They’re from Scalea, graduates in Economics and Engineering from the Università di Cosenza. After some work experience in Italy they arrive on the West Coast. They start humbly but they look around for opportunities.

They work in an Italian restaurant-cum-cafe as kitchen help and waiters; they have a colleague – says Camilla Baresani, who wrote about their story on Corriere Innovazione –, called Kevin Systrom, who a few months later resigns and ends up on the cover of Forbes, as the founder of Instagram.

«It can be done!» exclaims Gene Wilder, and so must have thought the Campilongo brothers too. California is the land of the American dream par excellence. And given the two 40-year-olds are intelligent, they venture in a good business: that of pizzerias. They open one in Palo Alto, in 2012.

Still, as we said, they’re also ironic: thus they decide to call it Terùn. Success arrives straight away, because they want quality: pizza baked in a wood oven, while in the kitchen they present traditional Italian dishes made in a contemporary way, with attention to techniques and raw materials. Signed by Kristyan D’Angelo, originally from Taranto (in the photo, to the left, with Maico Campilongo).

Terùn is on California Avenue, and everyone goes there, from the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, to Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, and of course their ex colleague Systrom. On top of students and professors from Stanford and all the Italian community in the Silicon Valley.

Baresani continues: “The start included the support of two backing partners with shares of 10% and 20%, whom they met among the clients of restaurant Venezia [where they worked at first]. In just three years, the value of the restaurant, which in the US is stated based on profits, has become four times the initial one. «Had we asked the money to a bank...», is the only regret of the Campilongo brothers: with such an increase in value, buying out the shares of the restaurant has become impossible”.

One last note: the Campilongo must have had the US in their destiny, their grandmother emigrated to America in the late 19th century, "Maico" is the Italianisation of Michael...

Carlo Passera
source: http://newsletter.identitagolose.it/email.php?id=568

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