00:05:54 · Luca Ferrari, Molly O'Shea
[00:05:54] S2: Yeah. So we we we thought that, generally, I think founders and executives more broadly, you know, tend to to to enjoy the spotlight more than they deserve. I think there's a the the world likes simple stories, and so they tend to have one or two faces at most. They associate with the... In this case, a a company. But generally, those people, yes, they... Maybe they play an outsized role in the company's success, but many others have, you know, extremely important roles to play, sometimes even more important roles to play. And so we figured that it'll be a nice gesture if I didn't take one... Take take up one spot in, you know, at Nasdaq on the stage, so to say, but rather enjoyed the the moment with the hundreds of colleagues from the street. You know, I'm pretty privileged in the amount of exposure I get, and so that was a very small gesture, really, just a symbolic thing. And, yes, the the person ringing the bell is Laura, one of our colleagues from finance, one of the people who put in the greatest amount of effort toward achieving the APO. Mhmm. And so we thought she deserved to to be there and being the one pressing the red button. [00:07:13] S5: That's an amazing story. Well, Luca, thank you so much. We're about to have a couple interviews coming out next with the two other co founders and Valley, like I mentioned earlier. And then later this week, as a part two, we have a full sit down with Luca that's pretty good. So, watch out for that. Thank you so much. [00:07:36] S2: Thank you.
00:07:36 · Luca Ferrari, Molly O'Shea, Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli
[00:07:36] S2: Thank you. [00:07:37] S5: Francesco, thank you so much for joining us. We're on a wild run here at Bending Spoons. [00:07:44] S3: Thank you. Thank you for having a talk with me. [00:07:47] S5: Of course. So you're head of M and A. You're also a co founder. You've been here for thirteen years from the very beginning. I have to ask you, what is the one that got away? [00:07:56] S3: Well, the one that we remember the most is probably when we had tried to acquire Grindr in 2019. That was a long process actually. I still remember the day we started discussing about that. It was actually only me and Luca here at the office, or actually it was the older office, because most of the team was on the retreat. I had young kids, so I decided to stay home. It was basically me and Luca in the office. He heard about the Grindr sale from a friend. The moment he heard about it, he thought, hey, this must be a great opportunity because we've been looking at that space in the past, we've been looking at an eating space in the past, and we've been looking at Grindr and we saw that despite being a product with very high retention, it was a really bad product. It was just like everyone was complaining about the app crashing all the time and this problem and that problem. So we thought it would have been a great opportunity. So we started really getting into that, but everyone we talked about, I thought we were crazy because it would have been a massive acquisition for us at the time. The equivalent would be today doing a $20,000,000,000 acquisition. Oh my [00:09:18] S4: God. Yeah,
00:09:20 · Francesco Patarnello
[00:09:20] S3: that would have been very transformational. And also at that time we had very limited experience with raising that amount of money on the debt side, that amount of money also on the equity side. So we had basically to learn everything from scratch. And it was a very long process. We started looking at that in spring twenty nineteen. And then the whole thing blew up at the beginning of twenty twenty. After we actually managed to put together a fully financed acquisition offer, but by the time it was too late because it was someone else that came in with a slightly better proposal. Once we thought, okay, we're going to get this because until like a few months before, basically we were the only one looking at that. Then no, we're not going to get that anymore because they went into exclusivity with someone else and that's it, it just blew up. At the beginning it felt really annoying, bad and sad because you just work so much. I mean basically half of the company was fully focused on their due diligence for almost a year. So that felt like, okay, we're going to get this. This is so important. But eventually in the hindsight, I'm happier that we didn't acquire it because given the fact that it would have been so big for Bending Spoons, then Bending Spoons would have been Grindr because we would have probably fully focused on that and we would not have developed Bending Spoons into what Bending Spoons is today. And also on top of that, while being a failure because we didn't acquire it, I think we had so much compressed learning into those nine months because basically we raised $500,000,000 without actually raising it, but it was fully committed. And so that was very valuable for what then came the need in terms of like raising debt, raising equity and talking with investors, talking with banks. So it was eventually it was very valuable.
00:11:38 · Molly O'Shea
[00:11:38] S5: How has financing the acquisitions changed over time and how will that change now that you're public?
00:11:45 · Francesco Patarnello
[00:11:45] S3: Well, so historically we have relied primarily on debt and we started, I think our first loan was in end of twenty seventeen, so very early in, in Denispoons history. I think we raised like $12,000,000. And the evolution of the debt financing for Benin Spoons was gradual because it was developing relationship with banks and lending slightly more every time paying back the debt because it was fully amortized and showing the banks that we deliver on the promises and then raising a little bit more and then paying back and showing again. And so there was a gradual path. The big unlock was moving from just simple bank loans to term loan agreements with US lenders and that happened at the beginning of twenty twenty five and that had to go through rating agencies giving you a rating and that's something new, as well as talking with different lenders that never actually worked with you and so you didn't have that relationship of delivering against your promises, paying back, raising more, that allow you to build a very strong track record and so allow you to raise faster at better terms. So we kind of had to start almost from the beginning with lenders at that time. Equity was slightly different because we basically never raised primary equity all the way to 2023. That was our very first big institutional round. We raised a little bit, it was more secondary rounds with smaller, investors, primarily from Italy in previous years, but 2023 was the first big round with Billie Effort coming in Cox Enterprises Durable. That was again, something new starting from scratch, having to educate investors about what we do and our story almost, I mean, by construction is a counterintuitive story. You need to learn and study bending spoons a little bit before really understanding the way it works and so also for equity investors, was a little bit of kind of showing them and teaching them before fully making them understand the way it worked. So I think that was an important moment.
00:14:24 · Francesco Patarnello, Molly O'Shea
And then becoming public, it was a continuation on that also because many of the investors, the big institutional investors that are part of Bending Spoons' Comp table today either were already part of that as previous institutional rounds or were investors that we talked to many times in the past and we showed them, okay, we think we're going to do this Then we show them after six months, we have done that better and then we show them again our plan for the following six, twelve months and so they had already learned about Bending Spoons so it wasn't something new for them. And so it wasn't, you know, starting from scratch, it felt like a natural continuation of where we were before as a private company. [00:15:21] S5: On the acquisition side, you have a thousand potential targets and you're doing five to 10 a year? How do you think about the categories that you want and the ones you will not touch?