00:14:30 · Katie Prescott, Luca Ferrari
[00:14:30] S10: Bending Spoons having one of the best names in the tech industry, I think, alongside the hugging [00:14:36] S11: face. Hugging face is pretty good. Yeah. [00:14:39] S10: People at the newspaper going, what? Bending spoons. [00:14:43] S11: It is weird. Yeah. [00:14:44] S10: Tell us the story. [00:14:45] S11: You know, actually we have a lack integration. We use lack for internal communication. We built a bot that will post mentions of Bending Spoons online on Reddit and elsewhere so that we can monitor and learn, you know, what people think and maybe hopefully improve sometimes respond. But something we are still struggling to to fully separate is people mentioning spoon bending, like, meaning telekinesis. And so I I read so many posts at this point of people talking about there's a entire world out there. It's weird. [00:15:12] S10: We used to be a TV show.
00:15:12 · Katie Prescott, Luca Ferrari
[00:15:12] S10: We used to be a TV show. [00:15:13] S11: Talking about telekinesis. And Mhmm. So anyway, so that's off topic. But, yes, we we we love the name. One of my cofounders, Mateo, is a big fan of of the movie The Matrix. You know? And there is a little kid at some point bending a spoon with his mind through telekinesis presumably. And so Mateo, they were brainstorming names, brings up the name. And we like it. We liked it a lot for a few reasons. One, it just captures the idea that the mind is powerful. It can do can do a lot more perhaps than you intuitively think it can. And then that power is unlocked through plenty of practice, perseverance, you know, hard work. And those are things, you know, call them values or ideas that resonate with us. And also we thought the name was kind of a little bit funny. We like the idea of not taking ourselves too seriously. And so, yeah, we went for it. It's also memorable. I've learned in hindsight, people remember it easily because it's so unusual. So we don't we don't regret that choice. It was a good choice, I think. [00:16:12] S10: And was the idea always to do what you do now, which, you know, buying up interesting tech companies and and zhuzhing them up is how I always describe it to people.
00:16:12 · Katie Prescott, Luca Ferrari, Danny Fortson
[00:16:12] S10: And was the idea always to do what you do now, which, you know, buying up interesting tech companies and and zhuzhing them up is how I always describe it to people. [00:16:22] S11: I mean, the short answer is yes. The idea was broadly speaking was there after that Evertail failure. We decided that we should be able to over time become world class at the skills that you need to run digital businesses really well. So software engineering, product design, product management, monetization, marketing, AI research, and that we should be able to find digital businesses out there, which weren't being managed optimally. So we should be able to offer very good prices to people, prices they would find appealing, but still deliver high returns for ourselves, our shareholders. We hadn't fully realized the advantage of having a centralized team of engineers, designers who we could redeploy flexibly across our different businesses on a short notice to go after opportunities to develop new functionality. But, but equally we throw those resources the moment that a particular product was not interesting. So we could keep costs very efficient at all times. Those were, I think, levels of sophistication that came with time, but the broader idea that we should be able to compound capital efficiently for a very long time through acquisitions. If we are exceptional at operating these businesses, that idea was there pretty much immediately, let's say. [00:17:41] S9: Today's episode of the Times Tech podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow.
00:17:41 · Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott, S0, S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6, S8
[00:17:41] S9: Today's episode of the Times Tech podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow. [00:17:45] S10: ServiceNow describes itself as an AI control tower for business reinvention, connecting people, systems, data, and AI so work flows more smoothly across an organization. [00:17:56] S9: The platform integrates with different clouds, models, and data sources, bringing them together in one place to help your team. [00:18:03] S10: To learn more about how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. [00:18:11] S0: People are disappearing again just like before. [00:18:16] S1: Nocturne. Streaming on Apple TV on the October 30. Liev Schreiber. [00:18:23] S2: Walter has a way of getting to people. When he does, [00:18:25] S1: they don't come back. Steven Graham. The world [00:18:27] S3: is sort of dark places. Zarcee Beats. [00:18:30] S4: How's he getting messages at? [00:18:31] S5: He's locked under six feet of concrete. [00:18:33] S6: She's still alive. I'm a fighter. [00:18:36] S1: Nocturne, streaming on Apple TV on the October 30. Subscription required. [00:18:41] S8: This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get preapproved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.
00:18:41 · S8, Katie Prescott
[00:18:41] S8: This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get preapproved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. [00:19:18] S10: Can you give us an example of one of the companies you've taken over and how you've changed it and what it looks like now?
00:19:24 · Luca Ferrari
[00:19:24] S11: One that's Lots to choose from. Yeah. One that's quite suitable, I think, because we've owned it at this point for almost four years and it's big enough and people know about it is Evernote. It's a productivity tool, basically, mostly note taking, but it does a lot more than that these days. So when we bought it, it had a team of roughly three fifty people. We rebuilt that team pretty much completely to achieve very high levels of talent density. We got rid of a lot of management layers, built roles that are way more kind of t shaped, so people have now much broader mandates. After a year, roughly 60 people work on Evernote. Today, it's 20, 25 people. At the same time, we rebuilt the technological foundation pretty much completely. So we rearchitected the cloud infrastructure, achieving much better scalability, performance, fewer bugs, better maintainability, just a more modern, more secure infrastructure. We rebuilt the modules that make sure that once you take a note, say on your laptop, it's properly synchronized on your phone and vice versa or with other people who are using the same note or or workspace with you. We rewrote most of the code base to make the app faster. We have launched a gigantic number of new features, got rid of features nobody was using but were getting in the way of making the product intuitive, redesigned the UI, rebranded the product. I mean, it's still called Evernote and it's still an elephant in the logo, it's now a little bit, we think, more modern and nicer. We have completely rebuilt the monetization, changing prices, what's available for free, what's premium, completely changed marketing. And now the product is generates a lot more revenue, way more profits. And every other important metric, the trajectory of all the other important metrics is either the same or improved relative to before. So it's been a massive undertaking, but also very rewarding from every perspective in our view.