Joys of Compounding
00:28:14 · Luca Ferrari
[00:28:14] S3: AI is having a massive impact on productivity for us. It's enabling people to do more, faster, better work. It helps in the context of scalability. I think it helps in a bunch of ways. Again, if each person can do more work, you need fewer people to say, absorb the same number of companies or larger companies, which in turn makes a lot of challenges easier. For example, you don't need to hire as many amazing people or people capable of extreme ownership, which is a win check. Alternatively, you could do more acquisitions in parallel or bigger acquisitions, which is good for growth. It also helps keep the organization functional at scale because it makes producing documentation much faster. Now writing a memo describing, say an experiment becomes 10 times faster than before potentially. We're trying to automate it fully, by the way, it's mostly automated already at Banish Spoons. Similarly, if I need to follow progress across different businesses, I need other people less. I can be more autonomous. In the past, I had to ask to be granted access to the relevant database. I would need to query data or ask a data scientist to query for me, have them run an analysis, do it myself. Now I go on Slack, we have built a set of technologies and automations, the superficial layer of which we call alternative spooner. And I've got my own Alternative Spooner, I will ask it to run that analysis and then it will go and automatically request access to the relevant database. Access will be automatically granted for say five minutes, the amount of time that the agent needs to review the data. It will compile the analysis, it will share it with me whether it's a plot or in textual form. And so I can be autonomous and even though I don't have time to follow everything in detail, I can very quickly catch up indirectly through the agent. So it is a boon. It makes us even more bullish that a call it centralized model, I think it could be a slightly misleading word can scale massively much more so than what would have been possible in a more traditional, technologically speaking, side of boundary conditions.
00:30:16 · Paul Buser
[00:30:16] S1: If you take it to the next logical conclusion, all of this internal work for thirteen years, my mind as an outsider makes you a better owner of a lot of these companies than just about anybody else. Can you take me through why M and A is part of the strategy linked to that and then what the market gets wrong? I don't know. I think some people label used to be kind of an acquirer of apps, then it's private equity and software. I think there's probably other companies you mentioned Berkshire or Danaher Constellation, other companies that really are permanent holders of companies. But if you're aiming to be the best operating company, you get people who think like owners. You're able to scale them and have a large team and now 50 proof points of companies. How do you think about deserving to be the best owner of a whole swath of companies now?
00:31:05 · Luca Ferrari
[00:31:05] S3: I don't think we deserve anything. We just try to work our ass off to be that. It's not about deserving. It's just either you are or you're not. But you asked why M and A first of all, because we could also launch competing products from scratch. There are a couple of issues with that. First of all, we like to own businesses with some moats, with some staying power precisely because these businesses already exist in certain segments. If you launch something from scratch, they are very unlikely to greatly erode their market share. If it were so easy to do so, we probably wouldn't be that interested in participating in that market anyway. So that kind of rules out the follower strategy in existing segments. Other launch from scratch potential pathway, which would be radical innovation coming up with something completely new where the segment almost doesn't exist or you'd be disrupting it completely, which is how startups do gain market share when they succeed. The problem there is, if you look at the statistics of this, are absolutely dismal. Out of 1,000 startups, how many get to a level of revenue, just to pick the most obvious KPI, that would move the needle for us at this point? Assuming we close the acquisition of Miro, we're at about $4,000,000,000 run rate revenue. So we need to believe that this new thing we launch is going to get to at least 500,000,000. And by the way, if it gets there, so there's probably a one in a thousand probability that it does. If the broader markets statistics apply to us too, even if we were a little bit better, it would still be very small. And then generally these companies get to say, billion dollars in revenue in ten years, maybe today with AI and a better distribution and more efficient markets a bit faster. If it's in ten years, we're not interested. We would need earlier. Otherwise in ten years, probably want to have it at 5,000,000,000. It's just too statistically unappealing. I think there is a lot of hidden loss making investment in the world of startups in terms of the massive amount of time invested by very talented people, founders and early employees in projects that fail. And they do that for basically no money for a dream. Probably the expected value of that is awful. Naturally, there's selection bias.
00:33:10 · Luca Ferrari, Paul Buser
We see relatively few companies that succeed in a big way, but what the overall investment that's gone into making those companies possible? I don't think it's appealing for an established business to go after that systematically. It would be different if you were Apple and you have an established customer base for a very particular type of product. You can build the ecosystem products around it. It's maybe much more predictable and you have a distribution channel. I can see that, but we own a diversified set of properties and launching a yet another completely from one. I don't think it would be particularly appealing in terms of attractive returns. Instead, we buy product market fit companies that have already succeeded. And because we believe we can operate them better, we can offer a high price, what's perceived to be a high price and still deliver good returns for our shareholders. [00:34:00] S1: Why do you think the market obsesses over organic growth? I think about some of the acquisitions you've made, and maybe they're growing a little bit, maybe shrinking a little bit depending on how you measure it, and then plenty are growing very quickly organically. What is it that you think the market is missing about the potential inside Bending Spoons in this platform, building something real and steady versus some organic growth rate?
00:34:00 · Paul Buser, Luca Ferrari
[00:34:00] S1: Why do you think the market obsesses over organic growth? I think about some of the acquisitions you've made, and maybe they're growing a little bit, maybe shrinking a little bit depending on how you measure it, and then plenty are growing very quickly organically. What is it that you think the market is missing about the potential inside Bending Spoons in this platform, building something real and steady versus some organic growth rate? [00:34:27] S3: By the way, you're absolutely right. A majority of investors are focused on organic growth, even with Bending Spoons, which I initially found it odd, given that the entire value proposition here is that we want to be the ultimate, ideally the perfect M and A and operating machine. Organic growth should be... Yeah, [00:34:45] S1: shouldn't be the same
00:34:45 · Luca Ferrari
[00:34:45] S3: as inorganic. It's just certainly a factor you want to understand, but it's a very secondary at best. I think there are two reasons for it. Part of it is just not all investors are uber brilliant and there's a lot of pattern following. Overwhelmingly companies in the market grow organically. Serial acquirers are fewer and far between because in aggregate I think it's a smaller opportunity. It's still a gigantic if you add them all up in it's probably trillions of dollars, but it's a rarer type of opportunity. So most investors have not done a lot of those investments. Some have done none. In any case, they're being trained to think about how do I catch the next Google? And that's more, you know, a product that scales organically. There's just that more shallow approach. Several investors are extremely shrewd and perfectly understand the math and why organic growth in our case is, I wouldn't say completely irrelevant, almost within reason. Some don't care at all and enthusiastically buy our stock even though organic growth has been lackluster, let's say, for the most part. Despite understanding it perfectly, we value our stock less because they are afraid there is kind of this vicious cycle where they think, well, I think many people out there in the market don't get it. They like organic. And so maybe Bending Spoons will not be valued as much as I think it should. And I need to embed that in my own valuation, and therefore I should value it less. So there's also this phenomenon of very astute investors who are second guessing what everybody else may be thinking, which is fascinating. And it's rational. If you're ultimately not holding forever, it is not irrational to think that way. I understand it.