We recently had the chance to speak with Giuseppe Vaccarella, as he shared about his journey and experiences of his professional journey with us.
Across his roles, he combines his legal foundation with expertise in cybersecurity and programming. Giuseppe leads his business with a clear vision: adopting innovation and advanced technologies to build secure and sustainable systems. He believes, “AI doesn’t remove the need for human judgment.”
Aligning this belief with his role at Oleven Group as its CEO, Giuseppe has been playing a crucial role in leading the company forward.
The Beginning
We started the interview by asking, “Could you start by telling us about your professional journey and inspiration behind jumping into this industry?”
Giuseppe shared, “I’m from Agrigento, Sicily, and I’m old enough that my first computer was a Commodore 64, the kind where you loaded a program from a cassette tape and then waited, and waited, listening to that whirring sound, hoping it wouldn’t crash at the very end. That waiting taught me patience before I knew it was a virtue.
The internet, as people think of it now, came much later for me. First, there was the BBS, where you’d dial into someone’s computer somewhere and a whole little world would open up on the screen. Then, IRC, where I met people I would have never met otherwise. The 56k modems only appeared afterwards. I tell you all this because the inspiration wasn’t some grand career plan, it was pure curiosity.
I was the kid who had to know how everything worked, especially how it broke. What surprises people is that I went on to study law, not engineering. But that was the making of me, not a detour. Security isn’t only about code; it’s about rules, about what’s permitted, and about where systems, and the people running them are weak. Law taught me to read the framework, and technology taught me to test where it cracks.
Twenty-five years later, I’m still that curious kid, except now, the systems I’m working on protect banks, ministries, and national infrastructure, and the stakes are real people.”
Pivotal Events in the Journey
We then asked Giuseppe Vaccarella, “As an expert in this field, what are a few lessons that helped you in leading your business?”
He explained, “The first lesson cost me: in security, ego will get you breached. The moment you’re sure you already know the answer, you stop looking and that’s exactly when something slips past you. So I’ve built teams where ‘I don’t know yet’ is a perfectly respectable thing to say.
The second lesson is that I hire curious people over those with impressive CVs. I can teach a curious person any tool you like; I can’t teach an impressive person to actually care.
The third is about trust, and it took me time to understand. With machines, we live by ‘trust but verify.’ With people you lead, you must do the opposite: give real trust first, and then build an environment honest enough that nobody hides a mistake out of fear. I promise you, the fastest route to disaster is a junior who’s too scared to say ‘I think I just broke something.’
And the last one: learn to speak plainly. I spend as much time explaining a risk to a board or a minister as I do on the technical side. If you can’t make the complicated thing understandable, your knowledge just sits in a locked room.”
Navigating through Challenges
Starting a business is never a simple task. To learn more, we asked Giuseppe Vaccarella, “Would you like to share what you feel is a major challenge in starting a business or career? And how did you overcome it?”
Giuseppe mentioned, “For me, it was credibility, and the cruel twist is that in this field, your best work is usually confidential, so you literally can’t show it. There’s no portfolio for the engagements that matter most. On top of that, I was a guy from a small Sicilian town trying to be taken seriously in rooms in Doha, Moscow, and Beijing.
The easy thing would have been to oversell, to perform a confidence I didn’t have. I did the opposite, almost stubbornly so. I said clearly what I could and couldn’t do, delivered exactly what I’d promised, and let the results do the talking. In this work, your reputation is the product. It builds up slowly, over years, and it can vanish in an afternoon.
After a while, I stopped hunting for shortcuts, because there aren’t any, and oddly, accepting that was a relief.”
Plans in the Pipeline
Interested in learning more about Giuseppe Vaccarella’s plans for his offerings, we asked him to share a bit about them with our viewers.
“My focus is protecting the things a country simply can’t afford to lose: energy, banking, government systems, and critical infrastructure. The direction I’m building toward is security platforms where Artificial Intelligence does the heavy lifting on spotting and connecting threats, but a human being always stays in the loop for the decisions that actually matter. I’m genuinely against fully automatic systems making serious calls on their own.
So we combine large-scale threat intelligence and anomaly detection with a hard rule of privacy-by-design, protecting people without spying on them. The ambition is what I’d call sovereign-grade security: something a nation can really trust, built to satisfy the strictest standards in several jurisdictions at once.
We’re growing this work across Europe and the Gulf, adapting it to very different rulebooks, which is its own kind of puzzle. But the heart of it is simple: technology that protects and that respects the people it’s protecting,” Giuseppe shared.
Adapting to Innovative Practices
Nowadays, AI is everywhere. Even businesses are increasingly adapting to it. So, we asked Giuseppe Vaccarella, “What are your thoughts on this?”
He reflected, “My relationship with the hype is complicated. AI is a real force multiplier on the defensive side; it lets a small team see patterns across an ocean of data no human could ever read by hand. I use it every day and I wouldn’t give it up. But I’d ask people to hold two uncomfortable truths at once.
First, AI is also a weapon and a target: the same tools helping defenders are sharpening attackers, and the threats I see are getting faster and more convincing because of it.
Second, AI doesn’t remove the need for human judgment; it raises the price of getting it wrong. The real danger was never intelligent machines; it’s people quietly handing their judgment to a system they don’t understand and can’t argue with.
So to any business adopting it, I’d say: yes, adopt it, but don’t worship it. Keep a person accountable for every decision that has consequences. Use AI to do more, not to think less. The companies that find that balance will be formidable. The ones that give up the wheel entirely will get a very expensive education.”
Insights of an Expert
Lastly, we asked, “What would be your advice to beginners in this field or in any field of business?”
Giuseppe mentioned, “Build the foundations before you chase the trend of the month. Every year, there’s a shiny new tool you’re told you simply must master, but the people who are still standing years later are the ones who understood what sits underneath it, how things really work, and why they fail.
Trends expire; fundamentals compound. Stay curious and stay humble at the same time that combination is rarer than you’d think, and it’s everything.
Take ethics seriously from day one, especially in security: you’ll have moments where the only thing stopping you from doing something powerful is your own line in the sand, so decide where that line is before you’re tested.
And be patient. I know it’s the least glamorous advice in the world, but real skill and real trust are built over years, not over one viral post. I’m still learning, twenty-five years from the day I stop will be the day I should hang it up.”
Connect with Giuseppe Vaccarella on LinkedIn to gain industry insights.
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