Marina Tognetti is an Italian entrepreneur and business executive based in Amsterdam. She is the founder and CEO of Myngle, an online platform that offers live language education through video conferencing in 45 different languages. [2]
Marina Tognetti is an Italian entrepreneur and business executive based in Amsterdam. She is the founder and CEO of Myngle, an online platform that offers live language education through video conferencing in 45 different languages. [2]
Marina Tognetti graduated cum laude in Business & Economics from the Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, after which she earned an MBA at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France. She lived and worked in different countries, and spent one year traveling through Asia. She speaks Italian, English, Dutch, French, Spanish, and a bit of Mandarin. [3]
She started her career in marketing at Procter & Gamble in Rome, working on different consumer brands. She then moved to The Netherlands where she worked for Philips in Eindhoven, responsible for consumer monitors for South Europe. After her MBA at INSEAD, she joined Sara Lee in the division Coffee and Grocery, where she became first Marketing Director for Out of Home in Paris, France, then moved back to The Netherlands as Director of New Products. She then joined The Boston Consulting Group. She decided to do some hands-on experience in the Internet, joining eBay, after which she was ready to start her own company and founded Myngle. [4] She was inspired to start a platform for language learning when she was having difficulty learning Chinese herself. She concluded that language learning would be much easier if people could learn languages as if they were living in the country where the language was spoken, benefiting from native teachers through internet connections. [5] Her startup was able to expand with funding first from HenQ and some private investors and then from Rabobank in 2009. [2] The company made the switch from consumers to corporate clients early on and is now primarily focused on business clients. [3]
In 2025, Tognetti developed the MASTER Risk Model, a professional development framework that treats risk as a learnable process rather than an innate trait. The model is structured around three diagnostic pillars—Mindset, Abilities, and Situation—which interact to place individuals in Comfort, Stretch, or Panic Zones. The zones are informed by Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, while the three pillars build on Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory (often expressed as Lewin’s Equation), linking personal and environmental factors in decision-making.
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Marina is a regular speaker at conferences about women’s leadership, entrepreneurship, and innovation.
Tognetti has received multiple international recognitions for her work in technology and entrepreneurship, including being listed among Europe’s “Top 100 Women in Tech” in 2012 and “50 Most Inspiring Women Tech Leaders in Europe” in 2015. [6]
She received many international recognitions for her contribution as a woman in technology: