Brunello Cucinelli, Italian Fashion Designer
If you have not already heard his name, chances are that luxury wear is not something that attracts much of your attention. For the fame of Brunello Cucinelli, who lives in a remote village in Italy, has spread far and wide. He is also a favourite designer of many of our contemporary tech titans.
In fact, a delegation from the Silicon Valley, including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston, recently went all the way to Italy's hillside hamlet of Solomeo for a meeting with the fashion designer.
Besides Bezos, Hoffman and Houston, others who were present for the meeting included Ruzwana Bashir (co-founder and CEO of Peek), Paolo Bergamo (Senior Vice President at Salesforce), Dick Costolo (former Twitter CEO), Lynn Jurich (SunRun CEO) and Sarah Leary (Board Member, Nextdoor), among others.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff informed in a post on his website, "attended the meeting" via a magnificent open letter addressed to the entire group.
Nextdoor co-founder Nirav Tolia organised the "magnificent meeting" which was called the "Solomeo Summit".
Cucinelli, however, has a different way of describing the tech titans. He calls them "young Leonardos of the third millennium".
Born near Solomeo in 1953, Cucinelli, besides building a $500 million a year company, has also helped change the lives of everyone around him, according to a report in CBS News in May.
Cucinelli calls Solomeo, the "hamlet of the industrious soul". In his own words, his dream has always been to work for the moral and economic dignity of mankind.
While a blazer created by Cucinelli may cost $4,000, he himself is not prone to extravagance, according to GQ's Samuel Hine, who reported about the meeting of the designer with the tech titans.
In his Instagram page, Cucinelli describes himself as an entrepreneur and describes that the values of beauty, humanity and truth are the ideal and guide to all the actions.
A self-made billionaire, Cucinelli is a favourite of many other luminaries in the tech industry, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Kevin Systrom, the founder and former CEO of Instagram, according a report in Business Insider.
Born into a family of rural farmers, Cucinelli's creations have already won the fashion world, but only a few probably know that he has also stormed the tech world with the fine stuff he creates.
Silicon Valley, Cucinelli said in a an Instagram post, "is a place that is far away in distance but so close to my soul."
While it is not known what transpired out of Cucinelli's meeting with the tech titans, he wrote that it was some sort of "symposium on soul and economics".
"Our thoughts go out to the future of our children and those coming after us, endless happy years, and expression of a fascinating energy. That's why we believe that it is just fair not to bridle our dreams, but rather to plan for centuries, for millennia to come," Cucinelli said in the post.
