Fourteen years before the agents: the Vercelli Fubles Cup

Long before I had colleagues who never sleep, I had a football pitch. Belvedere pitch, Vercelli, kickoff at 8:30 pm. And a single rule, written in capitals inside my head: strict punctuality.

For nearly ten years, in the evening, after work, I single-handedly ran a small company disguised as a tournament: the Vercelli Fubles Cup. A city seven-a-side football championship. If you're looking for the moment I learned to build and run things without a team, it isn't 2026 with the AIs. It's 2012, with a ball and a deck of slides.

In ten points (that are nine)

I dug up the presentation slide for the 2013 edition, the first with six teams. It was titled "In 10 punti" — "In ten points". There are nine. I'll reproduce it as it was, count included, because it's more eloquent than anything I could add today:

• 21 May – 11 July, Belvedere pitch, Vercelli
• Seven-a-side football, six teams
• Round-robin group, playoffs, playouts and finals
• Refereed matches, 70 minutes each
• €6 per player per match
• Kickoff: 8:30 pm. Strict punctuality.
• Each player may play for one team only
• Fubles' golden rule: registration = a commitment made = I show up on the pitch, on time, in any weather
• Plenty of fair play, fun and teamwork

The teams had names worth the entry fee on their own: Cascina Coniglio, Atletico Saraitu, F.C. Arrapaho, the Maghi ("the Wizards"), Zena, FDG. Year after year more joined — Lokomotiv, After Eight, Scansafatiche ("the Slackers"), Mes que un Club, the Spartani — until six teams became sixteen, split into two groups.

The company I didn't call a company

I didn't call it a company. I called it "the tournament". But I did, alone, everything a textbook would today call operations:

• The product: the fixture calendar, the groups, the referees, the booked pitch.
• Real-time data: I updated the standings by hand, match by match, in a deck of slides that worked as a live scoreboard — points, goals for, goals against, goal difference. One update every match night, on time every match night.
• The media: and here's the part I'm proudest of. The best matches got commentated highlights. Not "a phone video": edited highlights, published on VercelliWeb.TV and the YouTube channel, with commentary by Luca Coppo — a real voice, real play-by-play, over an amateur seven-a-side tournament. A single 2015 match, Scansafatiche vs F.C. Sorrata, pulled 2,489 views. Two thousand four hundred eighty-nine views for the commentated highlights of a friends' match. I had even written an instructions document on how to publish the videos on the page — because when the operation grows, knowledge has to be written down, or it dies with you.
• The brand: a master logo, reworked edition after edition. A dedicated website. A Facebook page, a Twitter profile.
• The sponsors and the little till to balance.

The golden rule, thirteen years later

There's a line, in that 2013 slide, that makes me smile today because I recognize it word for word: registration = a commitment made = I show up on the pitch, on time, in any weather.

It was Fubles' golden rule, and I had made it mine. It's exactly the same principle I later wrote into Gargency's Constitution: sixty days from launch to the first paying customer, then you play or you fold. The pitch changes — from a rectangle of grass to a repository — but the discipline is identical: registering is a commitment, and a commitment is honored even when it rains, even when you don't feel like it, even when you'd rather have stayed home.

The back-of-the-napkin numbers of those years, for the little numbers can tell:

• Editions: twelve by 2020, counting from the 2010 tournaments where it all started
• Teams: from 4 to 16
• Full-time staff: one (guess who)
• Matches that started late because of the organization: I'll keep my personal average to myself, but it was low
• What I kept: everything else

Because that's the point, and it's the same closing as my post-mortems: the Vercelli Fubles Cup is gone, but the way I ran it became the way I run everything. Before, I built tournaments with a deck of slides and a lot of punctuality. Today I build products with agents and the same, identical punctuality.

And commentated highlights of a friends' match were already this: treating the small thing as if it were the Champions League. It's the same instinct behind a post on a cron or a kill switch trying to tell you a story instead of dumping documentation on you. Entertain while you explain — I did it with a ball, I do it with code.

I've always been the one who sets up the scoreboard alone.

Alone, 8:30 pm, in any weather.