Alberto, do you want to add any more to your background as to what led you to ultimately ending up with RSS? Yeah, just if we start from the podcast generator, I was back in my homeland in Italy where I lived until I was 28, right? From 0 to 28. And then I moved to Spain because I wanted to do a PhD. So podcast generator has been always on the side, you know, and in the meanwhile I did a PhD in affective computing, which today is called emotion AI.
I was working with wearable to measure psychophysiological signals from humans, which means heart rate, electrodermal activity, so skin conductance, pupil size, to infer emotions. That was very interesting, kind of pioneering the field of wearable before Fitbit, before Apple Watch were commercially launched. Very exciting. Gave me a lot of insights on how to be data driven, right? This is something I still use today. I still am a very data driven person.
And after that, I wanted more commercial impact. So I switched. I left academia after my PhD and I joined a startup where I was CTO for three years. We raised 45 million dollars, especially in the United States. Then I switched to corporate in a business unit, which was a moonshot factory. It was the equivalent of Google X, but in Europe. And it's a big corp, a big telecommunication company, 56 billion dollar revenue as a CTO there. I also for three years, I spun out a moonshot into a company.
It's a real company, which raised 30 million euros, 36 million dollars. And after the spin out, I finally decided to leave everything, leave corporate and just join RSS, which was already alive and going for a couple of years. For myself, it was a side project, right? Some weekends maybe dedicated, some emails, but really I was not in the day to day ops. And that's when I decided to join, which is actually this year. So 2021 is a big year for me.
Finally being able to work and have an impact in the podcasting industry. What I love so much about how diverse your backgrounds are is that you both had so many like Marie Forleo says, you know, you're multi-passionate entrepreneurs and you took all of these amazing skills and all these amazing like knowledge bases and you created something that is giving a voice to the previously voiceless. And that's honestly why I love RSS so much.
Just the fact that you can come on, you can speak into a microphone and you're telling the world your story. And sure, you may not have like a bunch of followers all at once. You may not have a bunch of fans, but the point is you're taking something as simple as a microphone and a broadcasting platform online and you're giving your voice to the world. That's I love, I love that. And it's all nothing. So we certainly love our community. I love that connectivity with our physical remarks.
We love talking to students and cooling down on some dark stuff as a resource.