The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Harry Stebbings, Harry Stebbings
[00:00:00] S0: This is 20 Product with me, Stebbings. Now 20 Product is the monthly show where we sit down with the best product and design leaders of our time. Today is a very special show. Bending Spoons is on an absolute tear. Last month, they acquired Vimeo for a billion dollars. Just this week, they acquired Eventbrite for $500,000,000. They are famed for buying the beloved Evernote previously. And today, we're joined by one of their product leads, Federico Simionato. It was such a joy to have him in the studio, and I think this is one [00:00:29] S1: of the best product episodes that we have ever done.
00:00:31 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:31] S0: But before we dive into the show today, on this show, we care about velocity. Most teams lose it in code review, not in writing code. Now CodeRabbit fixes that. The second a PR opens, it leaves clear line by line comments, calls out what the change might touch, and offers one click fixes. You can teach your organizational standards using your own custom instructions, such as cursor or Claude rules and enforce them on every PR. CodeRabbit has so far reviewed more than 13,000,000 PRs and installed on 2,000,000 repositories used by over a 100,000 OSS projects. If you wanna cut code review time and bugs in half, try a free month at coderabbit.ai with the code two zero v c. And while coderabbit keeps your code clean, Warp Dev makes it fly. AI coding is everywhere, but most of it, honestly, it's pretty chaotic. Code that is almost right, but you don't really understand? Well, that's why Warp exists. With Warp, the old lines between terminal and IDE disappear. It's a seamless environment for coding with agents where you can prompt, plan, review, and ship production ready code, edit files in app, review diffs as you go, and deploy straight to production without switching tools. Warp tops the benchmarks, literally number one on terminal bench, top five on software engineering bench verified, and is trusted by over 600,000 developers and used by 56% of the Fortune 500 engineering teams, making it one of the fastest growing AI companies with revenue growing 30 x this year. With Warp, you don't just get speed, you get code you can trust. The average developer saves five hours a week with Warp. That's almost half a day. Try Warp for free at warp.dev/20vc. And to get pro for only $5 for your first month, use the code 20VC. That's 20VC.
00:02:34 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:02:34] S1: You have now arrived at your destination. Federico, I am so excited for this, dude. You've worked on some of my favorite products. So I'm thrilled to have you in the studio, and thank you so much for joining me. [00:02:44] S2: Thank you. I'm a huge fan of the show, actually. My favorite episode, I think, is the one with Nick from Revolut. I learned a lot from that episode. [00:02:50] S1: Nick is phenomenal. My biggest takeaway from that episode actually was the fact that they run 26 experiments within the company. That's And then allocate accordingly to who's winning and who's not winning. Thought it was incredible. Now I wanna start a little bit on you. Dentist games for kids. How did that lead to Bending Spoons and, you know, a core role in one of the most coveted companies in Europe?
00:03:15 · Federico Simionato
[00:03:15] S2: Yeah. So when I was at university, I knew that I wanted to start a startup. And so I jumped at the first opportunity I got. I met a friend who was thinking about starting a startup. We were in Rome for a startup event, and he had this idea. He used to be the administrator for his parents' dentistry study. And he just saw that if you have to cure a child instead of an adult, you need twice the time. And so he was like, if we can reduce that, it's probably better. Right? And so he thought, can we just gamify the experience a little bit? And the insight was good, but the way we implemented the result, I don't think it was it was great. And so I learned that you should care about what you're thinking of building. And and... Yeah. And so that failed or... I mean, it's still alive, but it didn't scale in a hypergrowth way. And then I just, like, I wanted this hypergrowth feeling. And the way I I discovered Bending Spoons was on the Internet. And I just read the things that were written on their website, and they were so ambitious, so clear, so, like, we know what we are. We are having great results, but we are not satisfied. We are at the scale of downloads of, like, Twitter or Spotify or stuff like that. And and they are unknown. Right? And I was like, who are these people who are getting these results while being unsatisfied by the scale they're at? And so I started studying. I just applied as you normally do. And, yeah, I brought some liquor to to Mateo, one of the cofounders, for my first interview. And I like to think that that's what got me the job. Yeah. And that was almost eight years ago now.
00:04:48 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:04:48] S1: Fantastic. Love that. We're gonna dig into the processes with which Bending Spoons build different products across different lines. I do just wanna start, though. You started a company there, and that led into the product role. A lot of people today want to become PMs. What do you find is the best background before entering as a PM? [00:05:07] S2: I think the best background to enter as a PM is either being an entrepreneur, which teaches you to think about things that matter, or being a very good analyst of some kind, like somebody who's done very deep, thoughtful analysis over how something works. A McKinsey, for instance, like Luca did. Or... But but even at... In an academic career, it can be. But just something who's very thoughtful and and looks at the root causes of some behaviors or some things that happen. I think those are both things that matter a lot for a PM. [00:05:38] S1: And so that's what matters a lot as a PM. We said there about kind of Bending Spoons creating this incredibly coveted brand. Everyone wants to work at Bending Spoons in Italy if you're in tech. What would you advise someone to get ahead to get a job at Bending Spoons?
00:05:38 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:05:38] S1: And so that's what matters a lot as a PM. We said there about kind of Bending Spoons creating this incredibly coveted brand. Everyone wants to work at Bending Spoons in Italy if you're in tech. What would you advise someone to get ahead to get a job at Bending Spoons? [00:05:53] S2: I think people generally try to follow the steps that are supposed to lend you a job. So, like, you have a great CV, you're very polite and professional, and that's certainly necessary. But I think that few people try to go the extra mile and try to do something surprising, you know, something creative. I I really love when people come up with something new. I think there are great touches that you can invent. I I mean, I just brought a bottle of liquor, and and it worked. I mean, it wasn't the only thing for sure, but I like to think that it helped make an impression. You know? And and I like to think that it was a a touch of something creative that that not everybody think about... Thinks about. [00:06:31] S1: The importance of being surprising is very Yeah. Significant. I I always actually say, like, you wanna be the purple cow, which is Seth Gooden. You know, you drive past a cow, no [00:06:40] S2: one bothers looking, but then you [00:06:41] S1: drive past a purple cow. Wow. That's a big thing.