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
00:54:19 · Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, Roman Kirsch
[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 [00:54:37] S1: we kind of a lot of this stuff is like a byproduct of some tenets and sort of we place at the foundation of what we do. But it's really a byproduct. So out of being lean, being effective, believing, having extremely talented people rather than sheer numbers, All that also brings this positive effect that basically reinforce the culture and make the company stronger. [00:55:03] S0: What I find really impressive about your company culture and operating systems is that kind of a lot of companies start this way, right? So if you have the first 10, 50, 100, at least you you get those fast charging graduates, but at some point in time there's a board member or maybe you as a founder who's maybe for this I need someone who has done it already or, you know, I need one adult in the room. You know, it seems like you resisted so far. Is there a moment or are there some some, you know, experience that you can share where you took on people that had already leadership roles with other tech companies? Probably they had a lot to unlearn and relearn here. How has that worked? And is that a path that you feel is not something that you want to go down?
00:55:55 · Luca Ferrari, Roman Kirsch
[00:55:55] S2: We've done it a few times, very few by any standards, usually a handful of times. Some successful and some not so successful. The successful ones, one of the reasons why they succeeded was like you said, they came in naked first. They only thought about leveraging their experience at a later point in time once they had fully absorbed what we had to offer. And I think that that was critical. But also often, I don't think we did a good job as a company in creating the right conditions for these people to succeed. But going forward, for us, it's pretty much all new graduates 99% of the time. We get a lot of applications from senior people. We're big believers in trying to be absolutely amazing at one or two things, not try to be the best. And right now we want to be the best in the world at attracting, identifying, nurturing, insanely great young talent and make sure that they have an unbelievable career faster, better than essentially anywhere else. And we need to stay focused on that goal. We can't try to do too many things at the same time or we'll certainly fail. [00:57:15] S0: Yeah, makes sense. I mean always stick to what you're great at in a way. You talked earlier about how you're local heroes and villains at the same time, but now you're at a scale where you're global. So global heroes and villains probably. Are there certain misconceptions that you feel people have fairly unfamiliar about Bending Spoons?
00:57:37 · Luca Ferrari
[00:57:37] S2: I think our model is so... I think you could say it's unique and and also counterintuitive that there's plenty of misconceptions from people on the outside. Building on what we're just discussing, I think one that's fairly common is, as you know, when we acquire a company, often we reduce staff quite substantially. And typically the narrative is from, again, from people who don't or nothing to know from the outside is that we do this because we don't plan to invest in the product. And therefore, why would you have as many people as before? Truth is the vast majority of times we greatly accelerate product development. We prove this in almost any KPIs we like, whether it's retention or literally number of features shipped per year. Evernote, for example, in last year we shipped over 100 improvements. This year we're already at 70 improvements, which is a crazy pace relative to historical levels. And retention is the highest it's ever been. So I guess customers vote with their feet, so to say. So if retention is the best it's ever been, despite prices are actually a little bit higher. So clearly the facts are we typically greatly accelerate the rate of, say, product innovation or product development, both big things or small things. So that's not the the reason why we typically reduce the number of people that the company is not because we don't expect to invest in the product. It's completely different reasons. Tangentially we tested upon them before, but one is we believe that typically smaller teams with much greater autonomy and fewer managerial layers, less process end up being way more motivated, way more productive, more speed, more quality. Two, we believe that when you have a smaller staff you're forced to really focus on the few things that likely really matter. And in I think any business very few things bring 99% of the impact and you want to do those things super fast and super well and not doing the other things is the first step toward doing the few things that matter fast and at a high quality level. And so again that justifies the smaller team. Then thirdly as a minor point but still matters, we're a much bigger organization and so there's all sorts of efficiencies. We've got one centralized team building technology for AB testing, for marketing, for payment management.