00:33:21 · Matteo Danieli, Luca Ferrari
[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 [00:33:42] S2: Can I add one more, I think? Because it's really quite so we also own Brightcove, which was a publicly traded company on Nasdaq. We do it private actually only a few months ago. Fully enterprise video platform, very sophisticated video technology for transcoding, streaming used by massive clients. It's only 2,000 customers, quote unquote only, but the average ticket is almost $100,000 So the biggest names you could imagine I can't name them but you could pretty much all the big companies that need video use it. And that's entirely sales driven, relatively few massive customers. So we really span the gamut from Remini, which is over 100,000,000 people each paying nothing or a relatively small amount of money, maybe $100 a year, to Brightcove, which is relatively small number of enterprise customers each paying $50,000 $100,000 even some a few million dollars a year in big contracts.
00:33:42 · Luca Ferrari, Roman Kirsch
[00:33:42] S2: Can I add one more, I think? Because it's really quite so we also own Brightcove, which was a publicly traded company on Nasdaq. We do it private actually only a few months ago. Fully enterprise video platform, very sophisticated video technology for transcoding, streaming used by massive clients. It's only 2,000 customers, quote unquote only, but the average ticket is almost $100,000 So the biggest names you could imagine I can't name them but you could pretty much all the big companies that need video use it. And that's entirely sales driven, relatively few massive customers. So we really span the gamut from Remini, which is over 100,000,000 people each paying nothing or a relatively small amount of money, maybe $100 a year, to Brightcove, which is relatively small number of enterprise customers each paying $50,000 $100,000 even some a few million dollars a year in big contracts. [00:34:46] S0: Okay, and then so those are two great examples because they're so opposed to each other, right, in terms of just the ARPU and the technical problems that you have, the level of service that you provide and the way how you think about building those companies. So how much of your playbook is actually fixed and how much do you kind of create a new playbook post acquisition for every single company? And what did you learn over the past acquisitions?
00:35:14 · Matteo Danieli
[00:35:14] S1: Yeah, so Well, go. Yeah, would say that, so for us, it's easier, of course, to tackle products that have similarities, either in business model or type of customer big products that we already have in our portfolio. And there perhaps we already created some playbooks that are perfect for that. But we to really find a good trade off between doing some of those acquisitions where we're pretty sure about what we're going to do for many months from when we acquired the product, but also dive into completely new territory where some of the things that we've learned we know we can reapply. But we also know that a lot of it will be kind of learning. And by doing that, we just expand our playbook. And then we also expand our ability to know precisely what we will be doing if we encounter another target like that. So I think it's being this trade off between exploitation of the know how we created until that point, but also exploration in order to expand that know how. And this is how we are able to sort of target and think about acquisitions in fields that we hadn't tackled before. But as a consequence of this, it's really hard to find a common theme. So if anything, as Luke said, we really span the gamut from mainstream B2C to enterprise. If I were to find perhaps one commonality, Luke, correct me if I'm wrong, but I would say at the level that we are now, it's either kind of established brands recognized typically reference points in their industry, in their vertical. Some of them might be a little more niche. But within their vertical, they're very much well known.
00:37:04 · Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, Roman Kirsch
[00:37:04] S2: Yeah, generally number one, maybe number two but leading... Brightcove was clearly the market leader. Evernote you could argue it's a little bit of a different use case but you could say Notion is the market leader but Evernote is number two probably. Yeah. [00:37:20] S1: They address all slightly different use cases. So like, you know, very recognized brands or... And or, you know, tackle some some use cases that are very important, crucial for the consumer. So these are commonalities that you'll find pretty much everywhere in our portfolio. [00:37:37] S0: Interesting. And how can I imagine that very specifically? Let's say you acquire WeTransfers. One of the founders actually jumping on, do you have a SWAT team that goes from company to company that you acquire or is it always a new setup basically?
00:37:51 · Luca Ferrari
[00:37:51] S2: I'll take this one. Yeah. Okay. So the... Yeah. I mean, we... First thing we establish, call it a task force, including some people who have done it before or experts in different functional areas, engineering, product design, marketing. And these people join the team. Some of them will take on top leadership positions. We'll spend the first few weeks or few months depending on a bunch of factors in almost entirely in in learning mode, learning from everybody at the company, being in the trenches, working on projects, talking to customers. We try to get up to speed very quickly on ideally everything there is to know. Of course, you never know everything. And then we try to develop a vision, a picture of that business that's as close to the ideal version as we can imagine and that ignores as much as possible the stage of squirrel. It's difficult because first you need to see everything to learn and then you need to unseat to imagine. So it's actually fairly challenging cognitively speaking process. But ideally the new vision is not hindered or limited by whatever happens to be the case right now. And then we get to work to close the gap between status quo and that vision as quickly and as fully as we can. That may require pretty drastic changes across the board. We rewrite big chunks of code base, rearchitect the cloud infrastructure, redesign the UI, typically add lots of features. We may even remove some features, restructure large parts of the organization, work on the culture, add new people. Like it is really time consuming, challenging, but if we do it right and of course you always need a little bit of luck, then we can generate good returns by making that business a lot more successful, typically both improving revenue and lowering cost. And that enables us to invest to make our platform even more powerful and to go after new acquisitions, larger, more challenging ones.
00:40:15 · Roman Kirsch, Luca Ferrari
[00:40:15] S0: Yeah. I think a big part of why Bending Spoons is able to create value, you said, is because you see, you know, some pitfalls or some things that don't really work that well and you had this comparison with the football coach, right, I think in one of your previous podcasts where you say the the initial founders were maybe great, but at a certain point in time a new coach brings fresh ideas, fresh energy. [00:40:41] S2: Oh yeah. And that's important. Like typically, I mean not always, but typically the management teams we find, whether they're founders or professional managers who were brought in later, they are very capable people. The reasons why we can improve the business are very rarely because of incompetence from previous teams. It's more the massive backlog or baggage of insights we have accumulated through the very specific activity that we run, which is run many different businesses, being able to take bets, make risky bets and learn from those. We don't have all of our eggs in one basket unlike most management teams. The scale we have, massive advantage. Integrating under the same umbrella, multiple businesses, again incredible efficiencies, ability to move people around.