00:00:00 · Roman Kirsch, Matteo Danieli, Luca Ferrari
[00:00:00] S0: Hi everyone and welcome to the ICONS podcast today from beautiful but very hot Milan with Luca Ferrari and Matteo Danieli, founders of Bending Spoons. Cool to have you. [00:00:10] S1: Excited to be here. [00:00:11] S0: Yeah, thanks for hosting me here in your office. So let's kick off with the classic: How do you explain Bending Spoons to your Grandmothers? Have you tried and how did you do that? [00:00:22] S2: I can take this one. Well, on the face of it, it's actually quite simple. We acquire companies and improve them, rinse and repeat. In practice, lot more sophisticated and difficult than that. But we just try to be the best operators of digital technology businesses globally. And when someone wants to sell, if we think we can make that business more successful, we'll probably be a great acquirer and operator. [00:00:49] S0: Cool. And then maybe double clicking on that. When we met initially a few years ago, the apps were focused on creator apps from my perspective, but now this got way broader. So was that a strategy all along or did you say that space with creators, photo editing, video editing and became too small for the ambitions of you and the company?
00:00:49 · Roman Kirsch, Luca Ferrari
[00:00:49] S0: Cool. And then maybe double clicking on that. When we met initially a few years ago, the apps were focused on creator apps from my perspective, but now this got way broader. So was that a strategy all along or did you say that space with creators, photo editing, video editing and became too small for the ambitions of you and the company? [00:01:15] S2: We've always been very broad in what we're looking at. I think there was a point where a fairly large share of our portfolio was within those segments you just mentioned, but not out of a grand design, merely I think as at the time we were focused primarily on mobile. Today things have changed. And the photo and video category is huge on mobile. If you exclude games, which we haven't done, then you're very likely to do a lot of photo and video if you work in mobile doing what we do. So it was not because we liked it especially or we thought it was particularly promising, but more selection bias out of just the sheer amount of businesses in that segment. [00:01:58] S0: Amazing. And we'll go through the differences and similarities of the apps that you own and operate in a bit. But first, kind of to your founding and founder story, because obviously that's a very long marriage. I think on average founder marriages are longer than actual marriages. So how did you get together and what did you see in each other that made you click basically?
00:01:58 · Roman Kirsch, Luca Ferrari
[00:01:58] S0: Amazing. And we'll go through the differences and similarities of the apps that you own and operate in a bit. But first, kind of to your founding and founder story, because obviously that's a very long marriage. I think on average founder marriages are longer than actual marriages. So how did you get together and what did you see in each other that made you click basically? [00:02:24] S2: Well, I'll give my half of the story and then I'll hand it over to Matt for the rest. So we met a long time ago, probably sixteen, seventeen years ago, And something like in Denmark, in Copenhagen where we both were studying at the time, I remember I had pneumonia. I got pneumonia there early on out of too much enthusiasm and the temperatures being too low, you just said, Milan is hot, we're not used to such cold. [00:02:54] S0: You've had to buy your first jacket probably, yeah? Exactly.
00:02:54 · Roman Kirsch, Luca Ferrari
[00:02:54] S0: You've had to buy your first jacket probably, yeah? Exactly. [00:02:57] S2: So I was sick and myself at home whereas my... One of our co founders and a good friend Francisco decided to go downtown for the evening on his own because I was typically his pal but I was sick. And then he comes back. I wake up in the morning on Sunday. I talked to him and he tells me, I've actually met an Italian in downtown, a very nice guy, Matteo, and is coming by later today for a chat. And so literally in the morning, Matteo comes and we, you know, we meet for the first time. And he was a fairly slick, well dressed and had a sort of composure that made me immediately dislike him intensely. I thought it came across to me as shallow and conceited. Later as I got to know him better and now we're physically brothers, we've gone through so many experiences over almost twenty years like I said. I know he's such a thoughtful, altruistic person, one of the best human beings I've ever met. So I think that's one, probably the one time I learned that first impressions are very, very risky not to be assigned too much weight. [00:04:14] S0: So I heard his part of the story already. Now... [00:04:17] S2: Well, he lost me immediately.
00:04:17 · Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli
[00:04:17] S2: Well, he lost me immediately. [00:04:19] S1: Actually, actually, so my first impression wasn't very good either. And I'm not sure whether it was because his first impression was bad or because he had pneumonia, so probably not in the best mood. But I remember I found him a little cold, a little detached, not the warm person with which it's easy to kind of start chatting and get familiar with. And yeah, so that was the first impression. Then I think that in reality, you earn his trust, it just opens up and he changes completely. But, you know, going back to, you know, how we are complementary and what I what I saw in him that made me want to kind of, you know, start a company together and, you know, you know, kind of jump in this great adventure that we had. Luke, he actually has a lot of spikes packed in just one person. It's really rare. And if he doesn't have a spike, he believes so much in self improvement that he's going to learn his way through it. So for example, I don't think that at the beginning his social skills were great. But he studied that and he practiced that. Now he can easily [00:05:31] S2: I'm be bored to the distraction of the log there.
00:05:31 · Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, Roman Kirsch
[00:05:31] S2: I'm be bored to the distraction of the log there. [00:05:34] S1: But now he can actually easily be the funniest person in the room. And that I think just tells you how... He has a lot of skills, but also the most fundamental important skill, is to better yourself, no matter what it is that you're kind of looking for. And that something else is that he has this great ability to paint a very exciting vision and take you for the ride. So whenever I'm working with him, I do something with him, it feels like the most important thing I could be doing. It feels like we're making history together. And I think that's something that rubs off to anyone, you know, he works with. And I think it's so important. Right? So, yeah, there's like many, many more good things to tell about Luke and also bad things like everybody else. But this is, you know, something that I find very inspiring. [00:06:29] S0: It's nice to hear. That's that's great to hear. [00:06:31] S2: I should say something nice too. [00:06:34] S1: It's okay. It's okay. [00:06:35] S2: No. Matteo is an incredibly talented person. A soul mate for me if you can have one but a truly amazing person. A very talented, creative, logical, an unusual combination both the analytical part and the more imaginative part. So