Silvia Consul Battilana: “Everything has its price, I find the right one”

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“The greatest lesson my partner, Nobel Prize winner in economics, taught me is that we can learn from everyone, even from an innovator who may be 20 years old”

She is Silvia Consul Battilana, lives in Palo Altoin California, where very young in 2008 has co-founded a business with Paul Migromthe world’s most recognized auction expert. The US economist who won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for improving auction theory and inventing new award formats.

The company is called Auctionomics (from English Auctions = auction) and was born in front of a coffee. Silvia is the CEO, she owns 50% of the company. They organize multi-billion dollar auctions in every industry. AND the auction that made them famous is the Incentive Auction for 5G. On that occasion they raised $19 billion. Starting in two, today there are 40. Their team includes economics professors from Stanford, including business school president Jon Levin, from Princeton and the correspondent of the Nobel prize in computer science, Kevin Leyton-Brownprofessor of computer science at the University of British Columbia.

And if you ask her if there’s an easy way to explain what you do, she replies: “It’s like winning multi-billion dollar poker using mathematical techniques.”

The idea was born with the great financial crisis of 2008. “Paul was asked by the US Treasury Department to design an auction for distressed assets. His model could work well. The government then decided against do that auction, but we had left and the company was up and running”.

Today their clients range from governments to very large corporations.

“Auctions are held when you don’t know what the right price is for an object. There are auctions that only have one item for sale, like on Ebay. There are art auctions, where what matters is having the buyers in the room. Then there are much more complicated auctions, where many objects are sold at the same time”.

“We we made an auction for radio frequencies, with 1.2 million interferences. Computer scientists said it was not possible to find a solution to this mathematical problem. Instead, we found it.”

There is more. With auctions the two have redesigned the entire gas market in Colombia. In Chile they made a proposal for the auction of fishing rights. “Even the US Justice Department hired us to see if there had been manipulation in the auction to set the interest rate. And now with DCVC, the leading climate and artificial intelligence venture capital, we are proposing market solutions and AI technologies to the problem of drought“.

Rewind. Sylvia starts from the Bocconi University, where he graduated in economics with a thesis in Game Theory. His mentor is professor Guido Tabellini, former rector of the university, now vice president. “I owe my entire career to him.” It is he who pushes her to apply for a scholarship and apply to three top universities: Stanford, MIT and Harvard. She wins the purse and it is admitted to both MIT and Stanford. The bag will be delivered directly by Mario Draghi. “I saw him a few years ago on the plane, I approached him and I said: you gave me a scholarship that took me to Stanford to work with a Nobel laureate in economics. He was delighted…”

During the PhD, Silvia creates two startups. One to help students pass the law school entrance exam, one that organizes networking events for startups and investors. After the doctorate, he returns to Italy. With a role of Visiting Professor at Bocconi. He replaces Professor Tabellini for three months, but soon feels the call of Silicon Valley.

“I was nostalgic for that vibrant atmosphere. It’s still like this today. I’m surrounded by people who, if they see a problem, the reaction is: “if no one else has solved it, I can do it”. Yes, it’s an idea megalomaniacal, but in the end they really do it. And this unique working environment, where everything is fast, and you can do business with just a handshake, won me over immediately”.

So Silvia returns to Palo Alto and a few days after her return, Paul Milgrom invites her for a coffee at the Coupa Cafe, a meeting place for the tech world. “He told me: Do you want to become my business partner? I didn’t know anything about auctions and I hadn’t done an MBA, but I had grown up in the entrepreneurial culture of my jeweler father, Rudy Battilana, and founder of two different companies. I was undecided, I didn’t want to leave the my startups, especially the one related to networking, but my mother begged me: “Don’t waste this opportunity to party”. That was her definition of networking. After 24 hours I said yes”.

Paul soon realizes Silvia’s potential. And her ability to motivate people. “When you design an auction where there are multiple bettors, you design the rules so that there is an incentive for the bettors to behave the way you want. This process is called incentive compatibility. You incentivize people to do what you want based on their preferences.

I also apply this principle in the company. We pay nightly babysitters to those who have a child so that our employee can sleep. We organize ski excursions by helicopter or holidays in particular places so that everyone has positive experiences that bind them to the company. In Silicon Valley, more and more money is being offered to retain talent. We take care of it.”

Paul has for years been the world’s number one expert in Market Design, the mathematical field of economics that is astonishingly complex. Algorithms are designed to solve difficult, large-scale, multibillion-dollar problems. Many VCs knocked on their doors. There were many takeover requests: but they never gave in. “For us the most important thing is to choose the projects that seem interesting to us and not having to have anyone tell us what to do.

Named Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2017, Silvia is considered The Queen, the queen of Bay Area networking. It is super inserted in the tech world. A few days ago you were on the ranch of Richard Saucer, the founder of You.com, the man “who created ChatGPT before ChatGPT”.

“Richard organized an Unconference there, a conference where everyone is free to bring their own content. All the leaders of artificial intelligence on the planet were there. Sergey Brin, the founder of Google, was there. It will be interesting to see what happens between Google and You.com”

Super sporty, Silvia plays beach volleyball for two hours every day in tournaments against different players. At Stanford she was on the triathlon team, representing the university on the US national team twice. The day before this interview she was on a bicycle with Lance Armstrong.

“Sports have been my greatest executive coach. It taught me concentration, self-confidence. I often find myself as the only woman in rooms full of super-powered men. I speak first, I’m always respected. And I’ve always thought that the credit was due to sport…”.

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From Udine. Two daughters, 9 and 7 years old, who come to Italy every year for three months. “I take them to cross-country ski training with the fantastic Tarvisio CAI ski team in the winter and Tosi athletics in the summer. I do it to teach them to lose. Children in California are given prizes for everything. You are always a winner. To make my girls stronger in the face of defeat, I send them to Italy, with healthy mountain people”.

What does your story teach? “TO not following the standards set by society, not to do what everyone else does, to try to draw an ideal life. I play beach volleyball with 20-year-old girls who are much stronger than me to force me to stay focused and out of my comfort zone. I grew up surrounded by male figures. I have had male mentors. I have a black belt martial arts friend, a great master, who taught me that the most important thing to defend yourself is not knowing how to fight, but having a posture and an attitude so that no one attacks you. And I believe it.”