How to Invent Awesome Things and NOT Become a Billionaire: Survival manual for dreamers with grease-stained hands

How to Invent Awesome Things and NOT Become a Billionaire: Survival manual for dreamers with grease-stained hands

Survival Manual for Dreamers with Grease on Their Hands If you picked up this book looking for a magic formula to make your first million euros while sipping a cocktail in Dubai, I suggest you put it straight back on the shelf. This book is not for you. There are thousands of books that sell you that dream, written by people who probably made their million by selling courses on how to make a million. This is not a glossy success story. This is a true story of survival engineering, full of anecdotes, information, and lessons that life has taught me. My name is Davide Angelelli , and for my entire life I have done one thing: I have invented. I have invented designs and engineering solutions in the automotive, aerospace, and architectural fields; digital systems for television newsrooms back when everything was still shot on videotapes. I designed multitouch tables for military defence when the iPhone had just been born. I put 360-degree cameras on drones and helicopters before they became supermarket toys or defence systems. And today, I design 3D-printed cars using Artificial Intelligence as a tool—not to make the job easier, but to make it faster. Sounds like a perfect biography, right? One reminding you of something you’d read on LinkedIn. The truth—what no one tells you at startup conferences—is that inventing amazing things is the easy part. The hard part comes afterwards. The hard part is when the FBI calls you on the phone and you think it’s a joke, only to realise that your technology is so advanced it has become a national security issue (and your bank account doesn’t benefit from it). The hard part is when you shake hands with executives in suits on the top floor of a Milan skyscraper, receive glowing compliments, and later discover that the sole purpose of that meeting was to figure out how to copy your idea without paying you. The hard part is understanding that a patent, without the money to defend it in court, is worth about as much as a piece of toilet paper pinned to the wall. The idea, however, has absolute value—and with the right strategies it can be enhanced and turned into economic benefit, beyond passion and beyond design and engineering, which remain the primary foundations of any success story. I wrote these pages because I am tired of the living-room rhetoric of innovation. I am tired of seeing brilliant young people crash into the rubber wall of bureaucracy, “smart guys,” and legal tricksters. In this book you will find a sometimes tragicomic chronicle of my professional life from March 2001 to today, December 2025: from the corridors of Striscia la Notizia and Mediaset, where I learned that speed is everything, to legal battles that taught me loyalty is not a spendable currency. I will tell you how I used AI to build an automotive super-structure, and how I learned to recognise at first glance who truly wants to help you and who just wants to vampirise your work. Think of this book as a bulletproof vest. I won’t teach you how to get rich (the title doesn’t lie), but maybe—just maybe—I will teach you how not to get robbed. I will teach you how to protect your intellectual property not with the illusion of the law, but with the strategy of industrialisation. I will teach you that innovation without execution is just an expensive hobby. If you have an idea burning inside you, if you feel a physical need to build something that doesn’t yet exist, read this book. It will save you time, money, and above all it will spare you the naïveté of believing that being good is enough to win. Being good is not enough. You have to be ready. Welcome to the real world.