All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
00:17:27 · S4, Luca Ferrari, Chamath Palihapitiya
[00:17:27] S4: You haven't tried or you've tried and it hasn't worked? [00:17:29] S0: No. We've we've tried and it's worked with marginally. So maybe it's helped 3%, but now, like, the bulk of it has been bringing 10 out of 10 excellence in operations, product, monetization, technology [00:17:42] S3: Luca, when... [00:17:43] S0: On an individual business basis. [00:17:44] S4: And then why not build organically products? Yeah. [00:17:47] S0: So the... First of all, you can't do everything. I mean, Elon can't. I I... You know, my colleagues colleagues and I, we don't think we can. Maybe we should be more ambitious with ourselves. So... [00:18:00] S4: Got a lot on your plate. Yeah. Yeah. There's so many different kinds of products already. [00:18:04] S0: We we launch a lot of new things on top of existing brands I see. But it's not like completely radical innovation. We don't do a lot of that. We try to stay focused on on one thing to try to be the very best in the world at it. Also, at scale we are at at this point where, you know, on a pro form a with Miro close to a run rate of $4,000,000,000 in revenue, it's difficult. Like, if you look at the percentage of new startups or products being launched that would move the needle, it's it's very, very small. So what's the... You know, we would have to deploy a lot of our resources and very unlikely to work.
00:18:04 · Luca Ferrari, S4
[00:18:04] S0: We we launch a lot of new things on top of existing brands I see. But it's not like completely radical innovation. We don't do a lot of that. We try to stay focused on on one thing to try to be the very best in the world at it. Also, at scale we are at at this point where, you know, on a pro form a with Miro close to a run rate of $4,000,000,000 in revenue, it's difficult. Like, if you look at the percentage of new startups or products being launched that would move the needle, it's it's very, very small. So what's the... You know, we would have to deploy a lot of our resources and very unlikely to work. [00:18:36] S4: Can you can you... Sorry. Let me just... Can you just talk about the thing... You and I talked about this point on the talent exodus that happens in Silicon Valley companies when they start to stall out, and that the talent maybe that's working on the business isn't the quality of the talent that you've built in your your core platform. How much of that is assessed in that m and a process that Chamath was mentioning? [00:18:59] S0: Well, it's it's... I mean, it's difficult to assess from the outside in, you can form first principles opinions. Businesses that, again, are more in a saturation phase, they tend not to be as appealing to some of the most entrepreneurial engineers or designers. And so you can assume that the level of talent will be maybe good, but perhaps not, you know, anthropic would have. I'm I'm not saying anything shocking here. They have very unique kind [00:19:24] S4: of talent, but we'll talk about that another time.
00:19:24 · S4, Luca Ferrari, Chamath Palihapitiya
[00:19:24] S4: of talent, but we'll talk about that another time. [00:19:26] S0: Yeah. Okay. We we have a big advantage in attracting talent because if you work at Bending Spoons, it may be one of the very few places in the world where you can spend say one year rebuilding the email infrastructure for AOL and then seven months helping rethink subscriptions on on Vimeo and then build a platform technology to manage payments all with the same employer, mostly the same colleagues, same culture. [00:19:49] S3: You get broad technical scope. Exactly. [00:19:51] S0: So career opportunities, just staying motivated because it's fun and new. Yeah. Very high talent density begets high talent density, so there is an element of virtuous cycle. So we have been able to attract some of people. Last year, 800,000 applications. We hired fewer than 300 people. [00:20:04] S4: Are they all in Milan? Where are they? [00:20:05] S0: No. No. We we are fully, you know, very international as a company. Milan, for historical reasons, remains like the biggest pool of of talent, but London, for example, is coming up faster. Madrid, we'll we'll be hiring people... Plenty of people in The States, I think, starting starting next year.
00:20:05 · Luca Ferrari, S1, Chamath Palihapitiya, S4
[00:20:05] S0: No. No. We we are fully, you know, very international as a company. Milan, for historical reasons, remains like the biggest pool of of talent, but London, for example, is coming up faster. Madrid, we'll we'll be hiring people... Plenty of people in The States, I think, starting starting next year. [00:20:21] S1: Brings up an interesting question. Europe as a tech center isn't exactly something that venture capitalists, even late stage investors are pursuing. They kinda look at the market there as maybe slower and maybe just not as good of an opportunity is I think their decision. Rather be in Silicon Valley or American companies, or perhaps Asia. So what's it like being the most aggressive, successful company then in Europe, or one of them? Is there... [00:20:54] S3: I think you're right. No. I think it is the. [00:20:55] S1: I mean, well, I mean, Spotify, obviously, is much better. Spotify, Klarna, you're you're in the top 10 probably. [00:21:01] S3: I do. [00:21:01] S1: Clearly in the top 10. So what's the talent pool like there? How is it different? Specifically Italy? I I noticed when Chamath goes to Italy, maybe the... There's a little bit less working going on. [00:21:11] S4: An extra button... He he he goes from three unbuttons to four. [00:21:15] S1: Yeah. The buttons go down and the hours in front of a laptop... Like Italy changes Chamath, [00:21:20] S4: we see [00:21:22] S1: Italians working? How do you... What's the secret? No. But tell us about the talent pool and running a company in Europe.
00:21:22 · S1, Luca Ferrari
[00:21:22] S1: Italians working? How do you... What's the secret? No. But tell us about the talent pool and running a company in Europe. [00:21:26] S0: So I I think I think Europe has a lot of problems, but I think there's a pretty good talent. Half a billion people live in, let's say, main the part of Europe. So it's a lot of people. A pretty good education. It's not Stanford, but it's solid. And and a lot of these people have a chip on their shoulder to prove we're necessarily less smart or capable. So you do find a lot of good people. I I do think there's a... The the fact that Italians don't work hard is mostly a false stereotype. Yes. I... We find that... I mean, my wife, she doesn't work with me. She works in another company. She works a long hours. At our company, we work pretty hard. We generally find that when we acquire companies and we work with existing teams, more often than not, the the the the team we bring in works substantially harder. So, don't I know. We just try to hire people who are intrinsically motivated, very ambitious, you're just hungry entrepreneurial, and and then give them no good reason to to do their best work because they see that they can have a... [00:22:28] S1: Headquarters anywhere other than Milan, and that it might be an accelerant for the business? New York City, where the banking capital is, Silicon Valley, the tech capital. Have you thought about moving to headquarters?
00:22:28 · S1, Chamath Palihapitiya, S4
[00:22:28] S1: Headquarters anywhere other than Milan, and that it might be an accelerant for the business? New York City, where the banking capital is, Silicon Valley, the tech capital. Have you thought about moving to headquarters? [00:22:37] S3: Why? And Luca's totally right. You get like these people... The problem with people in in the in... Like, you go to these typical places, typical schools, they think they're geniuses. And it's like, when you actually, like, just look... Even just look at AI, who are the major contributors? These are not like the... They are not from MIT, Stanford per se, you know? They're at U of T. They were at like... McGill. Like... Could... [00:22:59] S4: Well, it could be an advantage. [00:23:01] S1: Like Yeah. Well, that's sort of what I'm getting at. [00:23:02] S4: It's a [00:23:02] S3: huge advantage. [00:23:03] S4: I mean, when I when I interviewed Charles Koch, you and I talked about this, what I found so fascinating is he built that business, probably the most extraordinary, wholly owned business on earth, from nothing effectively in Wichita, Kansas. And I say it's like the Wichita mindset because he basically kind of ignored everything that was conventional, and he was able to do things his own way. I don't know anyone that thinks and does things the way you do them are based in Silicon Valley, and that might be the reason because you're in Milan and you're not kind of indoctrinated into cultural thinking.