Francesca Cavallo and Elena Favilli, wrote and published a children’s picture book, Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, 100 Tales to Dream Big. And they are creating their own story, moving to America to compose a picture book! That is 220 pages long! That has 60 illustrators! And yes, that made crowdfunding history with well over $1 million in purchases In this interview I asked Francesca not about the technical details of book contracts, and crowdfunding but how she and Elena created their own foundation for over 10 years, Francesca through learning to stand up in theatre, and how Elena created the first children’s magazine for the iPad. Their success came not by luck, but through humility, through focus, even through loneliness…, let’s go Francesca on the influence of being an immigrant entrepreneur. “Living in the country and being exposed to more work, then we realized that we could use the visual culture that we have, the sensibility of European design, but still merge it to Being willing to challenge your assumptions. How we think of European illustration, and how we think of American culture. “You’re in the middle.  You are not in your country and you are trying to fit in – but you never you feel you fit in, because that is not the country that you grew up in. So it is a variety of aspects.  Buy being in the country that you did not grow up with, you are naturally more focused on the reason why you moved to this country. We spent so many hours per day working on the project. Besides the determination, and the focus, part of it is that you don’t have many friends.  You moved to work on this thing, so all you do is work on this thing. “And you are kind of in the middle. You know where you came from.  You have a kind of curiosity toward the country that you came to live in, so it allows you to be creative.”