My goal is to improve my hiring skills and create an organization with clear accountability, fast processes, and a culture of growth.
The Culture at SylloTips
Dan: For anyone interested in joining SylloTips, how would you describe the company culture?
Giorgio: Before defining our product, we spent hours discussing our values, which led to our 16 tenets. Some key ones are:
- Customer-Centric: Always prioritize the customer.
- Lifelong Learning: We value people who are always learning and growing.
- Kindness and Indulgence: Mistakes are okay. We want an environment where people feel safe to fail and grow.
We’re building an organization where people see SylloTips as a life-changing part of their journey.
Advice for Aspiring SaaS Founders
Dan: Final question—what advice would you give to aspiring SaaS founders?
Giorgio: Two pieces of advice:
- Don’t over-engineer. Build something quick and dirty to prove product-market fit. Start selling even before you have a product to test the market.
- Think about financial sustainability. Pay close attention to cash flow, especially since SaaS deals with enterprises can take months—or even a year—to pay out.
Dan: That’s fantastic advice, Giorgio. Thank you for sharing your journey with us and introducing us to SylloTips.
Giorgio: Thank you, Dan. It’s been a pleasure, and congratulations on this podcast—it’s much needed.
Conclusion
Giorgio Barnabo and SylloTips exemplify the ingenuity and resilience required to build a successful SaaS startup. With a focus on capturing and streamlining company-specific knowledge through their innovative human-in-the-loop AI system, SylloTips is revolutionizing how organizations manage and share information.
Giorgio’s scientific background, coupled with his relentless drive to address real-world inefficiencies, has propelled SylloTips to become a valued partner for enterprise clients. His commitment to building a culture of kindness, lifelong learning, and growth ensures SylloTips is not just a tech solution but a transformative force in the SaaS landscape.
Stay tuned for more insights from SaaSlife SPOTLIGHT as we continue to shine a light on the brightest stars in the industry.