02:15:15 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[02:15:15] S0: Well, at one at one point, Boston Dynamics sold to Hyundai Heavy Industries, so I believe they were across the Pacific Ocean. Let's react to the second video posted by the Humanoid Robotics company. Okay. UB Tech Industrial Walkers, they've been pumping these out. Feels like the question has never been, can China make a lot of these things? Like, obviously, they In [02:15:41] S1: the in the bio, they said they said it looked too perfect to be real. Yeah. And then they used some chatty bitty slot, but perfection isn't fabricated. It's delicately engineered. [02:15:50] S0: It's so good. You know you know, for a long time, people were saying that, there was no way to watermark AI created content with because, like, oh, how would you do it? You you change one. It's like, actually, all AI content is watermarked. Turns out. It's just perfectly watermarked. Yeah. This looks real to me. I I don't know. It also could be CGI honestly. [02:16:15] S1: It's pretty funny to see Brett say this was all faked.
02:16:15 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Luca Ferrari
[02:16:15] S1: It's pretty funny to see Brett say this was all faked. [02:16:18] S0: Yeah. It it looks it looks real. I mean, it would be way they could have done so much better to make this look real. Put a bunch of humans there, touch them. A lot of the hard part in CGI is the handoff between the CGI character and the human character. And so what you should be doing is you is you should have a human who takes, like, a smoothie and pours it on top of the robot and then, like, wipes the robot off clean with a towel, and you're seeing how the fluids interact with the robot, interact with the person. And, like, that was that was not actually that satisfactory. I don't know. I think, I don't know. I'm not calling it fake, but it could be fake because CGI is really, really good. Like, CGI just is at that level where that's possible. Anyway, yeah, [02:17:08] S1: we know the we know the caption or the the description of the video was AI generated. [02:17:13] S0: That is hilarious that they they had to use it for the caption. [02:17:19] S1: It's like I mean [02:17:20] S0: It's like AI on it. And it's like, after all, it is an AI company. Like, it would be on brand. Anyway, fin dot a I, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in competitive bake off. Number one ranking on g two. You can get started for free. Our next guest is Luca from Bending Spoons in the restroom waiting room. Welcome to the show. [02:17:39] S1: Welcome to the show. Good to meet you. [02:17:41] S0: How are doing? [02:17:41] S5: Hello. Hi.
02:17:41 · Luca Ferrari, John Coogan
[02:17:41] S5: Hello. Hi. [02:17:43] S0: Thank you so much. [02:17:44] S5: Good to [02:17:44] S0: meet I imagine it's late there. Thank you for staying up late and coming and chatting with us. For those who don't know you, would you mind introducing yourself? [02:17:54] S5: Of course. One of the cofounders, the CEO at Venice Pounds. And what we do is we, look for digital technology businesses with an express potential, and then we acquire them if they'll sell them to us and transform them sometimes quite radically by rewriting big chunks of of the software, rearchitecting the cloud infrastructure, redesigning the UI, launching a lot of lots of features, optimizing monetization and marketing, rebuilding big parts of the organization. So lots of hand hands on work. And then if we do it right, we generate a lot of value. We plug back into bigger acquisitions and strengthening, call it, our platform. So basically, proprietary technologies, our expertise, access to talent. [02:18:36] S0: The company's huge now, $11,000,000,000 valuation. How did you get started with all this?
02:18:36 · John Coogan, Luca Ferrari
[02:18:36] S0: The company's huge now, $11,000,000,000 valuation. How did you get started with all this? [02:18:44] S5: So I first funded a startup in 2010. Interestingly, talking about AI, we were trying to create a self rising diary or journal with AI in 2010, which was pretty early. Yeah. We couldn't I mean, it worked fine, but it wasn't good enough. So that was like your typical start up. You work from a garage. It was really our, you know, living room in our apartment with more or less the concept is the same. We we worked on it for three years, couldn't make it work commercially, and then we kinda shut it down. And through that experience, we came up with the strategy for Benning Spoons. Basically, why don't we try to outsource looking for product market fit to the market? We try to be the best in the world at the, call it, functional expertise that's necessary to run a digital technology business. So software engineering, product design, growth, and all all these things. And then we we buy businesses where the owner is basically doesn't wanna work on it any longer or where maybe we can do better so we can offer an exciting price for all involved. [02:19:48] S0: Is the reference is the name a reference to The Matrix? [02:19:52] S5: Actually, yes. Yeah. It is. Cool. [02:19:55] S0: Yeah. It it is it it feels like, at least to me, like, it's kind of an odd name for any business. I it's cool. I I like the reference. But why did you pick that name particular in in particular?
02:19:55 · John Coogan, Luca Ferrari, Jordi Hays
[02:19:55] S0: Yeah. It it is it it feels like, at least to me, like, it's kind of an odd name for any business. I it's cool. I I like the reference. But why did you pick that name particular in in particular? [02:20:08] S5: So we we knew we weren't gonna work on just one product. Okay. So we couldn't call it, say, Facebook Yeah. If you do, you know [02:20:15] S0: Yeah. You need, like, a name for a holding company on day one, sort of. [02:20:19] S5: Yeah. Something like that. So we we chose to to find a name that would somehow convey a couple of principles or values that we thought were important to us. And bending spoons reminds us of two things. One is the power of the mind. For obvious reasons, if you are gonna ban spoons with your with your mind, it means you believe it's powerful and you can do great things with it. And the other one is call it perseverance, hard work, dedication. In my imagination to to get to the point where you can bend stones with your mind, you probably have to work pretty hard at it. So Impossible was kinda memorable, so we we liked it. [02:20:56] S0: Yeah. [02:20:57] S1: I like it. I I reached out or or one of us reached out when when the where the AOL acquisition got announced. Like, give it give us a backstory on on that deal, how it came to be, when you started thinking about the business, what what value you saw in the business, and and maybe why it was a target that that was overlooked by by, maybe American private equity players, and and what you saw in it.
02:21:28 · Luca Ferrari
[02:21:28] S5: There were multiple private equities that we're looking at it too. So we weren't the only ones. You know, it was owned by a private equity or it it's still owned because the the acquisition was only signed. It hasn't closed yet. Mhmm. And so you could imagine how they would run a proper competitive process. The typically, we we follow our business for a long time before an opportunity to acquire presents itself. I I don't have precise statistics, but my my off the top of my head, I'd say it's quite rare that we end up acquiring a business we haven't followed for at least a year, sometimes more. So we have been following AOL for a while and, you know, when when it became available, we we made an offer that we thought was quite competitive and here we are. What do we see in it? So I think it's a it's actually a great business. People are a bit stuck in the with the idea of AOL from the nineties or maybe early two thousands of Internet connectivity. It doesn't do that. Haven't done that for a long time. Today, it's two different products. There's a web portal for people to consume news and entertainment and and an email client, like Gmail, pretty much, you know, like that sort of thing. They have well well in excess of 30,000,000 monthly active users, 8,000,000 daily active users. So it's huge. Give or take one in 10 Americans uses it. And and it's just not necessarily, you know, the the the new hot thing that you would read about online, but it's still massively used and, you know, very good retention because people are self selected if if they still use it for really liking the brand and the offering. Yeah. And we we you know, nevertheless, we think we could help make the product more modern, more effective. We think that through AI, we could create better recommendations for the web experience, essentially better content to consume. We'll see, but it's exciting. We look forward to working with the team on it. Plenty to to refine and expand. We it's it's and it's exciting to work on a storied brand. You know, it's I find it kinda cool actually to be able to get our hands dirty with with with a brand of the caliber of AOL.