00:27:00 · Siddhartha Ahluwalia, Luca Ferrari
[00:27:00] S0: And it's been like, you know, maybe if [00:27:03] S1: you can share the earlier, like, was... How did you grow the revenue and what was the revenue, if you can remember, during the first four five years that can give an audience a better perspective of what it took to take it here? Well, in 2013 we started the company around the summer very little, a few tens of thousands of dollars probably. Then I would say maybe 2014, certainly less than $1,000,000 my recollection. And then maybe a couple of million. It was probably around 10,000,000 in 1617, and then, you know, a few tens of millions. It kinda goes up. Pick your you can start from a very low seed and then get your CAGR, spread it as you will. There has been no year that was an outlier. Some years have grown faster, slower, but there was never a year where we kind of 10x'd or something like that. [00:28:10] S0: But I would assume it would be like consistently 2x every year on year. That would be the right thing to say? [00:28:16] S1: Yeah. More more earlier. In the later years still pretty fast growth perhaps not quite a 100% on average. I think the last couple of years probably more like 70% revenue wise.
00:28:16 · Luca Ferrari, Siddhartha Ahluwalia
[00:28:16] S1: Yeah. More more earlier. In the later years still pretty fast growth perhaps not quite a 100% on average. I think the last couple of years probably more like 70% revenue wise. [00:28:30] S0: As an outsider, what seems to me one of the reasons for the success of Bending Spoons is that as a founder, you are not attached to your product because you are objectively acquiring them and giving them, you know, hey. Do we take them from here to there and what is required? And if it's not working, you can cut it off. Whereas founders who start these companies, and when you started, you know, company, there's a sense of attachment that I need to make it successful, and my identity is my product.
00:29:03 · Luca Ferrari
[00:29:03] S1: Yeah. I think it's, it's probably an accurate assessment. I am and I think a lot of my colleagues are extremely attached to our product. It's just that we see the company as our product. We want Bending Spoons to be ideally the best company out there. It's quite subjective, of course, but you get the point and ambition, I suppose. The products we have are a part of that naturally, in many ways critical to accomplishing that, but none of them individually is a necessary element or a prerequisite for that vision to be fulfilled, Which is a structural advantage we have over single product companies, I think. It goes back to being able to be a bit more rational. There are many other structural advantages with our model. We can take risks with products because if we make a big mistake on one, although we're not happy, we survive it. If you just have one product and you make a big mistake, your project can crush and burn, perhaps, irreparably. So we can be more efficient with allocating resources, can learn in one business and import that learning to another business. Of course there are disadvantages too. Focus is very useful when doing business and if you just do one thing when you wake up in the morning, if all you do is Evernote, it's easier than if you do many things. So, as usual, nothing is perfect. We found our own way, which is in some ways better than other, but you can be tremendously successful with just one product as lots of companies have proven. So I'm not... You know, I wouldn't say this is the best way. It's just one way and if interpreted correctly, with a bit of luck, can be successful. I think we've shown that.
00:31:08 · Siddhartha Ahluwalia, Luca Ferrari
[00:31:08] S0: And one of the reasons is I think is you cannot be labeled like most companies that become large of similar scale. They can... Like, Klaviyo can be labeled as a company, supporting Shopify. Right? And so they can never break that mold. They have to start a different brand if tomorrow they have to build a cloud computing business. But for you, I think that's an inherent, DNA advantage that you have that if you want to start a cloud computing business, you can start it by acquiring and building it in a Bending Spoons. [00:31:41] S1: Yeah. We don't even try to place our our brand Bending Spoons onto our product businesses. We we let them be autonomous in that regard. Our brand is only meaningful toward investors and job candidates, the Bending Spoons brand. We don't want it to be necessarily meaningful to consumers. I mean it may be one day but that's really not a goal. Guess in that we are similar to Procter and Gamble in consumer goods, physical consumer goods. Have hundreds of well known brands but if you pick 100 people in the street, probably 90 don't even know what Procter and Gamble is and it's one of the most important successful companies in the world. There are different ways you could do it. Google has a smaller set of products, still a lot relatively speaking. And to some degree, you know, they're kind of branded the same way and somewhat integrated, not all, but most of them. So again, a very successful model clearly. You can do it different ways. [00:32:48] S0: And does a team member have to work on a one product or they can work across multiple
00:32:48 · Siddhartha Ahluwalia, Luca Ferrari
[00:32:48] S0: And does a team member have to work on a one product or they can work across multiple [00:32:52] S1: products? Well, we've got a bunch of teams. We call them platform teams working on horizontal technologies, knowledge, services. Some are, as you would expect, accounting, finance, legal, recruiting. Some are perhaps less expected, AB testing, monetization, some developer experience. So these people working on these teams, in a way, they work for no product and old products at the same time. Then we have teams serving or working on a specific product or a small set of products. Typically, a team member working on one of these teams at any given time only works on that particular product. However, in time they're likely to move to other product teams. [00:33:46] S0: And what about the sales and marketing machinery? Is it common across the products or is it dedicated? Let's say if you have 300 people in your product in tech and 50 to 100 people in sales or marketing, then they... Are they working on different products or one for one?
00:33:46 · Siddhartha Ahluwalia, Luca Ferrari
[00:33:46] S0: And what about the sales and marketing machinery? Is it common across the products or is it dedicated? Let's say if you have 300 people in your product in tech and 50 to 100 people in sales or marketing, then they... Are they working on different products or one for one? [00:34:00] S1: It's a mix but primarily it's specific to a product and they work on that team. There are certain parts we have centralized for example we have a team called media design and they're kind of a bit of an in house creative agency so they can produce high quality visuals of all kinds. And our product teams will leverage the help of this team to for example create advertising campaigns or certain in app content like animations. But let's say more strategic marketing decisions like how do we price this product, what kind of customer we're going after, mostly it's within the products that these are made. Although it's always a collaborative endeavor. [00:34:54] S0: And how much, you know, especially on the sales and marketing and even on the product side, do you borrow from before... Like, what has been done before the acquisition? For example, let's take Evernote. So after acquisition, like, how much did you change the monetization, the pricing, even the tech and the product of that particular product? Well, we will review everything. Of course, we try to