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.
00:40:41 · Luca Ferrari, Roman Kirsch
[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. [00:41:30] S0: And the efficiencies come mainly so let's maybe zoom in on this. So the efficiencies don't come from synergies between the apps, it's more from the data that you have and as from my understanding from your ability to make bigger bets, because if those don't work out you have a lot of different eggs and you can kind of reinvest, right? Is there a certain value creation where you feel that this is really underrated and maybe it's so secret that you don't want to share it here, but are there for instance things where you look at across you obviously see a lot more apps than you buy, right? So are there certain things that you feel are, you know, oftentimes not done correctly, be it retention, strategies, pricing, the overhead cost structures, anything else that
00:42:19 · Matteo Danieli, Luca Ferrari
[00:42:19] S1: Can can I talk about, like, a superpower that is a little more hidden? Think because, again, you don't really see it surface in the changes we do on the product, but has a big responsibility in determining success. And that is being able to allocate you mentioned it briefly being able to allocate our people where we see that they can create the biggest impact. So for us, we'll always think in terms of, let's think about all the people we have in the company. Is there a place where each one of them, if moved, could be creating more value? And typically you see things such as we've just acquired a new product. There's a lot of need to kind of go in there, learn, and act. So that's a perfect place where they might be more impactful than where they currently are. And the process of moving them to this new reality I mean, we don't wait for the yearly reorganization. We don't have to kind of negotiate and convince them or persuade them. But it's really part of our culture. Everybody knows that at any point in time they might be taken out of the current context and move somewhere else. But the reason why we can do that [00:43:30] S2: To be clear, we ask them if they're Okay with that. But 90% [00:43:34] S1: of the time [00:43:34] S2: they are excited because it's really become part of who we are. It's part of the being a good team player is, yeah, of course, I'm gonna move to the next frontline and help there. [00:43:45] S1: But also the fact that you're moving them to areas where they have bigger impact, that that would excite everyone, right?
00:43:45 · Matteo Danieli, Roman Kirsch, Luca Ferrari
[00:43:45] S1: But also the fact that you're moving them to areas where they have bigger impact, that that would excite everyone, right? [00:43:52] S0: So how do you do that in practice? Because obviously that's the holy grail and every organization would love to do that. So is that more of a top down decision? Is that done, done, bottom up? [00:44:02] S1: Yeah, a combination. Of course, take into consideration the passions and abilities of people. And at the same time, we have a top down vision of where the biggest opportunity for value creation is around the company. So you combine those things and then you determine how people get moved around. So like Can [00:44:25] S2: I interject and say something more on that? Because I think this is quite uncommon. We have in our culture the idea that each person should be pursuing the highest impact opportunity at all times is so inculcated, so deeply rooted that very often it's individuals who come up and say I should be doing something else. I'm not moving the needle enough. We have constantly one recently cases of say one of our, you know, the leader of one of our businesses saying, I'm running this business with 60, 70 people. I think 20 would be more closer to optimal. Consider other businesses where the other 40 can be tried. That's very unusual. Almost any company out there in the world, there's a lot of empire building. People will fight to the death not to lose reports because then you know... And here it's pretty much the opposite. [00:45:25] S0: And how did you create that environment where that is incentivized?