two & a half gamers
00:15:31 · Matej Lancaric, Darius Mora, Jakub Remiar, Felix Braberg
[00:15:31] S2: So it's like you want to work for them. [00:15:34] S0: Yeah. I mean, it is like it's just one of the more exciting ones. Somebody described it as Goldman Sachs of Milan. They pay really well and they expect really high performance. And I do say in all the communication, yeah, this is not going to be easy. You're going to be pushed and really going to challenge yourself. This is not to fuck around. But if you're ready for that and they do pay like, you know, like north of 100 ks a year salary in Milan, you're a king for that [00:15:58] S2: kind Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:16:00] S1: Or queen. We know the headcount estimate or at least some kind of number here? [00:16:05] S0: I think four fifty employees, if I remember correctly. [00:16:09] S3: I also remember one of our mutual friends there has told us that also if you're a graduate hire, so if you're out of university, you... If you get through the application process, you're actually not assigned or you're not applying for any specific job, but you basically start and then you choose what role you want to do after being in the company for a while, which is [00:16:29] S2: very interesting.
00:16:29 · Matej Lancaric, Darius Mora, Jakub Remiar, Felix Braberg
[00:16:29] S2: very interesting. [00:16:29] S0: So that's like the internship program. Yeah. So they have like three months, six months internships that's for graduates. It seems like their strategy in general is not... I mean, have, of course, experts in industry, but I think majority of the workforce is like fresh graduates coming up. They can get them for cheaply. And also like the scaling of the salaries, if you have some experience, you make about double of what they offer when you're coming in as a graduate, which makes sense. [00:16:54] S1: But this is like the KPMG model, like the big four model, but you work to the bone in the beginning and then you get better and if you survive, of course. [00:17:04] S0: Yeah, yeah. I think if you're hungry and ambitious, this is like a great way to go. I think it would be a lot of fun and you'll learn a lot, I'm sure. [00:17:10] S1: Yeah, for sure. Starting point is a great school, I guess. [00:17:13] S0: Yeah, they don't have too many layers of management. It's going to get structured around specific products. And so you get to kind of a fairly small team, work on one product, dive deep, cross functional of that. I think it's a great way to start. [00:17:25] S3: And I'm assuming you must have tried to poach a couple of these people, right, in your career?
00:17:25 · Felix Braberg, Darius Mora, Matej Lancaric, Jakub Remiar
[00:17:25] S3: And I'm assuming you must have tried to poach a couple of these people, right, in your career? [00:17:30] S0: Yes. But it's really tough to compete with their salaries if you're a regular startup, not 2,500,000,000 evaluation company. I think that one thing to offer them is you can be one of the founders or early you get equity and be a bigger part of something drive, but they seem to have a pretty low churn and there's not a lot of people exiting or kind of laying around. They claim... Saw the stat. They claimed less than 1% unwanted churn. Unwanted part makes me wonder like, okay, you just fire a bunch of people and they're [00:18:07] S2: like, what's the wanted part? Like, come on. [00:18:10] S3: Wanted churn. Yeah. [00:18:12] S2: If you want to leave, yes. [00:18:14] S3: Right. [00:18:15] S0: So I think we haven't succeeded in hiring anybody from there, but yeah, there's a great pool of talent. [00:18:20] S1: Yeah. I guess that's also much, much more harder to get capital running compared to Bali or somewhere there in The US if these people, they get the know how and then they want to go independent. I guess it's not that easy from Europe than from US if they would be exiting some Facebook or whatever. [00:18:35] S2: Yeah, because in Europe you have slightly different laws. [00:18:38] S1: You don't found in Europe. [00:18:42] S3: So Jakub, I think we've been dancing around the topic, but do you want to share a screen and show off their beautiful portfolio so we can see actually
00:18:42 · Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric
[00:18:42] S3: So Jakub, I think we've been dancing around the topic, but do you want to share a screen and show off their beautiful portfolio so we can see actually [00:18:48] S2: Yeah, the yeah, yeah. When you are starting to do so, I just want to go through like the high profile acquisitions they've made. So Evernote, we already talked about. There's FiLMiC, which is a popular professional mobile video camera app, whatever that means. Mosaic Group, bought assets from Mosaic Group from IAC four hundred Climb, yes, Robot Killer, which is a spam call blocker, then iTranslate. And then Meetup HopinStreamYard. Okay, I used actually StreamYard, which is a streaming service when I was on the Google webinar. There's Isu, WeTransfer, Brightcove, and Komoot, which is outdoor navigation for hikers and cyclists, And which was very... The last app was acquired in March 2025. Okay.
00:19:45 · Darius Mora, Jakub Remiar, Matej Lancaric
[00:19:45] S0: That's nice. So they're saying they're claiming to do about 5,000 companies in the top funnel of the acquisition. And obviously they talk to a lot of people, and then less than 1% makes it to the actual conversation stage. And this is something that also... Five years ago maybe, if you had an app that makes like some of them... Not huge, but if you just had an app that makes consistent money, there was very little people reaching out. Like at Reflectly, we did a bunch of acquisitions early on, fairly easy, and we could triple the revenue in a few months just by doing some optimization on the payroll, on the onboarding and nothing really changing the code, just some few things here and there without even driving UA, literally just on the onboarding. And that was easy. And now those same people, the same founders, they get messages every day from Bending Spoons like people and private equity and all these. Like the market has shifted significantly. Demand for apps is huge now. [00:20:44] S1: Yeah, for sure. We also see that in our sector, whereas a lot of people are actually switching from gaming to apps, because that expertise translates to [00:20:53] S2: some I wouldn't say changing or switching to apps. [00:20:57] S1: I think some friends literally just go apps. [00:21:00] S2: Really? [00:21:00] S1: Yeah. Why? Yeah. Because, you know, the monetization is kind of the same. [00:21:04] S2: Yeah, but it's like people think it's very easier, but I don't think that really applies. [00:21:09] S1: They get to get paid well.
00:21:09 · Jakub Remiar, Matej Lancaric, Felix Braberg, Darius Mora
[00:21:09] S1: They get to get paid well. [00:21:10] S2: I mean, then say they get paid well. I mean, it's [00:21:15] S1: slashing Like for we had that problem with Netflix and Netflix was poaching gaming people with one million year salaries and like, where did they get that? [00:21:23] S2: Ah, okay. [00:21:24] S3: I don't know, Darius, did you think gaming translates to app development? Because it's quite different, right? Or what's I your experience it's on that [00:21:33] S0: because I think we look at gaming of like, oh, gaming is a few steps ahead of us. And then we look at some of the obviously like gamification, but a lot of the monetization models and like payrolls and onboarding, lot of stuff, things and vents. From I was listening to you guys last episode, you're talking about how apps are a few steps ahead in some of these. From the marketing [00:21:53] S2: point of view, Darius, absolutely true. Absolutely true. Because people are definitely from the gaming industry, at least I'm borrowing the trends because it's usually the flow. It's e commerce apps games. Everything starts in like e commerce and apps. UGC came to fucking gaming like three years late. [00:22:12] S0: Usually it's like porn e commerce. [00:22:15] S2: Yeah, yeah, Yes. Okay. Yeah. [00:22:18] S0: It's where everything starts. [00:22:19] S2: Yes, that's very true. Okay, fair enough.