“We don’t try to sell you something. Our intention is to tell you something.”
– Gino Fisanotti, Moncler
At Bedrock, we work closely with multigenerational families and understand that each generation approaches wealth differently. Our philosophy, We all see wealth differently, reflects the belief that stewardship evolves as perspectives, responsibilities and opportunities change over time.
Inheriting the Future is a Bedrock series exploring how the next generation is navigating that responsibility in an era of rapid technological and societal change. Written by Bedrock Advisory Board member Kydd Boyle, founder and CEO of Horizons and a member of a fifth-generation family business, the series offers a candid perspective shaped by his experience as an entrepreneur, investor, next-gen, and father.
In an age where technology is becoming increasingly accessible to everyone, the true differentiators are often the hardest to replicate. In this essay, Kydd reflects on lessons from some of Europe’s most successful family-owned businesses, including Prada and Moncler. Through conversations with the families and leaders behind these companies, he explores the relationship between innovation and inheritance, and what enables certain businesses to endure and thrive across generations.
Each year at Horizons we try to take members inside businesses they could never fully understand from the outside. We meet the owners and operators in the rooms where decisions are made.
This summer, that took us to Milan, where we spent three days with the families and operators behind Prada, Moncler, Tod’s, Molteni&C, Bending Spoons, AC Milan and others.
Despite their differences, the most successful shared a common approach: the strongest weren’t using technology to reinvent themselves. They were using it to reinforce identities that had often taken generations to build.
What follows are four reflections on what these enduring businesses taught me about growth, innovation, technology and identity.
The strongest businesses we met competed less on the product than on the system beneath it.
At Prada Group, Worldwide Retail Director Felipe Dell’Oro described a shared platform across Prada, Miu Miu, Church’s, Versace and the rest of the portfolio. Each brand keeps its own identity, but they draw on pooled CRM, client experience and operations. Data exists to know the client better. The trust underpinning that promise is itself the asset.
Bending Spoons, a software company founded in Milan in 2013 with forty thousand euros from a failed startup, runs the same playbook in a completely different register. They acquire underperforming digital businesses (Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Eventbrite and more than fifty others), rebuild the technology onto a shared platform of proprietary tools, and run them far more efficiently. Revenue has grown from $387m in 2023 to over $1.3bn in 2025. They never sell.
At RedBird Capital, which owns AC Milan, the same logic appears in sport: an investment platform built around under-monetised premium intellectual property, with football as the anchor and a multi-vertical holding group taking shape around it.
The product earns today’s customer. The platform makes the next thousand easier to serve.
“The strongest businesses we met competed less on the product than on the system beneath it.”
In the first essay in this series I wrote about the Intelligence Revolution and the anxiety I felt leaving San Francisco. The founders there talked about AI as a destination: artificial general intelligence, the automation of cognition, the end of work as we know it.
AI surfaced instead as another capability, absorbed quietly into businesses that have been running for decades. Silicon Valley often frames AI as the story. Milan treated it as another chapter. Important, certainly, but still in service of something larger.
It surfaced as another capability, absorbed quietly into businesses that have been running for decades or, in Moncler’s case, since 1952. Prada uses it to personalise client experience. Bending Spoons treats it as a tailwind, built once and reused across fifty products. AC Milan has embedded an AI team across sporting analytics, dynamic pricing and stadium design.
What struck me wasn’t what people said about AI, but how little they felt the need to talk about it. It had already moved from strategy into infrastructure.
For families navigating this transition, that distinction matters. The question is not whether to adopt AI. It is whether you let it redefine you or whether you put it to work inside a framework that already exists. The businesses that impressed me most in Milan had answered that question clearly.
“For families navigating this transition, that distinction matters. The question is not whether to adopt AI. It is whether you let it redefine you or whether you put it to work inside a framework that already exists.”
Almost every business we met is family owned or founder led, and spoke about thinking in decades rather than quarters.
At Tod’s, Filippo Della Valle traced the house from a roadside cobbler through to the company his father built in the 1970s. Everything, down to the paper of the handbags, is still made in Italy. At Molteni&C, the third generation showed how the same principles apply to the home, with production kept in the Brianza district and a roster of the world’s leading architects under one roof.
Moncler’s Chief Brand Officer, Gino Fisanotti, walked us from 1952 sleeping bags to a global luxury group. The Al Pacino and Robert De Niro campaign, built around a real friendship of nearly seventy years, was offered as proof that emotion travels further than celebrity. Their refusal to chase fashion’s cycles stood out: they grow by staying true to their DNA, and treat selling as a consequence of storytelling.
Martina Mondadori welcomed us into Casa Cabana, her Mongiardino-decorated childhood home and the original inspiration for the brand she founded in 2014. A fourth-generation Mondadori, she described a business conceived not as a furniture company but as a world: a visual identity and a way of living that could extend into products, collaborations and experiences.
By the end of the week I had stopped thinking about heritage as history. It had become obvious that, for these businesses, it was a foundation. A source of trust, identity and patience that competitors couldn’t buy.
“By the end of the week I had stopped thinking about heritage as history. It had become obvious that, for these businesses, it was a foundation. A source of trust, identity and patience that competitors couldn’t buy.”
Running Horizons means spending much of my time trying to understand what comes next. It is easy to become preoccupied with whatever feels newest.
Milan reminded me that the future is rarely built on novelty alone.
Technology is becoming increasingly available to everyone. Identity isn’t. The easier intelligence becomes to acquire, the more valuable judgement, trust and culture become.
That may be why so many of the businesses we met felt unusually confident about AI. They already knew who they were. Technology wasn’t being asked to provide an identity, it was being asked to strengthen one.
For the next generation inheriting family businesses, I suspect that is the most useful lesson. Don’t mistake reinvention for progress. The inheritance itself may be your greatest competitive advantage, provided you are willing to build on it rather than simply preserve it.
The more intelligence becomes commoditised, the more identity becomes scarce.
“For the next generation inheriting family businesses, I suspect that is the most useful lesson. Don’t mistake reinvention for progress.”
To learn more about Bedrock’s multigenerational approach to stewardship and family strategy, please reach out to: info@bedrockgroup.com.
Biography
Kydd Boyle is the Founder and CEO of Horizons, a global network of 150 millennial founders and investors representing over £200 billion in assets. Horizons exists to connect a rising generation of capital allocators and entrepreneurs by expanding each other’s horizons through curated gatherings and shared experiences.
The community hosts in-person forums featuring leading investors, entrepreneurs, creatives and athletes. Past speakers have included Bill Gates, David Rubenstein, George Russell, David Cameron and Mira Murati.
Kydd comes from a fifth-generation family business and sits on his family office’s board. He also serves on the advisory board of Bedrock Group.
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