In the spring of 2004, in his second year in Singapore, Carmelo Pistorio gave an American business magazine a sentence that we at Palaimon have since been repeating in inadequate words of our own. Singapore offers a safe harbor, a perfect watchtower over the rest of Asia. We did not know the sentence when, two years ago, we decided to open a second berth at Collyer Quay. We came across it only later — and with it, a man who had been there half a working life before us.

Carmelo is the eldest son of Pasquale Pistorio, the long-serving CEO and later honorary chairman of STMicroelectronics — that patriarch of the European-Asian semiconductor industry whose stewardship was so consequential that he entered Italian business history under the name il green manager. Carmelo himself looked early for another road. He read Philosophy, with a minor in History, at Tufts College in Massachusetts; he graduated at twenty-six, and went not to Milan or to New York but, for a year, to a twenty-eight-tonne fishing trawler in Liguria. “I knew the sea was the only place where I could slowly make sense of the world.” — In the nineteen-nineties, he and friends drove an Alfa Romeo into the Bosnian War, in order, as he later put it, to study man's relation to himself other than in books.

Only after that did the kind of career a respectable family will recognise begin: stations in Paris, Brussels, Milan and Catania; the running of HTS, a pan-European firm dealing with the downstream environmental footprint of semiconductor fabrication; FolloWeb, a first-wave European e-commerce play with PricewaterhouseCoopers, SAP and CommerceOne — “1.7 million euros in revenue and 9 million in debt; an ugly business”. In 2002 Carmelo arrived in Singapore as a silent partner in a local recycling company; a year later he was a permanent resident; in March 2003 he founded Upstream Ventures, a small seed fund behind Boat Quay with three partners and eight portfolio companies in its first year, fifteen by its third. Today he is executive chairman of XiD Technologies, a Singapore-based leader in biometric facial recognition for Asia.

Why we name him here

We do not name Carmelo as an adviser, and we do not name him as an intermediary. We name him because a man who, twenty-two years ago, decided to put his life in Singapore, and who has since carried, almost in pure form, what an Asian decade can teach a European family fortune — such a man is, for a house like ours, a compass.

Carmelo himself says that sailing is “one of the best schools of life, where you learn about interdependence and vulnerability, and how to govern”. Anyone who has spent a day with him aboard the MS Jock — the J/24 with which he and his crew have, on occasion, beaten full-time sailors in the regattas of the Changi Sailing Club — will see that this is not a pose. It is the way he sits in his board, at his desk, on a telephone call. If you want help handing a family across a generation, you should keep close to a man who knows what it is to bring a boat through a night in which no one ashore could any longer help him.

How one reaches him

Carmelo lives between Singapore and Malta. He does not work for us, and we hold no mandate from him. We make introductions where the matter fits our shared understanding of how a life should be conducted — a family question, a holding in Southeast Asia, a piece of an estate in Singapore, Malta or Italy that needs a clear head familiar with the language and the manners of both sides. As with Anna Jelen in Arosa, Carmelo is not directly available. An office hour with him tends to last a whole day — on a pontoon, aboard, or at a kitchen table in Valletta. It usually ends with an answer that does not appear in any spreadsheet.

From his pen — a small archive

The nine items below are, with Carmelo's knowledge, a complete mirror of the press file from his Singapore years as listed on his personal website. We host them here so they remain reachable when the publishers eventually retire their servers. The April 2004 piece carries the sentence cited above; the May 2006 essay is written by Carmelo himself.

1. I Upstream — planting seeds of innovation SI News · November 2003
2. II VC in Asia — an angel in Singapore Red Herring · 16 April 2004
3. III Sing — A time to invest Italian Chamber of Commerce, Singapore · August 2004
4. IV Moving Upstream SI News · November / December 2004
5. V SVCA Magazine — Inaugural Issue Cover Story Singapore Venture Capital Association · April 2005
6. VI SVCA Magazine — cover plate Singapore Venture Capital Association · April 2005
7. VII Fish Eye India (by the author) SCOPE / SVCA Newsletter · May 2006
8. VIII Angels of Asia Unite! Italian Chamber of Commerce, Singapore · August 2006
9. IX Pistorio — profile page Web-page snapshot · 2006

The PDFs are bit-for-bit copies of the originals on carmelopistorio.com. Hosting and stewardship rest with Palaimon Capital.

If you would like to speak with Carmelo, please write to us — see Office Hours.
We reply personally, usually within forty-eight hours.