All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
00:00:00 · Luca Ferrari, S1, S2, Chamath Palihapitiya, S4
[00:00:00] S0: You are the reason that NASDAQ exists. [00:00:02] S1: They went from zero to $1,000,000,000 in revenue in just ten years. [00:00:06] S2: Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari. [00:00:09] S0: We have never lost a bid before. [00:00:11] S2: Well, AOL has a new parent again. Milan based tech company, Bending Spoons, announced it will buy ticketing platform, Eventbrite. Bending Spoons is stirring up the market. [00:00:21] S3: They go from fixing one zombie app to reviving 20 of them. [00:00:24] S0: Half a billion people use our products. We're trying to build a generational company. [00:00:30] S4: Please welcome Luca Ferrari. [00:00:38] S1: Hey. Here he is. Nice to see you. [00:00:45] S4: Luca. You got fans. [00:00:48] S1: Alright. Luca. Have great company. [00:00:53] S3: Don't make fun of Luca Ferrari. I'm not. I'm just... He's... This is a great Italian entrepreneur, so shut the up. Absolutely. Absolutely. Luca, I [00:01:01] S1: I asked... So I got somebody yelling like it's Super Mario Brothers from the audience. [00:01:05] S3: We could have another presidential moment here at the All In podcast. So if she picks it... If she if she calls you, then just run the phone over. Got my phone here. Okay. Just in case. [00:01:13] S0: Yeah. It's ready.
00:01:13 · Luca Ferrari, Chamath Palihapitiya
[00:01:13] S0: Yeah. It's ready. [00:01:14] S3: I mean, there's a lot of us that have actually been tracking you for a while. I I originally heard about you because you were in Milano, where, you know, my wife's family is from, and you had this incredibly progressive, methodical approach to growth. You did this fantastic podcast with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, which was great. I encourage all of you to listen to it. And you explained the arc of Bending Spoons. And I'd love for you to explain to folks the first few years and just all the misery and failure, the the nadir of the company, and then the beginning of the ascent.
00:01:55 · Luca Ferrari, Chamath Palihapitiya
[00:01:55] S0: Yeah. So the, you know, most of the... I mean, the pain... There's been plenty of pain throughout as for most entrepreneurs, I think. But the the the biggest failures were in the previous start up. So with my cofounders, we launched an AI company in 2010, very early, too early, clearly, crashed and burned. Three years later, we're left with about $40,000 in capital we'd raised from the VC and we... You know, clearly, there wasn't a lot to salvage other than our relationship being stronger and and and that money that the VC pretty much gifted to us as they, you know, didn't wanna go through the liquidation process too too much in legal fees and too many headaches. They had seen us work pretty hard. And so they told us, you guys keep it. We'll sell our shares to you for $1, like, nominal value and you go and get a nice vacation. We're clearly a little bit sick in the head and so we took the money and enthusiastically turned it into seed financing for Bending Spoons and and we, you know, we came up with... [00:03:03] S3: You started with $40,000.
00:03:03 · Chamath Palihapitiya, Luca Ferrari
[00:03:03] S3: You started with $40,000. [00:03:04] S0: 40,000 exactly in 2013 and we we had this strategy which has remained pretty much the same obviously, you get smarter, you refine it in time. That was... The idea was we we are not very good at finding product market fit or maybe, you know, lock plays a big role, probably both things are true. But we have become pretty good at engineering, design, monetization, marketing in just three years of hard work. And so we should be able to be among the best in the world at that. And we should be able to buy product market fit from people. And and and, you know, they get a good price, we we get a good asset we can make more valuable, and then we we deploy more capital into making our our platform... Acquisition, [00:03:45] S3: and how much did you pay, and how did you get the deal [00:03:48] S0: So the first acquisition was we paid $10,000, give or take, and it was a mobile app for iPhone specifically that you used to personalize your keyboard. Very simple. One man kind of developer sold it to us. Obviously, a very amateurish operation, not that difficult at the time to to make it better and more successful. But you know... What were you buying? [00:04:16] S3: Like, you're buying one times revenue? You're buying the revenue? You're buying the app? One specifically,
00:04:16 · Chamath Palihapitiya, Luca Ferrari, S4
[00:04:16] S3: Like, you're buying one times revenue? You're buying the revenue? You're buying the app? One specifically, [00:04:21] S0: I think, had negligible revenue. It wasn't even really monetized. Okay. Which of course is never the case for for scale businesses... Users. It had users. So so what we bought at the time was an app with a bunch of users and good positioning on the app stores, so they... It would get an influx of new users. And that's, you know, remained broadly speaking similar over time and, you know, we keep looking for great brands, user and customer bases, where we can, you know, improve everything ideally and make those assets even more valuable over over time. We just do it at a much bigger scale these days, but the the underlying concepts have not changed. [00:04:59] S4: Did you did you rebuild that app? Did you take over the code base and redo it? Just help us understand technically what's going on in the organization from that business through to some of the bigger ones today. Yeah. Is it a is it a code biz... Are you are you doing engineering, product design, marketing, all of the above?
00:04:59 · S4, Luca Ferrari, Chamath Palihapitiya
[00:04:59] S4: Did you did you rebuild that app? Did you take over the code base and redo it? Just help us understand technically what's going on in the organization from that business through to some of the bigger ones today. Yeah. Is it a is it a code biz... Are you are you doing engineering, product design, marketing, all of the above? [00:05:16] S0: Yeah. Most of what we do is is engineering and product. We have a core team of, at this point, about 800 people, and I would say probably three quarters of them are either engineers or AI researchers or product designers, product managers. Most of what we do is actually improving technologies and products. And and of course, you know, that... Yes, that app, we we wrote it completely and... But it's you know, very early days. Today, we're much more sophisticated. We we... So what we do is we we bring in a... Call it an operating system of 50 plus proprietary technologies. We built, kind of an engine to run technology businesses very effectively and efficiently and really our core product. We swap out the technological foundation of the businesses we buy with that one so we can run it much better. Also, the people we transition across our various businesses always play by the same rules. They're more efficient because they find the same [00:06:09] S3: tool. So these tools cut across what? Like HR, finance, tech ops, dev ops? [00:06:15] S0: Pretty much everything. Yeah. I mean Everything. Orchestration of AI models, check. Recruiting tools, check. AB testing platforms, it's [00:06:21] S3: And [00:06:21] S0: then do