Having grown up in the southwest of Italy, Giuliana left her hometown to go to Bocconi University in Milan. At Bocconi, she received a master's degree in Economics and wrote a thesis on the importance of the agricultural sector in Argentina. She did most of her research in Argentina during one of the country's highest inflationary moments.
After Bocconi, Giuliana went to London, where she became a senior analyst at Lehman Brothers. During her time there, she worked on projects for companies such as:
During this time, she became interested in the methodology that some of her co-workers who had graduated from the Harvard Business School had and decided to apply to the MBA program. After Harvard, she was employed by Bain & Company, working in both Milan and Boston.
When she met her husband, Ed Takacs, they developed and built People Stream, a platform very much like LinkedIn, but which not only captured people's resumes but combined this with references from those who knew or had worked with each individual. The combination of references and background created a platform that guaranteed quality placements that worked for both the employer and the employee. People Stream eventually transformed into HT Ventures, which did what People Stream had been doing and took a position in many of the companies they worked with.
After Giuliana's husband passed in early 2019, she took over the role of Deputy CEO of HT Ventures while searching for an interested party to purchase the company's operations.
In May 2020, she started working as Head of New Markets for the blockchain company Algorand. With little initial knowledge of the sector, she not only did a deep dive into the possibilities of what a blockchain such as that which Algorand had devised but also where it could be best deployed. Though she had innumerable contacts in Europe, she decided to focus on Latin America, where she envisioned that blockchain could be used to develop fast, stable, and secure payment systems. While at Algorand, she had the company invest in the likes of:
TravelX is the first company to turn airline tickets into Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), allowing passengers to resell their tickets if they do not use them. She also helped the company raise significant money from the auction of one of their first NFTickets.
AgroToken is the first company to tokenize grains, allowing farmers to use their production to purchase everything from a cup of coffee to a combine harvester. AgroToken has partnered with VISA, which enables farmers to sell time the sale of their grains at the highest point in the market. AgroToken started in Argentina, expanded into Brazil, where they have been very successful, and now plan to come to the US.
Covid Passport (VitalPass), in partnership with the Colombian bank, Davivienda, she helped launch the VitalPass, which showed that blockchain could be highly scalable as it grew to be adopted by millions in Colombia as well as in other countries where Davivienda has operations.
El Salvador, Giuliana was integral to developing the country's blockchain infrastructure using Algorand's technology.
Neomoon is a bank in dollars, 100% digital, and aimed at all Latin Americans who want to protect their money from devaluation but also want to be able to make their day-to-day payments. NeoMoon has developed its platform on Algorand technology.
Attestiv is a platform that guarantees the validity of documents and photographs. They use Algorand's blockchain technology to certify that neither documents nor pictures have been altered in any way.
ELO is a Brazilian national financial services company founded in 2010 by Bradesco (50,01%) and Banco do Brasil (49,99%), today controlled by Elo Serviços S.A., known as Cartão Elo (66,665%) and Caixa Econômica Federal (33,335%). Elo is a 100% national debit, credit, and prepaid card brand. Cielo is Latin America's biggest payment system company by revenue and market value. The network accepts transactions denominated in Brazilian real. As of March 2019, Elo has issued over 120 million cards. Elo developed a POC using Algorand technology.
NuBank is the largest neobank in Latin America and among the top five in the World, engaged Giuliana to help develop a token that could be used by their customers and companies that had partnerships with the bank. At the time, the bank was estimated to have 1.65 billion transactions per year. Shortly before the deal closed, Algorand decided they could not focus on projects of this scale.
During her time at Algorand, Giuliana was not only present at most of the public events the company either participated in or hosted. Not only was she able to understand the value of each of the companies she interacted with, but also how they might bring value to each other and, in the process, build the ecosystem of companies that use Algorand's technology.