ALESSANDRO CARPENTIERO
Entrepreneur | Futurist | Creative
Menu
I’m Alessandro Carpentiero, an entrepreneur, futurist, and creative.
Deeply passionate about human optimization, technology, and longevity, my mission in life is to evolve the human potential of 1 billion people so we, as a collective, can accelerate humanity’s moonshots and create a future of abundance.
• Former photographer, product designer, musician, IT Consultant and COO.
• Coached by Olympic coaches for 2 years.
• I read 75 books per year.
• Daily movement, breathwork, meditation, and cold showers.
• Ultra-healthy vegan nutrition, no alcohol, 9 PM bedtime.
• I shot images for brands like Sony, Huawei, Jaguar, The Ritz Carlton, Four Seasons, and more.
• 25 countries traveled.
• Lived out of a suitcase for 104 days.
Positively impacting others with my actions is the greatest contribution I can bring to the world.
Achieving total mastery is what will help me bring an even greater impact.
Constant growth is the key to maximizing my potential and contribution, which will bring ultimate fulfillment.
I will continuously be at the forefront of longevity science to empower others to live long, meaningful lives.
Every living being, no matter the species, deserves their full dignity, values, and potential to be recognized, respected, and cherished. Homo Sapiens is not superior to other forms of life.
I was born in Milan, Italy, in 1988. The oldest of 3, I started developing interests outside school at a very young age, as school felt quite boring.
In the early 1990s, I discovered the fascinating world of technology through my father’s job at Digital Equipment Corporation, a major American company in the computer industry. I started using computers at the age of 6, learning how the components worked together, using MDOS, playing rudimental games, and browsing the super early internet through Netscape. The PC became my new playground, and I also learned how to assemble computers from scratch.
Then, when I was 9 years old, I developed a strong interest in music. No one in my family had a musical background, but I got inspired by seeing a young kid playing the saxophone. I wanted to do that too. So, I started taking saxophone and music theory lessons in the afternoons after school, and one year later, I also started studying the piano. That’s when my relationship with music began, one that lasted over 15 years.
School, computer gaming, music practice, music school, homework, study, repeat. That’s how you can sum up my elementary, middle, and high school years. And no, I didn’t watch any TV as it was completely banished from the house until my late teens.
What I did outside school was much more interesting than sitting at a desk listening to someone else teach concepts and ideas that someone else had labeled true.
This belief showed through my behavior, which, let’s just say, didn’t attract the sympathy of most professors. This also led to me being bullied during adolescence. But gladly, my main focus was taken on the crafts I intended to master.
Photography was the latest addition to those; I first started playing with the family’s analog camera until I received a digital camera as a gift in the early 2000s. It was just 1 megapixel, but to me, it was the best thing yet. I started experimenting with taking pictures and editing them in the early versions of Adobe Photoshop, and I loved every part of the process.
After high school, I had to answer the infamous question, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
At the time, it felt impossible to choose. I was developing my music career through saxophone and piano. I absolutely loved technology, and in the meantime, I was dancing with the idea of being a photographer.
Throughout high school, I took several career tests/interviews, but the results were always like, “The test has proven inconclusive”. I guess entrepreneurship was not on the list.
At first, I thought about going with music, but then, trusting my love for technology, I went up for Computer Science.
Shortly after, I knew I had made the wrong choice. In fact, I adored technology, but I didn’t want to spend my life writing code behind a desk. After 18 months, I quit.
At the same time, I started working as an IT consultant for a pharmaceutical company. It was quite funny; while having never received any education on the topic, I could fix every computer because of what I had learned as a kid.
Quitting Computer Science started a very difficult year; I was feeling lost, and at the same time, my family was going through a difficult period, which made this period even worse. I ended up falling into a mild depression. I spent the days closed in my room, in complete darkness, playing video games and watching American TV series.
The only bright thing about that period is that thanks to listening to countless hours of English through TV series, I literally mastered the language (to the point that the first time I travelled to the US years later, my tenant asked me “Where in the US did you live before?”).
Then, a ray of hope came into my life. I was doing some occasional jobs, and one of those was the cashier at the Milan Trade Show. During the breaks, I would walk around the various exhibitions until one week it was the design week. My attraction to the design world was instant, so I decided to become a product designer.
And so, 4 years later, I graduated in Industrial Product Design. For the first time, I felt that what I was studying had a purpose, and that showed in my grades, which went from average to excellent. For the first time, I felt that I was using my full capabilities, as design requires combining a strong creative side with a highly logical and technical one.
During university, I developed concepts and projects revolving around the areas of sustainability, health, and well-being. My thesis was a product to easily deploy music therapy sessions to Alzheimer’s patients, and it was used for the scientific paper “Music therapy as an interactive rehabilitation tool for people with Alzheimer’s: ergonomical issues”’ presented at the AHFE 2014 in Krakow.
But design wasn’t the only thing I was doing. Behind the scenes, I was big-time into music. During my university years, I stopped studying saxophone but added jazz piano and modern singing and started composing music. That’s when I founded my progressive metal band, Fade to Rain, intending to create music and tour the world with it. During the day I was designing products and building 3D models, while in the evenings – and let’s be honest, nights – I was composing and arranging music, as well as self-teaching me how to record, mix, and master music.
After graduation, I started working as a freelance designer, collaborating with the studio of my thesis mentor. The projects I worked on were truly great ones. The first project was the design of an innovative kitchen that would be easily usable by everyone without restrictions. Called “AdaptLiving”, the project was supported by the design giant Poliform and done in partnership with LG Hausys (now LX Hausys). The kitchen prototype was exhibited in Milan, Italy, at the Fuorisalone 2014, at the “LongeviCity” exhibition. The second project was the entrance desk for the brand new hospital in Biella, Italy. The design was done in partnership with the world-renowned artist Ugo Nespolo, and in partnership with LG Hausys.
While I loved this stimulating start of my design career, my chapters with music and photography were not close.
I was still composing and producing music, and my interest in photography returned stronger than ever.
I found myself, again, in front of many choices. Should I be a Musician? Photographer? Or Designer?
The answer kept changing, so I took a drastic decision to truly find the answer.
The plan was to get a job as an IT Consultant to save money and move to Shanghai, China, to be a full-time designer and keep music and photography as hobbies.
I started consulting at Alphabet (BMW Group), leading a team of 4 to serve over 150 users, and managing ticket resolution with level 2 & 3 teams in Europe. It was, again, interesting to do this job, as I had never studied for any of this. But somehow, I could do it naturally.
But of course, that’s not the only thing I was doing. While still practicing music, photography started knocking at my door incessantly, to the point that I would use my metro travel time, my lunch breaks, and my evenings to self-learn photography and editing.
This was around 2013, the early days of Instagram.
And so, in a matter of months, my Instagram account started gaining traction, reaching thousands and thousands of people. I started investing a significant part of my earnings to buy photography equipment and to travel the world to take pictures. I did this for 3 years, doing crazy trips in the little free days I could carve out of my IT Consultant schedule. To give you an idea, once, when I returned from Hawaii, I went straight to work right after landing after a 30-hour flight (and an 11-hour jetlag). Spoiler alert: it was a terrible idea.
It was an intense period, but I loved every second of it. And slowly, it came the time to quit IT and go full-time with photography.
My account started getting noticed by agencies and brands, which helped me land some great shootings worldwide, and to creating content for massive companies such as Microsoft, Sony, Huawei, Jaguar, Barilla, Nastro Azzurro, The Ritz Carlton, Four Seasons, and many more.
Photography was everything I did & breathed, and my mission was to show others the beauty that our planet has to offer. I started a YouTube series documenting my travels around the world, worked for brands all around the world, spoke in front of audiences, and had my images printed on gigantic size on trams and buses.
I also took a 104-day long trip in Southeast Asia to live with as few things as possible and not be a tourist but a local. It has been an incredibly formative experience where I’ve learned so much about life.
After the trip, I produced an online course (in English and Italian) about Adobe Lightroom, to teach my post processing to others. In the meantime, I also went deep in studying and building online ads, marketing plans, funnels, and automations.
This was a project that took over a year of endless work, and during the process, I realized that my interests weren’t just about photography. The end of this chapter was approaching.
Continuous learning has always been a pillar of my life, and so, in 2018, I attended a 4-day seminar in Phoenix, Arizona. There, I met the founders of a personal development podcast. It seemed like a random encounter, but two years later, a series of events led me to become the COO of the company.
That period unlocked something in me. I had always considered myself an “artist,” but I felt naturally comfortable with business operations.
Could it be that the reason why I achieved some kind of success/results in music, design, and photography was not because of innate artistic talent but because of my ability to learn, optimize, and execute?
I had associated my identity with being an artist, and while working as a COO, that identity started to crumble. Simultaneously, the pandemic was in full swing, and getting the virus (I hadn’t gotten sick in years) forced me to bed for a few days. After a very long time, I finally stopped. That silence was a loud one.
I understood my true talent is about having a vision, creating a plan to reach it, and continuously optimizing it until the result is reached.
Should I use this talent to take pictures? Or maybe to grow someone else’s business?
My answer was no to both. Doing differently would have meant wasting my truest potential. The only viable option was to create something new. Something big. Something impactful. nothing. At that moment, I knew I had always meant to be an entrepreneur.
I completely let go of my previous identity and founded Beyond Sapiens in the summer of 2022. My company represents the culmination of everything I’ve learned and experienced up to this point, and it’s what I intend to create a legacy with. I’m now committed to growing the company to a global business and bringing its vision to life, which is: “To shape the future of our species by evolving humanity towards its holistically maximum potential.”
I can confidently say this is my life’s purpose, and I will work tirelessly to bring it to life.
But how did I go from being an artist to founding a company that aims to evolve human potential?
It required massive work on myself. We are the bottleneck to our truest potential, and we constantly have to work on removing the barriers that are preventing us from reaching them.
To me, this consisted of two primary things: optimizing my mind and optimizing my body.
I’ve always nourished my mind, especially through art, but starting in 2014, I began the journey of continuous and never-ending learning. I devoured (and still am) countless books on business, habits, mindset, productivity, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, nutrition, and training, just to mention a few.
While balancing my IT Consultant and Photographer careers, I stopped caring for my health. After all, there was no time (or at least, that’s what I used to tell myself). Until one day, I finally decided to change. That is one of the most important decisions of my life.
I started eating healthier and moving more, and I easily returned to my healthy weight. But this time, I wanted more. I wanted to try to live the athlete’s life to see if that would positively impact my professional life. Spoiler alert: it did.
I was coached for two years by the same performance center that was part of the Tokyo 2020 100m Men Gold Medallist team. Through that, I lived like an athlete for two full years. It was brutal at times, such as when I went through a Peak Week, drinking 7L of water per day while eating 1,200kcal. When I went through bulk phases, I had to eat more than 4,600kcal of clean food daily.
Now, I’m still living like an athlete, but I’m adopting a more balanced and holistic approach. Still, this experience taught me that we can change our minds through the body, and planted the seed of my entrepreneurial journey.
I’ve always taken things to the extreme through continuous learning and optimization. So, I naturally found myself doing the same for my health and performance. I focused my studies on Performance Science, participated in several Biohacking events, tracked my biomarkers (DNA, Gut Microbiome, Hormones), and started adopting the latest technologies and supplements to optimize my health at a higher level.
Everything was different. Not because I had muscle and very little fat but because my increased well-being, paired with all the teachings I had learned from my continuous learning, made me access the full potential of my brain.
I felt (and still do) like I was operating at a completely new level of consciousness, which later inspired me to found Beyond Sapiens.
That is way my day is highly structured for maximum performance, sustainability, and fulfillment. I continuously optimize my routine to get the most out of each day so that I can show up as the most evolved version of myself, ready to contribute to Beyond Sapiens’ mission.
My personal evolution made me realize something: we are all wasting untapped potential. No matter how much success we have achieved, there is always more to uncover. And in the moment you think you don’t need to grow because “you’ve made it,” you’re making yourself and all the additional people you could have positively impacted a huge disservice.
I believe the key to discovering hidden human potential is to bring the focus back to your unique individuality (and bio-individuality). Specifically, by continuously optimizing your physiology and mindset, your being operates at a whole new level. And once you are at that new level, you can see new horizons coming into view.
This process is infinite, and I strongly believe that if each of us had the humility and willingness to walk this path, we would reach a future of true abundance much faster than we think.
Throughout my life I’ve always had the desire to learn more. Not simply for an infinite thirst of knowledge, but for what you can do with that knowledge. That’s why I’ve always focused on continuous learning, consciously choosing new topics and crafts to master outside traditional education. To this day, learning is a crucial pillar of my life, and I read to 75 books per year (all non-fiction ones).
I grew up with technology around me and have been an early adopter of every new piece of tech. This made me quickly realize that we, as a collective, are accelerating way faster than we think. I am fascinated by exponential technologies and strongly believe we are on the verge of societal quantum leaps that will revolutionize humanity.
I turned Vegan in 2022. If there were something I wish I would have done earlier, this is it. Facing the reality of animal farming, the incredible sufferance and death it causes, not to mention the environmental impact and sustainability aspect, truly shook me to the core. All these truths were always there to see, but I chose to look the other way, not to face the consequences of my choices and change. Living a thriving, healthy, and long life as a vegan is 100% possible. Just to mention, there are Olympic Athletes who are vegan. If you’re considering turning vegan, please reach out; I would love to help you.
© 2014 – 2024. Alessandro Carpentiero. All Rights Reserved.
