Forget the slides. Forget the pie charts. Forget the bloody safety net. If you’re looking for the story of an entrepreneur who spends two years “analysing the market” before making a move, you’re reading the wrong article. This is the story of Kyma and Mattia. And it kicks off exactly where the real stuff happens: in a car, on the ring road, deciding to hurl yourself into the void.
THE MOTORWAY IS THE OFFICE
Here’s the scene: Mattia is in the car with Emiliano. Emiliano is talking onigiri, Japan, business models. Mattia is listening, but his brain is elsewhere. He hates working with fish, but he’s got this obsession rattling around his skull since his Mebimport days: a coffee amaro.
He doesn’t pitch. He doesn’t open a MacBook. He just throws it out there. Raw.
The response isn’t “I’ll get back to you.” The response is a foot flat on the floor. In ten minutes flat, they’ve gone from a hazy idea to a registered company. Kyma wasn’t born from a spreadsheet; it was born from a handshake between two guys who decided that waiting for the “right moment” is for people with too much time on their hands.
THE HARD SCHOOL OF ‘QUANTOBASTA’
To understand why Mattia moves like a bullet, you have to see where he was forged. Quantobasta wasn’t just a job; it was a high-octane Master’s. Diego and Andrea didn’t just teach him how to stir; they rewired his entire operating system.
That’s where you learn that hospitality is an exact science: you’re either perfect, or you’re out. Every move is tactical, every detail is borderline manic. Mattia took that relentless rigour and dragged it out from behind the bar. You can’t build a bulletproof brand if you haven’t first survived the absolute discipline of the counter.
A BLIND BET (AND PURE ADRENALINE)
How unhinged do you have to be to book a stand at the Rome Bar Show, the one event that can make you or break you when you don’t even have a final name, and more importantly, the recipe isn’t even locked down?
Properly unhinged. But Mattia and Emiliano did it anyway. They bought the ticket for the show without having filmed the bloody movie. And like any real race, the wheels nearly came off at the final turn. Days before the launch: wrong caps, botanicals missing in action, production on the brink.
It could have been a car crash. Instead, they used the crisis as fuel, arriving in Rome with the bottles still hot and their adrenaline through the roof. That’s when you find out if you’re built for this: when everything goes to hell, you find a way through.
AMARO WITHOUT THE DUST
The result of this madness? A product that takes tradition and gives it a violent wake-up call. Kyma is a coffee amaro: technical, structural, built to tear it up in mixology rather than die of boredom in a cupboard. It’s street, it’s pop, it’s alive.
Mattia didn’t want to make some “ancient liqueur” for the archives; he wanted a liqueur for now. He pulled it off by ignoring what everyone else was doing and focusing on what he, as a bartender, was actually missing.
THE TRICK IS: DON’T THINK
Today, Kyma is looking at the export market, international guests, the whole world. But the real lesson Mattia brings to the table the one he tells anyone asking “how?” is simple: stop overthinking it.
The comfort zone is nice, but nothing ever grows there. If you’ve got the vision, jump. You might hit the deck, or you might build something that makes you wake up hungry to take it all. Mattia chose the latter. And from where I’m standing, he was right.
