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?
00:45:25 · Roman Kirsch, Luca Ferrari
[00:45:25] S0: And how did you create that environment where that is incentivized? [00:45:30] S2: Twelve years. One person at a time, coaching each person, hiring almost entirely new graduates. We don't come in with what we would consider wrong preconceptions of what good business looks like. And lots of coaching, lots of consistency, repeat, repeat, repeat. It is painful. It is time consuming. Like I said before, we could do it in maybe 30% less time now with maybe infinite money and more credibility, but it takes forever. But then you have a very high density of this is the culture, these are the principles we follow and magic happens. Then things happen that seem almost impossible in your typical company. [00:46:08] S0: How do you...
00:46:09 · Matteo Danieli
[00:46:09] S1: I think it's also a matter of aligning incentives, though. And there's a couple of important incentives here. So beside the one where you're moved to where you can create more impact, I think that no matter where you work... If you work for a year on a product, you get to diminishing returns about what you can learn around it. I mean, you've learned the architecture of the tech stock. You've learned the business, etcetera. So at that point, you're like, my growth as a professional would accelerate if I moved to a different place. And so outside of Bending Spoons, you have two ways to do that. You either stick with a certain company and you try to move kind of upward. So you try to get more and more responsibility. And the way you learn is through this expanded responsibility. But you're still married to that one product. So the expansion of the context is still quite limited. Or you can change company every year. So in that case, you change product every year and you're exposed to different things, but at the same time, you invest in the same amount of time in getting to know the people, getting to know the culture. Often, if you're the new one, you're placed in a kind of minor role just to prove yourself and then move somewhere else. Whereas here, you can have the combination of both. You can pack like ten year of normal experience into four, into three because you got this insane opportunity to operate on different products while staying within the same company culture, while knowing the people that work with you. So I think that's great. That accelerates the pace of learning by a lot. And the other way in which we try to align incentives is that we really believe in every one of our colleagues becoming an owner of the company. So we have this approach whereby anyone can convert a portion of their compensation up to a certain limit to stock options at a steep discount with respect to latest valuation. And I would say that well, I'm not sure about the stats, but I think basically everyone chooses to convert in different amounts.
00:48:22 · Matteo Danieli
And that creates one last very big incentive because the way even if you just thought about it purely financially and you didn't care about self improvement or weren't attaching out to the company, you were just thinking rational in terms of finance, financial incentives, it's often that wealth generation happens more as an owner of the company than as hoping that you'll get a raise next year. And this is despite us being top of market in basically each one of our roles. So I think that this combination of company culture, aligning incentives makes it so that it's so easy to allocate people to where they can create the biggest impact. That makes a ton of difference. Like in your average company, I think that you're just a victim of the inertia by which you kind of wait for things to happen by themselves because change is so resisted and having those conversations is so tough. But once this becomes second nature, everything becomes much easier. And really, like if you took a peek into the way we operate this move and changes, it's really fascinating. I mean, we take it for granted, but I think it's really