Nova Blog - From Amazon warehouses to solar energy COO: Matteo Artero's playbook

Five companies, four countries, one throughline

Matteo Artero grew up in Turin, the son of two entrepreneurs — his mother a clothing stylist, his father an art director — who modelled what it looks like to build something by hand. He studied industrial production engineering, did stints in Ireland and Barcelona, graduated, and immediately joined Amazon as an area manager.

What followed is a career arc that looks almost suspiciously tidy in retrospect: each move deeper into the intersection of operations, technology, and commercial impact, and each one taken at an age most people are still figuring out their first promotion.

Amazon at 22: 200 people, 5am briefings, and the most important lesson of his career

Matteo joined Amazon straight out of university — or rather, slightly before finishing — and chose Barcelona over Piacenza and Rome because he wanted to go back abroad. What he got was the opening of Amazon's first robotised fulfilment centres in Europe, in Spain, Germany and England, followed by a settled role in Barcelona managing a team of roughly 200 warehouse staff.

He was 22 or 23. His team had an average age of 40–45. They were native Spanish speakers. He wasn't.

"I remember the first briefings at 5am before the shift started, standing in front of those 200 people with a microphone in my hand, my voice trembling." What he discovered in the process of getting past that trembling — of building genuine rapport across a language barrier and a generational gap — stayed with him more durably than any process framework.

"Empathy and closeness to people is probably one of the winning factors for growth, both personally and professionally. As an engineer I didn't naturally have that — Amazon forced it out of me."

— Matteo Artero, COO · Soli

Amazon also ran a two-and-a-half-month induction that included public speaking training. "It was like a second master's degree," he says. The technical operations knowledge — robotised warehousing, shift management, efficiency metrics — was real and valuable. But the people management insight was the one he kept applying everywhere that followed.

Inditex at 25: connecting the dots between operations and the customer

The question that sent Matteo to Inditex was a simple operational puzzle that Amazon couldn't answer for him: why did the number of parcels to ship fluctuate — 90,000 today, 100,000 tomorrow, 120,000 the day after — and what was his real impact on the customer at the end of that chain?

A former Amazon colleague, now at Inditex, offered the opening: come and build the Zara.com network in Italy, joining e-commerce and omnichannel operations with the physical store estate. At 25, he took it — a decision his uncle, his corporate-world mentor, helped him think through alongside the persistent imposter syndrome that comes with any large jump.

"Those first three or four months I had to really understand how everything worked. But once I did, I felt confident to go further." Further meant not just Italy but the opening of the South African market and the Middle East franchise operation, still for Inditex, but now with a fully international brief.

The key shift: for the first time he could see the consequence of his operational decisions in real customer outcomes. "Operations is always the department that doesn't exist when things go well, and gets blamed when things go wrong. But to do operations well you have to understand what's happening downstream."

The Gorillas gamble: resigning into a company that just announced mass layoffs

The Gorillas episode is the most vivid in the conversation — not because of what happened inside the company, but because of what happened one month before Matteo was due to start.

The Gorillas timeline

Spring 2022

Matteo receives offer via ex-Amazon contact in Luxembourg. Gorillas has ~15,000 employees, €3B+ valuation, operations in 400+ warehouses. He is asked to help make the company operationally profitable and attractive for its next funding round.

May 20

Gorillas announces closure of all four Southern European markets and layoffs of 15–20% of global staff. Matteo has a signed employment contract with a June 15 start date. He and his wife have already planned a relocation from Milan to Berlin.

June 15

Matteo starts anyway. His mandate: turn Gorillas operationally profitable using ML tools, demand-forecasting algorithms, and structural cost reduction — at scale, with 15,000 staff across 400+ sites.

Dec 2022

Gorillas acquired by Getir. Six months after joining, the company is sold. Matteo transitions to Getir's international strategy team — 10 people split across Turkey and northern Europe.

"Everyone called me — parents, friends — asking if I was still going. Was the job still there?" He was. The rationale: his mandate was exactly to fix what had gone wrong, and the very crisis that scared everyone else created the clearest possible brief for him to work on.

His view on Gorillas' trajectory is worth dwelling on. "Amazon took nine years to be profitable. If someone had given Gorillas nine years and a different macro context, it would be something by now — probably not just 10-minute grocery delivery, but multi-category, multi-speed delivery. I still believe in the model." The collapse wasn't the business; it was the timing of the capital markets cycle.

The nuance Matteo adds: the value of corporate isn't just the explicit training. It's the indirect absorption — watching performance reviews, sitting in business reviews, observing how feedback gets structured — that you carry out without realising you're doing it, and that you don't appreciate until you need to run those same processes yourself in a startup with no template to follow.

Building Soli Italy: €0 to €13M ARR in 12 months

Soli at a glance

12 yrs company age

9 yrs profitable before first VC round

€30M Series B, Dec 2023

10 markets

€13M ARR, Italy, year one

30+ Italy team (was 5 at launch)

Founded in the Netherlands by two brothers and their father. Shell Ventures led the Series A (2021/22) alongside a Dutch pension fund. The Series B brought in US and Canadian investors. Italy launched January 2024 — first Southern European market. First customer acquired within 10 days of launch.

The challenge of being a Northern European company's first Southern European market is a specific kind of difficult. The HQ has product assumptions baked in from Dutch, German and Scandinavian behaviour: higher average purchasing power, faster digital adoption, simpler transaction paths. Italy required almost every assumption to be revisited.

Financing didn't exist in any other Soli market. Italy needed it from day one — the upfront cost of a solar installation requires a financing option for the mass market. Insurance was non-negotiable ("Italians are, let's say, a little paranoid," Matteo says). The digital journey had to be rebuilt for different behaviour patterns. The value proposition couldn't be price-led — Soli's product is positioned at a slight premium — which meant extensive customer education about why the ROI justified the difference.

"We nearly fell into the temptation of competing on price to penetrate the market. We resisted. Now Trustpilot ranks us first in Italy for customer experience. That was the right call."

— Matteo Artero, COO · Soli

The internal negotiation with headquarters was equally important. Matteo's rule: be 80% aligned with corporate standards and fight for 20% local customisation. The financing option, the insurance product, specific customer journey steps — each had to be argued for in internal forums where the product team, sitting in Amsterdam, had limited visibility of Italian consumer behaviour.

The formula for going from country to global: stop being a problem

The path from Italian country manager to Group COO didn't come from lobbying or visibility-seeking. It came from a single operational principle Matteo learned at Amazon and applied consistently: never bring a problem without a solution already in progress.

Matteo's "stop being a problem" framework — how a local team earns global trust

Communicate proactively, not reactively

Send unsolicited updates on what you're doing and why. Don't wait to be asked. HQ's biggest fear is discovering a problem they didn't know about — proactive communication eliminates that fear.

Always bring the Plan B with the bad news

When results miss, have the alternative ready before you pick up the phone. HQ doesn't need to be the one proposing solutions to problems in your market — that's your job.

Demonstrate ownership, not neutrality

The teams that make HQ most nervous are those that report facts without emotion. What headquarters needs to see is a team that cares — that is already in motion before being asked.

Become an asset, not a cost centre

Once you're no longer a problem, you start being a value-add. That's when HQ asks: "Can we replicate what they do in Italy globally?" That question is how Matteo's role expanded.

Talent is 80% will, and AI agents are the next real shift in how we work

Two topics dominate the final third of the conversation: how Matteo thinks about talent, and how he sees AI reshaping the work his teams do.

On talent, his ratio is simple: 20% ability, 80% will. The CV presents logos and skills — what it cannot verify is whether someone will be humble enough to learn, proactive enough to move without being asked, and honest enough to flag problems before they become emergencies. "The only people who can validate those qualities are people who've already worked with you." Which is why 80% of his hires at Soli Italy came from his personal network — not from a LinkedIn job post with 150 applicants.

On AI, he distinguishes between the consumer-facing application in Soli's specific sector — AI that learns household energy consumption patterns and optimises storage and purchase timing to reduce bills and CO₂ impact — and the internal productivity shift he sees across all industries.

His focus is on AI agents — the systems that take over repetitive, time-consuming tasks that add no cognitive value: booking the first sales appointment, handling the first customer service interaction, routing and categorising inbound queries. "You're not removing jobs. You're giving people back time to think about how to solve problems structurally — the parts of the job that only humans can do well." The customer service agent who used to spend 60% of their day booking callbacks now spends that time designing better escalation processes. The salesperson who manually scheduled every first meeting now spends it building the proposal.

⚡ Lightning round

A failure you're grateful for?

Gorillas — before I even started.

Best advice you still follow?

"Aiutati che Dio ti aiuta." — Help yourself and God will help you.

Worst advice you hear too often?

"Follow your passion."

A book that changed you?

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. The Nike founder story — genuinely extraordinary.

If you couldn't work tomorrow?

Family first — then I'd invent something new, because I probably couldn't stop.

🔑 Key takeaways

Corporate is high school, scale-up is university. Build your foundations in a structured environment first — processes, people management, decision frameworks — then go apply them where you'll have faster impact and broader scope.

Imposter syndrome is a feature, not a bug. It keeps you in the detail, keeps you humble, and forces you to build competence before confidence. Use it as fuel rather than a brake.

Never bring a problem without the Plan B. The single most reliable way to earn global trust as a local team is to make HQ's job easier. Proactive communication plus pre-prepared alternatives turns a cost centre into an asset.

Talent is 80% will. Skills can be trained. The willingness to be humble, go beyond the brief, and take ownership when it's inconvenient — only people who know you can certify that. Hence: network over LinkedIn.

80% global standard, 20% local customisation. The discipline to adapt without chaos — picking the battles that matter (financing, insurance) and letting the rest default to corporate — is what makes a global product work locally.

AI agents free up the cognitive expensive work. The real productivity shift isn't AI replacing people — it's AI absorbing the repetitive, low-value tasks so that the people doing them can spend more time on the work only humans do well.

Matteo Artero

Chief Operating Officer · Soli

Turin-born industrial engineer turned operations and strategy leader. Launched and ran Amazon's first robotised European fulfilment centres, built Zara.com's Italian and international operations for Inditex, drove operational profitability at Gorillas ahead of its Getir acquisition, led international strategy at Getir, and then built Soli's Italian market from zero to €13M ARR in 12 months before becoming Group COO overseeing marketing, supply chain, technology and all country managers across 10 markets.

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From Amazon warehouses to solar energy COO: Matteo Artero's playbook