How Vinivia Founder Marcello Genovese Went From Wedding Singer to Tech Mogul

Marcello Genovese’s background in the entertainment industry uniquely prepared him to start Vinivia, the livestreaming platform that puts creators first. What a twist it would have been if Adam Sandler’s eponymous character in the 1998 comedy hit The Wedding Singer turned out to be a tech savant at the end. Too unbelievable? Well, check out Marcello Genovese, who’s making a name for himself as one of the tech sector’s most innovative players — a long way from the special event entertainment he once offered.

Genovese’s newly released streaming platform, Vinivia, is already shaking up the livestreaming game. Based on his vision, Vinivia employs cutting-edge technology and a transparent monetization model that puts creators first and makes it easy for aspiring internet stars to connect with users and make money doing what they love. Already, Genovese and Vinivia are earning rave reviews from users and creators.

But Genovese didn’t come to the tech industry via the usual channels. His first paying gigs came from weddings, where he worked as a singer, a DJ (known as DJ MarciG), and a photographer. And these weren’t just favors he did for friends and family. While he was still a teenager, Genovese was delivering captivating performances at some of Germany’s most prestigious event venues.

“I’m an entertainer, I love to entertain people,” he says. “That’s what I’ve done when I was a singer, that’s what I’ve done when I was a DJ, I was entertaining people.”

Marcello Genovese: ‘My Father Was Always My Mentor’

That love of performing is actually a genetic trait, as Genovese’s father was a professional singer and artist.

“My father was always my mentor,” Marcello Genovese shares. “Since I was a little kid, I was always going with him to events where he was singing. Instead of going hiking or skiing or whatever, we were going to events, making music, and doing business. This influenced me a lot, and is one of the reasons I am who I am now.”

Indeed, it was an attempt to help out his father’s business that led Marcello Genovese to another passion — web design.

“I started to make my first website when I was 8 years old,” he says. It turned out so well that Genovese says he “fully developed” the first website for his father’s artist agency.

That quickly blossomed into a side hustle. “I built my first website, and then I was doing websites for friends,” he recalls. “I was working, and I discovered working was my passion.”

Genovese quickly got involved with his school’s IT and audiovisual groups while still performing as an event entertainer, which didn’t leave the visionary teen a whole lot of time for hitting the books at his high school.

“I was doing so many things instead of going to school,” he says. “I tried to avoid going to the exams and to the lessons.”

It became clear that something was going to have to give, so Genovese made the bold move to drop out of high school.

“I have this introverted, nerdy side, where if I go into something, I want to learn [all about it], and I can if I want to, but if I don’t want to learn all about it, like with school, I could never do that,” he admits. “So I broke up with school when I was 15. I made the decision, ‘OK, I want to do my own business.”’

And that’s just what he did.

A Sweet 16 Entrepreneur

Genovese became one of Germany’s youngest-ever entrepreneurs when he launched a web-hosting agency before his 16th birthday. It went remarkably well, something he credits to having both that introverted side as well as that extroverted love of entertaining and interacting with people.

“I realized that I’m a business nerd and I can build this bridge because a lot of nerds can’t articulate their vision, or talk well about their idea, but I can,” he says. “That’s where I realized that I can really be in this entertainment world, which is like my business side, because your business is selling to people. I can even explain how we can build this vision in the quickest way possible.”

This proved incredibly fortuitous in 2015, when Marcello Genovese met his eventual business partner and Vinivia co-founder, Stefan Graf.

“My business partner, he was another one of my biggest mentors, pushing me in the right direction into being more the business guy instead of just the nerd,” Genovese says.

The dynamic duo quickly partnered up, and together they started over five different companies.

“It’s coming from our belly; we pursue the ideas that we have a good gut feeling on,” he says about how he and Graf have chosen their projects. “When we’ve hired experts, they challenged our ideas, but we came back to what we already had in our gut. That’s how we make our decisions.”

In 2020, the pair came up with the idea for Vinivia — the livestreaming platform that puts creators first by giving them the tools they need to instantly start earning money.

Vinivia is, in many ways, the perfect synthesis of all Genovese’s passions. Just like how he started a website to help get the word out about his father’s musical talents as a boy, now he’s helping livestream performers connect with an audience and get paid for their passions.

“In the end, it’s all entertainment,” he says. “For me, Vinivia is the perfect place because you can be a singer, and you can be a DJ, and you can be a photographer, and you can entertain people through livestreaming.”

Disrupting Livestreaming

As an artist himself, Marcello Genevese was all too well versed in how hard it can be to monetize talent in the performing arts space. And his time in the tech sector showed him that other livestreaming platforms were the ones getting rich while their content creators struggled. So it was extremely important for Genovese that Vinivia make it incredibly easy for creators to earn.

That meant designing an interface that is easy to use so creators can spend more time perfecting their art, be it playing the saxophone or leveling up on Fortnite, and less time trying to figure out how the technology works. It meant making sure Vinivia had plenty of opportunities for user engagement, as well as adding features like one-click shopping. Above all, that meant coming up with a monetization model where creators get to keep 80 cents of every dollar earned — far and away the best rate in the livestreaming industry.

When experts told Genovese and Graf it couldn’t be done, they stuck to their guns.

“We were doing things in Vinivia where everybody else told us it’s impossible to do that, but we made it happen in the end,” Marcello Genovese says. Genovese already knew that making the best livestream platform for creators meant you’d attract the best creators — something his eccentric background in entertainment taught him years ago.

“That’s what’s making our social media platform successful,” he says. “Social media platforms are successful because you’re getting the best entertainment.”