Federico Salvitti, an adjunct instructor of marketing within the NYU SPS Division of Programs in Business, was born in Italy and has lived in England, Japan, and New York City. He began his career in tech equity research and sales. His marketing and sales experience spans SaaS and professional and financial services. After launching more than 20 software and tech products, he is now operating partner at SevenTrain Ventures, where he acts as a venture capital-facing chief revenue and chief marketing officer in web3, artificial intelligence, and machine learning companies in the pre-IPO stage. He teaches the marketing capstone and Integrated Marketing and Database Management and Modeling courses.
With a passion for football, he has worked with friends to fund a charity that supports Street Soccer USA, teaching over 4,000 young children the values of respect and teamwork through playing ball.
What sparked your interest in the metaverse?
The explorative element of the metaverse fueled my interest. It is a new “people engagement” architecture (I refuse to use the word consumer) and its overarching dynamics and boundaries are yet to be identified.
How does your background tie into what you are teaching? How do our courses prepare our students for the future?
My current work in VC helps to prepare my capstone students for investor pitches. My CMO role brings real-world Integrated Marketing to the classroom, especially marketing operations. My passion for AI and connecting data in my database management classes help students decipher personas and trends from that data; their minds move away from “opinions” and into hypotheses.
Our courses prepare students in the fields of marketing management and orchestration. With the increasing complexity in Martech and Adtech, and the advent of web3 and metaverse, orchestration is king.
What role does the metaverse play in education and marketing?
The time for written reports is dead. We have to revert back to interview-based exams and or projects where two key elements can emerge—elements that favor an ability to select information (not build, AI does that) and clearly demonstrate enthusiasm and critical thinking (something that AI can’t do yet).
I have a special vision for the metaverse in the education sector. It’s a long one, however the short version is simplified in these steps: use AI to identify the roles of the future based on the lifestyle students want to have, create immersive simulation content, and incorporate alumni and corporations into the mentoring element of the overall experience.
By immersive experiences, I mean to create an augmented reality environment where a student can mirror the daily tasks and behaviors of an engineer, a lawyer, a business manager, or a mechanic. The metaverse can automatically produce these environments by mixing image recognition from physical recordings, matching those recordings with Robotic Process Automation video-process mining, and immersing students in real-life quality case studies they can sink their teeth into, allowing them to make not just career but lifestyle decisions about the life they will be living day in, day out.
What are the challenges and opportunities in marketing in terms of the metaverse?
The key challenge is to understand the differences between the metaverse and web3. Marketers must simplify what can be done now (web3) and how the metaverse is the experience through which people will interact with new forms of content (future).
Where do you see the metaverse heading toward in the next 5-10 years?
Five years is web3 and blockchain territory, 10 years is more metaverse territory. By that time 5G will probably be 6G, our engagements will not depend on devices, and we will be able to move assets across the metaverse.
Any tips for our students?
If students are not curious and invest time getting good at one or two aspects of tech, they are sleeping at the wheel. Many students are missing the importance of teams and human interactions. They hide behind tech and don’t interact with others and, to anybody who’s managed a project, this is the main leading indicator of failure.
Please tell me about other presentations and projects you are involved in.
I’m involved in projects/presentations around investing in web3 and the metaverse. I’m also part of a large workforce reskilling project to re-employ professionals to use Robotic Process Automation software.