00:13:13 · Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, Roman Kirsch
[00:13:13] S2: Not about trying to gain. I do not remember even discussing, hey, should we maybe apply to go work at Google instead? Like, I do not remember a single conversation like that. [00:13:24] S1: Which if anything, I mean, you know, that experience just gave us the feeling that that was our path. You know, if we if we had any doubt about it, we were sure about it. So... And, you know, a couple of years later, three years later, we were better positioned. We had learned things, and we knew that the next time around, we would just have more chances, you know. [00:13:43] S0: And that was the time, was that the time when you moved to Milan and started Bending Spoons? Was that kind of at the same time or?
00:13:49 · Luca Ferrari
[00:13:49] S2: Not immediately because we found the Bending Spoons in Copenhagen. We moved it to Milan about a year later, give or take, a year and a half later, when we started to expand the team. We felt we had maybe saying figured out the strategy is a little bit too much, but we felt we had a more specific vision and approach for what we wanted to do. And so the topic of where to build it came up. So we pride ourselves on being quite rational and open minded and so we thought it seems that most companies never really ponder the location topic. They just happen to be in a place. But location probably makes a fairly significant difference in your fortunes. And so we went through a proper location strategy. I remember a 10 or 15 page document we wrote with all sorts of research in different we looked at 20 or 30 locations in Canada even, I remember And ultimately picked Italy and within Italy, Milan for a couple of reasons. One was the balance of sheer number of talented and well educated people versus the opportunities they currently had was particularly favorable. And so we thought this could be a win win. We have this massive ambition. And a lot of these people probably can't wait to be part of and shape that ambition and that project. And their next alternative is a lot worse. And so we could for the company acquire fantastic talent and make the team very good and for these talent give them essentially a fantastic ride as they would give us a fantastic ride. It's really a team sport ultimately. So that was one big reason. And the second big reason and a couple of countries you could make similar claims but when it was a tie, us being Italian it was just easier. We knew some of the universities, we understood the culture a little bit better. On the margins that made the difference you could have said similar things of France for example at the time. Today France is more developed but I think at the time that would have been true. The second reason was we had this ambition to build a company for the ages, one of the most successful companies in the world of our generation. Not that we thought we would succeed but that was the goal. And we thought, okay, if we fail, failing in Copenhagen or Milan or Paris or New York is basically the same. Nobody cares.
00:16:22 · Luca Ferrari, Roman Kirsch
But if we were to succeed, even partially relative to that big ambition, doing it from a place that hasn't seen a whole lot of success in general in entrepreneurship, certainly in tech for like forever could make a very big impact in terms of inspiration, kind of igniting a virtuous cycle of economic growth, cultural advancement. When I say cultural, don't mean like the liberal arts, but more again entrepreneurship and believing you can build interesting things. And Italy was particularly appealing place in that regard because again, it was one or two steps behind some other countries that had potential. And so we picked it. We haven't looked back. We're a very international company now. We have an office in London and people all over the planet, including The US. But trying to build a super successful massive global company with roots in Europe in general because you can make a similar argument for Europe overall and Italy also was a very motivating for us. [00:17:28] S0: No and I mean probably there's a lot of... You're the local heroes here, right? Now looking back kind of versus ten [00:17:35] S2: years Well, ones because you know what we learned is that when you succeed, before nobody [00:17:40] S0: Yeah, us both, right? But at least you polarize. You're hurt. [00:17:44] S2: Exactly. Initially nobody cares either way and then either they love you too much or they hate you too much. Like there's no middle ground.
00:17:44 · Luca Ferrari, Roman Kirsch
[00:17:44] S2: Exactly. Initially nobody cares either way and then either they love you too much or they hate you too much. Like there's no middle ground. [00:17:53] S0: Yeah, but I couldn't kind of agree more and also emphasize how important it is to have those role models because Milan is actually, like a lot of other cities in Europe, a center for entrepreneurship just in different industries. Like so, there's a lot of fashion entrepreneurs, like it's high end luxury and so on and so forth, but kind of having a bit of inspiration for the young kids that you can also do it in tech is probably worth the risk. Like every big decision, know, there's pros, as you said, with ease of hiring and kind of leaving some sort of legacy, but also challenges because you had the lack of ecosystem. There's probably not a lot of people that you can chat over coffee who go through the same challenges. [00:18:33] S2: Especially at the time. [00:18:34] S0: At the time, yeah. [00:18:35] S2: The city has made major strides since, but at the time certainly... [00:18:40] S0: Yeah, at the time, exactly. So how did you... Did you just accept that or did you make an extra effort to reach out to other people in other cities to kind of share best practices? So how did you approach that?
00:18:40 · Roman Kirsch, Luca Ferrari
[00:18:40] S0: Yeah, at the time, exactly. So how did you... Did you just accept that or did you make an extra effort to reach out to other people in other cities to kind of share best practices? So how did you approach that? [00:18:54] S2: I'd say at the beginning we didn't really have any coaches, mentors, advisors partly because we were nobodies and very talented, knowledgeable people generally don't coach nobodies but they coach people they already believe can go places. And even access tend to follow that also even if someone wanted to give back to people who don't necessarily deserve it, still you would struggle to find those people. And the location didn't help. And I frankly don't think we even sought that out very much. We could have done more. I don't know why. It's hard to remember. But we were quite self reliant. Thought perhaps arrogantly we've got to figure it out on our own. And I think that was both good and bad. The good part is that we came up with a lot of non obvious insights, ways of doing things that are proven powerful for us. On the baddies, of course, sometimes we reinvented the wheel or made mistakes that others had made for us in theory, but we didn't pick up on those lessons.
00:19:59 · Matteo Danieli, Roman Kirsch, Luca Ferrari
[00:19:59] S1: Yeah. We did have pretty early on a pretty unique strategy. So it was kind of hard to find companies or founders or mentors that could tell us something about that. So that also is part of the equation. Yes, I totally agree that it just made us work harder to find out how to apply this strategy in the best possible way. I'm also sure that a lot of the things that apply to our company would apply to a lot of other companies. And, yeah, we did reinvent the wheel a lot of times. At the same time, if you reach out to get some advice, you cannot really filter the one that applies to you and then makes you grow and the one that instead you should discard. So I guess in a way it was okay to be isolated like that because it gave us a lot of self reliance and resilience. [00:20:56] S0: Cool. So I mean, your first acquisition was I think 10,000 US dollars approximately. [00:21:02] S2: Give or take, yeah. [00:21:03] S0: Now you're writing 9 figure checks. I don't know what the most expensive acquisition is, maybe you can share, but you've come [00:21:09] S2: a I long can't say which one it is, but I can say it's 500,000,000. [00:21:14] S0: 500,000,000, wow. So it's fair to say that you've come a long way as a company, it's very impressive. What changed in how you evaluate, how buy companies from this $10,000 acquisition to now?