00:20:11 · Molly O'Shea, Francesco Patarnello
[00:20:11] S5: What was the best question someone asked you during the roadshow? [00:20:15] S3: I don't know if it's not specifically a question, but it's a topic. I think most of the people have been focusing on the standard, what's your organic growth, what's your attention, how you do this and how you do that. And very, very few fully understood the fact that the really secret sauce of Bending Spoons is the talent and triple dig into that. And I remember this specific investor almost spent like an hour and a half only focusing on that and really asked thoughtful questions about our hiring process, how we retain talent, what the culture is, how we develop the culture, why is it different? And it wasn't a specific question but it was like a topic that made me understand and he understood really, really well why Bending Spoons works the way it works. And so I would say probably was the only time that happened and so that made me think very highly of that specific investor because they probably understood well how it worked. [00:21:30] S5: We were talking about talent a lot with Luca, with Valley, with Matteo, it's ever present. We talked about it at lunch, and one of the peculiar things that I came across was that you've been running tenders, you're public now, but you'd been running tenders for many years, every year for your spooners. So why did you make that decision? Also, why do they get vested on day one?
00:21:55 · Francesco Patarnello
[00:21:55] S3: Dropping the vesting, it was something that we introduced more recently. I'll get to that in a second. The reason why we started offering, let's say, secondary transaction for team members to sell some of their share if they wanted to, was to really show the value of their ownership of Bending Spoons. Also showing that they were now locked into that until a specific event in the far future that they didn't know when and how it would have unlocked. And so that really allowed them to fully understand the power of being part of Bending Spoons as a shareholder and then make better decisions when it comes to how to convert their compensation into equity versus cash. And that links well into how we actually do compensation. Is you get specific yearly compensation fixed, now variable components, and then you decide how much to convert into equity and how much to convert into cash and also that specific decision is very linked to the fact that we want to show you that your equity component has a specific value. At that point in time, you actually can decide to get it all in cash if you wanted to. So you know that at that point in time, it's precisely that the value that you're unlocking. So that plus the fact that you can then, let's say within a year, a year and a half convert that back into cash and showing the appreciation of that because every year, year and a half when the new round was coming, then you could see that your ownership increased in value. That allowed to create a sense of ownership almost as a public company while being private and I think that was very important and allowed us to then become a public company without that big of a step change that maybe private company feel because everyone is super invested and everyone feels oh now I'm going to be able to then sell my shares. That was already possible before, so there wasn't that big of a change. Same thing with not creating a vesting structure that created like some weird kind of incentives, similar to now creating variable components. We want everything to be simple and straightforward. I mean, you created a value within a certain year and you're going to be rewarded for that and then if you leave the day after, you're still being rewarded because of the work you've done before. That's the reason for dropping the vesting and that has no impact on retention.
00:24:34 · Francesco Patarnello, Molly O'Shea
We still have less than 1% churn on a yearly basis and I think that speaks highly of how people perceive ownership of Bending Spoons. [00:24:43] S5: I remember I said this would create an absolute bloodbath in San Francisco. [00:24:49] S3: Yeah, I mean, of course we are also in a different context. I mean, in Italy or in Europe more broadly is different than being in San Francisco as well as probably San Francisco is different than being in New York versus Miami. Think San Francisco is a very specific context. But yeah, I think the reason why we have this churn despite the fact that we have no red, no vesting is also the very strong culture we developed. The fact that we hire young talent that then develops within Bending Spoons and so there is less of a, if I hire only people that have already fifteen years of experience, they don't have that feeling of being part of this family, this culture, this company, and it's going be a lot easier for them to flip to the next company afterwards. With Bending Spoons it's different. [00:25:49] S5: So as we close out, what are you most looking forward to in the next six, twelve months?
00:25:49 · Molly O'Shea, Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli
[00:25:49] S5: So as we close out, what are you most looking forward to in the next six, twelve months? [00:25:55] S3: Well, previous six months were kind of out of the ordinary, given the fact that we had the leasing process that was unique, that happens only once. So I was a lot more detached from the daily operations. We have a ton of things we're working on, on the M and A front and our pipeline has never been so rich right now, so we have a lot of prioritization to make. Yeah, I really look forward to finding the best opportunities to focus our firepower on. And I think that's going to be very important because when you have a lot of things to choose, picking the best is quite important. [00:26:39] S5: Well, I'm so excited to see what you acquire next. Airtable broke the internet in a lot of people's brains. So I'm excited to see what happens. Thank you so much. [00:26:50] S4: Thank you. Thank you, Molly.
00:26:50 · Matteo Danieli, S6
[00:26:50] S4: Thank you. Thank you, Molly. [00:26:52] S6: This episode is brought to you by Brex, my favorite. You become what you spend on, and I refuse to spend my time on work that shouldn't exist. Expense reports, receipt chasing, and manual closes. The companies building what's next from Vercel, OpenAI, Anthropic, Grindr, and Deepgram all made the same call. They all run on Brex. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that combines cards, expenses, and banking into a single stack with agentic finance built in. AI agents that handle expenses automatically, enforce policy before spend happens, and close your books in minutes. That's why Sourcery runs on Brex, I can spend time on building and not busywork. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com/sorcery. That's brex.com/sourcery. Bye. Turing is training the next generation of AI with tasks that require real expertise and real world judgment. That's why companies like Nvidia, Anthropic, Salesforce and Gemini partner with Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces, the kind of infrastructure Frontier Labs need to train superintelligence. Visit turing.com/sourcery. AI needs more than chips. It needs power, land, and infrastructure. Zone develops next generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers, and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Zone is building the foundation of the AI frontier. Visit zonefrontier.com to learn more. That's zonefrontier.com to learn more.
00:28:44 · Molly O'Shea, Matteo Danieli
[00:28:44] S5: Matt, thank you for joining us. We are on a wild tour of Bending Spoons, and now we're with you, your VP of Product, your co founder. You've been with the company since the very beginning, thirteen years. Thank you for joining us. [00:28:58] S4: Thank you for being here. [00:28:59] S5: One very particularly interesting part of your story, what we were talking before the cameras started rolling, was how much the culture thrives on meritocracy. One of the best examples, I think, is you know, your story of stepping down as CPO so someone else could take.