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.
01:00:18 · Luca Ferrari, Roman Kirsch
So of course there are redundancies that appear every time we acquire a company. So that's a huge misconception. It couldn't be further from the truth, but it's also the lazy explanation. And so that's what people intuitively go for every single I [01:00:37] S0: think you said in the past that you're sometimes extremely paranoid. And had to think of my very first business angel. He ended every board meeting with only the paranoids survive. [01:00:50] S2: Andy Grove. I read the book. [01:00:52] S0: So what are you currently paranoid about?
01:00:55 · Luca Ferrari
[01:00:55] S2: Yeah, it's not a good... It's both a superpower and a super curse, if you know what I mean. Well, we have a lot of investors and especially pretty much all spooners, that's how we call one another, have invested in the company. Feel a massive sense of responsibility for them and both making sure that we never mislead any of these people into believing there's more potential than there actually is. And two, we want to deliver and seize that potential if we realize that potential if we can. And so that's something that keeps me up at night just that sense of weight on my shoulders, which I think a lot of colleagues share but I certainly feel it. We have in absolute terms a pretty substantial amount of debt, well over a billion dollars. It's not a whole lot relative to our but it's still quite a lot of money. And although we feel we have followed very prudent policies when it comes to debt, it's still a risk. If you don't pay it back that would be disastrous. So we keep looking at the numbers and make sure that the risk of that happening is tiny, negligible. We care so much about attracting and retaining top talent and so we're constantly obsessed with what can we do to make our product, the jobs we offer even better. What can we do to tell that story accurately? Particularly with all the noise we talked about before, false narratives, the hate and the love not probably being ideal. I prefer a world of balanced assessments. I think it would be a better world. I would very rarely give up the excessive love if I could get rid of the excessive hate too. And so how do we make sure that we put out there accurate information people can judge us based on? So all of these are things I constantly think about and gnaw at me sometimes in not too healthy ways.
01:03:05 · Roman Kirsch, Matteo Danieli, Luca Ferrari
[01:03:05] S0: Matteo, you're also paranoid? [01:03:06] S1: Well, as a paranoid person, maybe something that I'm paranoid about is we choose the businesses we acquire because they have a dominant position perhaps in the market, but the market is constantly evolving. And as more and more tools appear where basically anyone can code up something that would take months before, the challenges become more and more. So the thought of how do you retain that position of dominance despite the changes in the market and despite the competition, that's something that I keep on wondering about. [01:03:46] S0: Yeah. Okay. So Bending Spoons now a few 100 millions in revenues, few 100 millions in profits. I'm not sure if you're disclosing what [01:03:54] S2: €1,200,000,000 revenue. [01:03:55] S0: €1,200,000,000 revenue. Okay. I wasn't sure if it's public information, but [01:04:00] S2: I don't know, share typically share revenue. [01:04:02] S0: Roundabout It's got to be 5,000,000,000 in valuation, rumored. And do you see room for the neck? Is there a ceiling? Where do you want to grow? Is there more of the same? Do you feel that you need to kind of rethink some basic strategies?