As a child, Silvina Moschini’s dad shared his vision of what he wanted his daughter to become when she grew up: “He told me that I needed to be a princess, but a princess that made her own castle.” From that moment on, the successful entrepreneur said that shaped her ideas of becoming a “princess entrepreneur.”
As a self-proclaimed princess entrepreneur, the Argentinian now based in New York and Miami, has actively accepted the role as someone who can play an impactful and transformative role. She’s launched her own cryptocurrency, Unicoin. She’s co-founder, president and chairwoman of the board of TransparentBusiness that is setting out to become the global leader in business transparency and workplace transformation. She founded SheWorks!, a digital platform that provides women access to remote opportunities and “remote readiness”. If that’s not enough, she is the executive producer and host of “Unicorn Hunter,” a TV show that helps entrepreneurs find investors, attracting more than 300 million viewers in Latin American, Europe and Africa.
“I left the corporate world precisely because I was hired because of my innovative mindset and my energy, but I was almost fired for it also,” Moschini explains. “So, I decided that if I wanted to work in a company that I would love to work for I will need to create it. …I left the big check, the original vice president position in a large company to start a new, and I had no idea where to start.”
In short fashion, she learned a great deal about entrepreneurship. “It was hard because I came from a corporate background with a lot of people doing a lot of things for me,” she says. “When you’re an entrepreneur … you need to do everything. So, it was quite a challenge, and, oh, yes, many times I said, ‘What am I doing here? I’m crazy.
As an entrepreneur, you’re a jack of all trades. … I wanted to do something that made me happy. That would give me purpose. And change the dynamics of the markets and the lives of people.”
Moschini quickly realized that as a woman it was more difficult to raise capital and hire people. She didn’t let that stop her. She tapped into her financial savvy to raise money through crowdfunding, then created her own company to hire, and if needed, train remote workers with a particular focus on women.
Among the many lessons she has learned in her career is that you must be prepared when opportunities arise. She’s a strong believer that you live by design, not just living by chance. “I plan things because I want things to happen, but I’m always prepared to pick up, and I build 1,000 times because the market changes, and sometimes when you get to a point in which you say, ‘Okay, I’m ready to scale,’” Moschini says. “For women, you need to believe that you can, especially for women. If you don’t believe in yourself, no one will back you.”
Moschini’s restless entrepreneurial energy keeps her continuously innovating. The creation of Unicoin is more than just a whim. “We’re going to transform the way people invest and the way people transact,” she explains. Her belief is that alternative forms of currency are needed to address the instability of the current instability of traditional currency markets. She’s already sold more than $315 million worth of Unicoin in less than a year.
Her leadership style is grounded in several fundamental concepts: inspire others, bring out the best in everybody, and be able to work together toward a goal. She admits she picked up some of these principles from reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People” early in her career. She learned the importance of building relationships and communication. “When I say contacts, I always like to make the analogy with it,” Moschini says. “Business is a contact sport, because in a sport you are tight, and for me it was quite instrumental in my decision to pursue a career in public relations, and the use of a communications relationship building as a key anchor for creating businesses that always bring things together, and that brings other people, and with the concept [that by] lifting other people, we lift ourselves up.”
As Moschini looks back, she wishes she would have taken more time as a young professional. “I rushed too fast to get things done,” she recalls. “I was very much in need of controlling the outcome and it didn’t help me. It exhausted me. It made me not think as clearly as I could have done if I had taken one step at a time to prioritize radically.”
She resets every so often because “the carrot gets higher and higher” all the time. “Today, I will give myself some license to look at my younger self, but tomorrow I will look at myself and say I should have done this better. But that’s fine.”
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