Today we’d like to introduce you to Luigi Castrucci Pedrinola.
Hi Luigi, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
My name is Luigi Castrucci Pedrinola, I am 28 years old and live in Orlando. I am the founder and president of 42nite.
I was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and blessed to be raised by an amazing family. Since I was a little kid I’ve loved competing in sports, but golf has always been my number one. When I was 8 I had a rare disease on my legs and for that reason, I could not practice any sport for over 4 years. Once healed I was determined to play golf competitively.
In a few years, with a lot of sweat and dedication, I became the top-ranked junior player in Brazil. Around the same time, I got into one of the best Economics colleges in the nation. However, Brazil does not have any student athlete programs. In fact, the college I attended could not care less that I was traveling the world representing Brazil on the biggest junior and amateur stages. I was failing classes strictly due to the absences I had while traveling.
This gave me the necessary push to look into moving to the USA, where students have the opportunity to chase an athlete career while getting a great education. I am a big family person and that made me very hesitant to leave my hometown, but I felt like that was a unique opportunity to take the next step into my golfing career. A few months later I was enrolled at Rollins College, which was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
Before being able to fully adapt myself to the new culture and language, I started to have excruciating back pain. Later on, I was diagnosed with a bad herniated disc in my lower back, which put a stop on my dream of becoming a golfer.
One weekend during my junior year, I was hanging out with some friends at the pool. Someone asked, “What’s for tonight?”. After talking it out, reaching out to other people and looking up online, we were still not able to come up with the answer. We ended up going to the same pub we always used to go to. That stuck to my head – with so many different nightlife experiences out there, how come we always ended up at the same place? After a few more weeks talking to people and brainstorming, I figured out that not only a lot of people faced that same issue, but they also hated most of its processes.
That’s when I was certain that we needed a platform which would ease the whole process of going out, from options to admission. This way socialites would be able to focus more on their experiences without the hassle of outdated processes. This is how 42nite (for•tonight) was born.
For the next couple of years, I was able to get a few beta versions rolling out. The more I learned about the nightlife industry, the more I realized that the outdated processes were not only a problem for socialites, but for everyone involved in the industry. This is when I first understood the full potential of 42nite and the extremely complex road that it would be.
With that in mind, I started structuring a complete business model cycle that would be easily replicable across the USA, in which 42nite would assist users on making strategic decisions to optimize time and money, independent of their role in the industry. However, I knew that I was not going to be able to do it alone and that it would not be easy to find the help I wished for, especially with limited resources.
When I was close to running out of options and needed the most, life gifted me the business partner I was looking for. By sharing dreams and beliefs, Caio Garcia de Souza Monteiro has been essential to the success of 42nite. With his help, we were able to start transforming our vision into reality, and on 10/14/2019 42nite was officially launched.
Currently, we are operating in 8 states and 18 cities within the USA. We believe that this is just the beginning to our vision of professionalizing the industry across the nation with the use of technology.
I would not have been able to get here without the unconditional support and love from my family and friends. Especially my dad Pietro, my mom Cristiana, my brother Vittorio, my sister Giulia, and my beautiful fiancé Lyndsay.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
As I mentioned above, it has been a very long and complex road, with many challenges and obstacles. However, I always try to learn something from it, independent of the outcome. In my opinion, two of the biggest challenges to start and to run a business are time and money. Like it or not, we live in a capitalist country where money is a big variable of our life. From a personal perspective, money won’t buy you happiness but it will provide you with the needed foundation to build it upon. Money speaks even louder from a business perspective, as it usually involves other parties and as it is always correlated to business growth.
Time is the most valuable thing that we own, being the hardest to accumulate and the easiest to trade off. Starting and running a business require a lot of it, especially with limited resources. If you don’t do it, most likely no one will. At the same time, there is just so much someone can do in a day without diminishing productivity. In my case, I’m consistently trading time spent with family and friends for time spent on the business, and that is one of the hardest things for me.
As a company, one of our biggest obstacles so far has been the burst of covid-19, which started only a few months after 42nite’s official launch. Due to closed markets, we had to survive for over 12 months without operating.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
I believe enough in myself and in my vision to not be afraid to try and to have the resilience to never quit. I’m always seeking more knowledge to become ever more specialized in my passion, by learning with others and by constant self-analysis.
Contact Info:
- Email: contact@whats42nite.com
- Website: www.whats42nite.com
- Instagram: official42nite
- Facebook: 42nite
- Appstore: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/42nite/id1031072333
Suggest a Story: OrlandoVoyager is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
