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
00:49:37 · Roman Kirsch
[00:49:37] S0: rare. It's so great to speak about it because there's a lot of talk about attracting talent, right? And a lot of attention goes on recruiting the right people. But there's very limited attention to at least at the start of how do you make the best out of the talent and how do you challenge how to allocate them, right? Because it's way more complicated. So it feels like you figured it out quite organically. Is there, like, certain inspirations that you drew upon when you kind of built this, cult... Like, system within your company? Or how would you compare that to maybe some other companies that do something along those
00:50:19 · Luca Ferrari
[00:50:19] S2: lines? I'm sure have drawn some inspiration here and there. I can't really put my finger on a specific case. Like we said earlier, for better or worse, we we have reinvented the wheel and discovered powerful insights, the bright side of the same coin. I think a company that... I don't think I would say that we drew inspiration from it because we only got to learn about its culture quite late when ours was mostly in its present form. But I think this company's culture has quite a few similarities with ours. That would be Netflix. I think very mature, trusting, high bar, high performance culture. I think probably what we do is quite unusual. We are less worried about everybody in general and everybody who works here agreeing with everything we do and more concerned about making Bending Spoons the nearly perfect place for super bright, super driven people to thrive. You can't do that and make it the perfect place for everybody else. You have to pick our we look at the jobs we offer as a product. We want it to be far and away the best product in the world for super bright, super driven people. And I think we have I mean there's plenty we can improve but I think we've done a good job with that. We have people here who are a person leading Evernote as we were talking about earlier. She's 27, 28. She's been with us for seven years working part time initially as a student. Evernote is a business, 140,000,000 in revenue, millions of customers. It could be a publicly traded company, it's all married, certainly in Europe. Typically a CEO, a known founder CEO of such a company would be at least 50 years old. And so not many companies like Bending Spoons can offer you becoming essentially the CEO of that business at 28 or 27. She was probably 27 when she did. And would leave you almost complete autonomy on how to run it. We're not imposing at all blood bearing when it comes to talent maybe and cash allocation. Of course, to enable someone so hard charging, determined and capable to succeed, you have to provide a certain level of freedom and room for maneuvering that could be uncomfortable for people who are more laid back and uninterested in being in a high talent dense environment. So you got picked. We picked very clearly, and I think that was very important and successful for us.
00:53:14 · Matteo Danieli, Roman Kirsch, Luca Ferrari
[00:53:14] S1: That's probably the last piece of the puzzle that is important to spell out. Beside general managers, we believe in having small teams that work on these massive products. And so with [00:53:28] S0: respect This is to Bezos Amazon pizza strategy, right? [00:53:32] S1: Yeah, exactly. But where, you know, it's like if one of these pizza team was actually managing the whole Amazon, not just like a project in it. And so that's where the difference comes from. Like if you have a team of 40 people managing a 100 plus million dollar business, the level of impact that each one of them has on the trajectory is insane by any standard. But that also creates a lot of reward and motivation because you feel like you can really contribute. It's not like, oh, it's so great. I can now work at company X where they have such a cool product, but it's like maybe 10,000 people working on it or 1,000 people working on Whereas here it's like 40 people and you're sharing the impact just with them, very often you'll be If [00:54:19] S2: the team wins, it's you. If it fails, it's you in a way. Like it's very different. It's personal. And that's incredibly motivating and fulfilling for the type of person we try to attract. Almost unique. I don't think many companies out there, if any, can offer this. And again, it's not something that