00:26:28 · Luca Ferrari, Roman Kirsch
[00:26:28] S2: Yeah, the honest answer is that I don't know. I don't know those businesses. Well, I've heard of them superficially. I haven't looked into them. So I don't know why to what extent they failed, why they failed. I think I know very well why we have succeeded in a big way and we keep doing really well. And that's there is a ton of substance. We have invested an untold amount of money, time, sweat, and tears into building very advanced knowledge, very advanced technology, a very powerful employer brand, a distinctive, deeply rooted culture. And all of these come together to enable us to take not every business, but a lot of businesses and make them way more successful. And when you can make them way more successful, there's space for paying a highly appealing price for current ownership while still generating really good returns for Bending Spoons and our share owners. It's not something you could do overnight. Even if we started afresh, think with all we know today, would take us it's taken twelve years to get here. Maybe we could get here in seven or eight, but not a lot shorter. It's just a lot of hard work and investment. [00:27:42] S0: Do have more capital and all that?
00:27:42 · Roman Kirsch, Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli
[00:27:42] S0: Do have more capital and all that? [00:27:45] S2: We will shrink it a little bit, but it's still a massive hurdle to get there. It's a bit, I suppose, like Formula One racing. You could have a great engine, not enough. You're going to suck. You have to have great tires, great engine, great engineers, a good pilot. And it takes forever to fine tune each part. And then all of a sudden you're winning. And if others have been a little bit more superficial, not as thorough, they could lose badly for what appears to be a relatively small difference. But there is a world of effort and investment to get there. [00:28:22] S1: And in a way, this is where the idea that we were very compelled to starting a company and growing into a success story. So this focus on the company itself and not so much on the product, the product being kind of more of an excuse, gave us the long term thinking and the desire to invest in the company that made this long term place possible. So given that we're not pushing for a three year exit where you would focus on building as fast as you can and you would cut corners, etcetera, etcetera, all the investments we made into the platform, we just saw it as something that would yield returns in a very long time. And we were fine with making those investments because we knew that we were in, you know, for a long play.
00:28:22 · Matteo Danieli, Roman Kirsch
[00:28:22] S1: And in a way, this is where the idea that we were very compelled to starting a company and growing into a success story. So this focus on the company itself and not so much on the product, the product being kind of more of an excuse, gave us the long term thinking and the desire to invest in the company that made this long term place possible. So given that we're not pushing for a three year exit where you would focus on building as fast as you can and you would cut corners, etcetera, etcetera, all the investments we made into the platform, we just saw it as something that would yield returns in a very long time. And we were fine with making those investments because we knew that we were in, you know, for a long play. [00:29:12] S0: Okay. I mean, it's so interesting to hear about how you think strategically about that. Let's talk about some examples and case studies. So maybe you can share, you know, the amount of businesses and brands that you currently own and operate. Where is it now? Where is it, in three years? Maybe no one knows, but maybe you have a fair opinion on that. So what are the common themes among those brands? What are differences?
00:29:38 · Matteo Danieli
[00:29:38] S1: Yeah. So we currently have in our portfolio dozens of products. So it would be pointless to list them all, but I could mention some examples, perhaps the most important ones, and go through some of those and try to find these commonalities if they're out there. So in no particular order, WeTransfer, file transfer, file sharing platform with more than 70,000,000, seven-zero, monthly active users. It's basically the de facto standard in Europe, in Europe especially when it comes to sharing large files. Then we have Evernote, a digital notebook with a lot of complex features and a large degree of customization. And there we have more than 1,000,000 paying customers. The latest acquisition is Commute. So it's an app and website where you can plan your outdoor activities, being some hikes or bike rides. And like there's a great community, a lot of user generated content, and there's more than 8,000,000 people using it every month. Once again, it's, I think, a point of reference for this type of things when it comes to Europe, especially. We have Meetup. So it's platform where organizers can organize events and people can join them. And these events are organized around shared interests. And there as well, every month more than 300,000 events are organized. So again, massive scale. Of course, we have Remini, an AI powered photo enhancer that also gives you the ability just to create photos from scratch through generative AI. That's one of our largest products when it comes to user base with more than 100,000,000 users around the world.
00:31:37 · Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, Roman Kirsch
[00:31:37] S2: It's probably there is no official ranking, one of the top most alternative AI products in any category globally, probably top five. It's massive, massive usage. So I think you At some point, sorry, some point we were using so many GPUs for all the inference that was on Google Cloud. We became a kind of an emergency case at Google to help us scale fast enough, just to give a sense of the insane level of usage. [00:32:09] S1: And at peak times, we used to employ something like from 30,000 to 50,000 GPUs. And when I talk to tech people around this, they look at me and they're like, you're either making it up or you got the number wrong. Because that's open AI levels. [00:32:26] S0: Sounds expensive as well. [00:32:27] S1: Sounds expensive [00:32:27] S2: as well. [00:32:28] S1: But we were able in Remedy to nail the right approach to the business model, whereas we would be able to offer AI powered features for free, of course, with some limitations. And we would be, I think, the only consumer app that offered you this ability apart from OpenAI Especially in image generation. In image generation, [00:32:52] S2: Not actual, that's a little bit cheaper. [00:32:53] S1: Which is more expensive. And the way we did that was that we nailed the business model to make this possible so as to have paying customers subsidize the others. And at the same time, we worked a lot on reducing the cost of inference, like making crazy optimizations so as to gain cents and cents to reduce costs and to be able to offer these at a much lower cost. So if you're
00:32:53 · Matteo Danieli, Luca Ferrari
[00:32:53] S1: Which is more expensive. And the way we did that was that we nailed the business model to make this possible so as to have paying customers subsidize the others. And at the same time, we worked a lot on reducing the cost of inference, like making crazy optimizations so as to gain cents and cents to reduce costs and to be able to offer these at a much lower cost. So if you're [00:33:18] S2: able It's very interesting offer engineering problem, by the way. Very fascinating. [00:33:21] S1: If you're able to offer these features that went viral a lot of times for free to this massive user base, out of that comes an insane consumption as well. But luckily, the ROI is positive, we can afford that. Yeah, that was an insane ride. But anyways, so if you try to look for commonalities