The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Luca Ferrari
[00:00:00] S0: The moment you think you're very smart, the likelihood that you make very dumb mistakes skyrockets in my opinion. We let others seek product market fit and then we... If they will sell it to us, we will acquire their company and try to make it even better than they they have made it up to that point. The reason why we we took that route, think, is precisely because we crashed and burned by being arrogant in thinking we knew what the market would want and we could build for them.
00:00:26 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:26] S1: Welcome to TwentyVC with me, Harry Stebbings, I'm so excited for the show today. This guest is the founder of the most incredible success story in tech that very few have ever heard of. Bending Spoons, an Italian company that has scaled their product suite to over 500,000,000 downloads, a 100,000,000 monthly active users, a reported 380,000,000 in sales in 2023, and a valuation of $2,250,000,000. Absolutely insane. Plus, for the majority of their life, they were bootstrapped. This is such an incredible story. I'm so thrilled to be joined today by their co founder and CEO, Luca Ferrari. But before we dive into this incredible discussion, there's no shortage of helpful AI tools out there. But using them means switching back and forth between yet another digital tool. What was supposed to simplify your workflow just made it way more complicated. Unless, of course, you're in Notion. In Notion, you can automate the tedious tasks like summarizing meeting notes or finding next steps, really freeing you up to do the deep work that we all want to do. And that's why Notion is used by over 50%, 50% of Fortune five hundred companies and teams that use Notion send less emails, cancel more meetings, and reduce spending on tools. Try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/20vc. And speaking of amazing products like Notion there, I'd like to talk to you about a company called Digis. They're a full service AI accounting company. And if you're in need of an accountant or looking to switch, there's no better solution than Digits. Starting at just $350 a month, which is less than half of what you'd pay a traditional firm, Digits is the most accurate, most efficient solution on the market. They've developed proprietary AI technology that automates tedious financial tasks and delivers reports of the actual close of the month, not two to three weeks later as always. And they also allow you to keep track of key metrics like revenue, burn, cash flow, and runway in an incredible live dashboard. The best part of all of it, this is vetted and signed off by their in house CPAs. If you're interested, visit digits.com/20vc to claim your special offer today. That's digits dot com forward slash two zero v c. And finally, travel and expense are never associated with cost savings, but now you can reduce costs up to 30% and actually reward your employees. How?
00:02:49 · Harry Stebbings, Luca Ferrari
Well, the van rewards your employees with personal travel credit every time they save their company money when booking business travel under company policy. Does that sound too good to be true? Well, Navan is so confident you'll move to their game changing all in one travel corporate card, an expense super app, that they'll give you $250 in personal travel credit just for taking a quick demo. Check them out now at navan.com/20vc. You have now arrived at your destination. Luca, I am so excited for this. I think Bending Spoons is one of the coolest stories that we've seen in recent times in Startup Land. So first, thank you so much for joining me. [00:03:29] S0: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. [00:03:31] S1: Now I would love to start with a little bit of context. What would your parents and your teachers have said about the young Luca growing up? How would they have described you? [00:03:40] S0: Well, parents are probably not a good source. It seems to me they tend to be biased. I would say my teachers probably would say that I was incredibly shy. Some may even say I was pathologically shy, weird and gentle, I think. I was considerate, kind of very careful not to hurt people's feelings. [00:04:01] S1: I would have been described as weird too. Guys, did you feel like an outsider when you were growing up? I I didn't have many friends at school, and it shaped a lot of how I do what I do.
00:04:01 · Harry Stebbings, Luca Ferrari
[00:04:01] S1: I would have been described as weird too. Guys, did you feel like an outsider when you were growing up? I I didn't have many friends at school, and it shaped a lot of how I do what I do. [00:04:09] S0: Yeah. Probably. I really wanted to to make friends I couldn't for the first probably ten or twelve years of my life. I have major struggles socially. Not I'm incredibly well versed with socializing these days, but I have definitely proved a lot. I guess you could say an outsider. But an outsider who wanted to be an insider. Was an outsider because he was incompetent at being part of people's groups. [00:04:37] S1: Sorry for this weird tangent. Would you say you've become an insider or you just accepted being an outsider? [00:04:43] S0: No. I think I I have different phases. So I was by, you know, your definition of trolling outsider initially who really wanted to be an insider. Then I became, you know, kind of average, so make it an insider. Like, I started having friends and being invited to doing things with others. And then, as I grew older, particularly the last five or six years, I think I've become a little bit more of an outsider again because I find my bandwidth and my patience have become more limited or perhaps have been tested more aggressively. And so I learned to build more walls and more protections.
00:04:43 · Luca Ferrari, Harry Stebbings
[00:04:43] S0: No. I think I I have different phases. So I was by, you know, your definition of trolling outsider initially who really wanted to be an insider. Then I became, you know, kind of average, so make it an insider. Like, I started having friends and being invited to doing things with others. And then, as I grew older, particularly the last five or six years, I think I've become a little bit more of an outsider again because I find my bandwidth and my patience have become more limited or perhaps have been tested more aggressively. And so I learned to build more walls and more protections. [00:05:18] S1: One of your friends told me one of your points for improvement could be a willingness to accept more dinners and social events. So maybe they were maybe they were onto something. I would love to start. I I heard that you were at McKinsey, and you were essentially sharing your salary with your cofounders to fund the early days of Bending Spoons. Can you just take me to that and those early days of Bending Spoons? Tell me a little bit about that. [00:05:41] S0: That's almost true, but I would say it wasn't Bending Spoons. It was another company called Evernote, which I founded before founding Bending Spoons. It only lasted for about two and a half years. So that was a failed startup. Pretty, you know, by the book failure. And I had two co founders there, and all three of us also, you know, founded Bending Spoons plus two other people.
00:05:41 · Luca Ferrari, Harry Stebbings
[00:05:41] S0: That's almost true, but I would say it wasn't Bending Spoons. It was another company called Evernote, which I founded before founding Bending Spoons. It only lasted for about two and a half years. So that was a failed startup. Pretty, you know, by the book failure. And I had two co founders there, and all three of us also, you know, founded Bending Spoons plus two other people. [00:06:01] S1: Well, I didn't know that. What did you learn from the failing of that company? I think we learn a lot from failings. What did you learn from that failing? [00:06:08] S0: Well, many things. I would probably say two in particular. One is the importance of building a good team. At the time, we were quite naive and superficial in that regard. And the second one was to be very thoughtful as to what you build or more broadly what you do and why. We had this idea and we just thought we were right and arrogantly got into execution mode and of course, we crashed and burned. And, you know, you can still crash and burn even if you're thoughtful, but your odds are better. So I would say we learned to do our homework a lot more and iterate more and faster. [00:06:43] S1: How did Bending Spoons come to be then? So this company failed, and the three of you went and go, what now?