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From losing everything in a foreign country to rebuilding a global sustainability group, Filippo Ghirelli’s story is a masterclass in resilience, philosophy-driven leadership, and creative reinvention. In this conversation, the InfraCorp founder explains how his early engineering career across Africa, Turkey, and Italy shaped his worldview, and how the devastating collapse of his Egypt venture during the Arab Spring forced him to restart from zero - emotionally, financially, and professionally.

Today, he leads InfraCorp, a global developer using a proprietary seven-layer AI system (InfraCore) to create digital twins of infrastructure projects, assessing economic, geostrategic, environmental, and social risks before they happen. Filippo speaks deeply about processing setbacks by becoming a “third party” to yourself, breaking crises into solvable pieces, and focusing on execution over idea worship.

He credits reading, philosophy, and language as foundational to creativity and leadership, arguing that your vocabulary shapes your ability to think. Humor and irony, he says, reveal whether people truly know themselves. He reflects on OPM at HBS as a rare community where barriers fall, vulnerability becomes strength, and personal transformation accelerates.

For aspiring founders, his message is simple: ideas are 1%; execution is 99%. And perhaps more importantly: knowing what you do not want to become is a lifelong compass. 

Here are the Top 10 Takeaways from the conversation:

1. De-risking is everything
   Great infrastructure projects need deep geostrategic, economic, social, and environmental analysis—not just financial modeling.
2. Use a “third-party” mindset
   In crises, step outside yourself, “freeze” the problem, break it into parts, and treat it almost like someone else’s case to solve.
3. Setbacks scale with ambition
   The more you do, the more setbacks you’ll face; they’re a function of activity, not bad luck.
4. You can lose everything and still restart
   After losing all assets in Egypt, he rebuilt from scratch—pain, grief, and discipline can coexist with forward motion.
5. Learning = change in behavior, not information volume
   Knowledge matters only insofar as it changes how fast and how well you make decisions.
6. Read widely to expand your inner “vocabulary”
   Without words, you can’t fully think or describe what you feel; reading others’ stories accelerates your own learning curve.
7. Diversification is overrated if it’s incoherent
   Spreading yourself across things you don’t understand usually destroys time and value; coherence of thesis matters more than number of sectors.
8. Creativity beats pure technique
   Technique is a small part; real breakthroughs come from creativity, perspective, and understanding humans.
9. Humor and irony are powerful leadership tools
   Being able to laugh at yourself—and accept jokes about yourself—signals deep self-knowledge and emotional strength.
10. For founders: idea = 1%, execution = 99%
    Don’t romanticize the “big idea.” Validate it, then obsess over consistent, relentless execution.