Joys of Compounding
00:48:00 · Paul Buser
[00:48:00] S1: It's great. John, was he famous for telling his team, let's practice putting on our socks over and over again until we get that right? This is fun. I wonder what the the corollary is for you guys. Just the blocking and tackling the little things. Before recording, we were talking about Mitch Rails, who's a very close friend of ours and super important in what we're building, and he's influenced us a lot on how we think about business. And, especially, we actually met via Will Thorndyke. But I had never met Mitch. And within a day, he became our biggest shareholder and we've been building a lot of companies together. I think that one of the common factors was this obsession with duration. In our old lives, helping to manage an endowment fund, our biggest frustration with the institutional investing world was that super well intentioned people hadn't thought enough about structure. They were incredible learners, but the learning was actually just kind of a waste. They weren't able to implement it. Everything I've heard about you, I'm hearing right now is the opposite. And I think Mitch has taught us to take it to another level, which is every decade, expect to reinvent yourself almost completely. The first ten years for Bending Spoons, you were in the wilderness. Not a lot of people had heard of you. I know there's some Italian media that was finding you. Then all of a sudden, you read The Outsiders. You've heard of Constellation by then. Still don't really try to match yourself with anybody. You're midway through the second decade now. What is it that you think could be reinvented or has to be reinvented, say, year 2025 without losing the soul of bending spoons. What can
00:49:28 · Luca Ferrari
[00:49:28] S3: you see already that could be a big pivot point for you? The basic principles of what we do has stayed roughly the same from the beginning. Basically by product market fit, bring exceptional operational excellence, largely through structure, being able to integrate all these businesses together, transform them very deeply, use the same underlying operating system, a shared team of people. But the way that's looking and more so, I think if I have to imagine the next five or six years is changing quite a lot. It's boring. Everybody's talking about it, but I think frankly, AI is right now for this phase, the big difference maker. We have invested aggressively in technology for as long as I can remember, but never before have we found ourselves in a situation where productivity could spike just so much through incremental efforts here. For example, internally, we have recently launched something called diagram, which is if you've used co op design, there are some similarities. It's deeply embedded and integrated into our broader toolkit so that when you ask the tool to design something, it needs zero context. It already knows all the products, databases. It knows the design guidelines that the lead designer had on each business or product has laid out. It is in contact with all the right people if it needs feedback or approval. So it's a far more efficient way of designing within Bending Spoons. The productivity gains we're getting from something like that are extraordinary. First of all, designers are much faster, but also the percentage of team members who can now design effectively on their own without having to bother other people. And every time people have to collaborate, there's information loss as you exchange comps and then the delays and frustrations. It's just mind boggling. So that's just one I could bring many, many examples. So I think looking forward five years, let's say, I expect that what we'll be able to do in a vastly automated fashion will be just sci fi like. We're trying to be trailblazers along that path. The underlying principles will be similar, but I think what you'll see us do will be just shocking. Evernote when we bought it, it had three fifty team members approximately. After twelve to eighteen months from when the acquisition was completed, it had maybe 60, something like that. And now it's been run by 20 people.
00:51:45 · Luca Ferrari, Paul Buser
And those 20 people launched in January, February this year, by far the biggest update to the product in maybe a decade, certainly five or six years. And part of that is we've spent a couple of years cleaning up the code base, improving the cloud infrastructure so that the code base is more maintainable. It was easier to expand the product, add new features, but a lot of that is just incredibly powerful AI automations. And so I think we're just scratching the surface of that. And the advantage of it for us is not so much that we can further optimize costs. It's more that we can acquire more companies, which means we can deploy the same amount of capital across smaller tickets if we want to, which means the universe of realistically attainable opportunities is bigger, which means that saturation effect on returns is further pushed out. [00:52:35] S1: What is the limit to keeping this ownership mentality with these AI gains? What comes to mind is, say, the team running AOL, they might have a mindset of transformation, but then there's sort of maintenance. AI, in a way, to me, seems like it just pushes the boundary of everybody at their edge at all times. Bending Spoons already has this culture. Now this is just multiplying it in an exponential fashion. How do you envision... Are there examples of how you move team members more quickly? Or like you were kind of alluding to the team's sizes get smaller. How do you keep people interested at the cutting edge on what they're able to do?
00:53:10 · Luca Ferrari
[00:53:10] S3: I think it's actually easier. I mean, there's personal tastes. Some people like some products more than others. That's part of that. I think it's generally a minor aspect. At least at Bending Spoons where we try to have a culture that's not passion driven, but more impact driven. We want people who are excited when their work matters, they improve product for a customer or improve monetization for the business. The main factor determining level of motivation that people feel that extreme ownership in our experience is or factors they'll give you to. One is how much responsibility you have. The more productive people are, the more responsibility they have naturally. Mean, it's running a business, it's a fixed set of responsibility. If you're running with 10 people rather than 50, you could argue very simplistically, they have roughly five times as much as responsibility. Two, by the level of talent density in the team they are part of, because we don't want to be the lesser performer. If everybody around us is very good, we want to be at least as good. Most of us have a level of competitiveness and just as desired not to let people down. And so if we have smaller teams managing the same surface of product or business or tooling or whatever that is, we automatically get higher levels of response, average levels of responsibility and higher time and density, both of which I think if anything breed a sense of ownership and a desire to make an impact. So I think AI makes our job easier in that regard, not harder. How do
00:54:32 · Paul Buser
[00:54:32] S1: you think just knowing how quickly this is all changing the second decade could be profoundly different than the first and then beyond? How do you cultivate the right shareholder base who gets on board with the way you're thinking? You've done that internally. Be kind of fun to think about. Could you use the mechanism to go from 800,000 applications to a couple 100 hires on the shareholder side? We first heard about you through our friends, Henry and Anuk and Corey over at Durable. You spent time before going public, bringing together an amazing crew of shareholders. That has been unleashed now. How do you maintain that set of people around you that allow you to continue to do what you're doing?
00:55:13 · Luca Ferrari
[00:55:13] S3: When you're a public company, you don't really get to choose your shareholders. People can buy and sell more or less as they please. Of course, you have some control. Maybe if you have a private placement, you can favor some investors, broadly speaking, you don't control it. What you can do is you very clearly articulate what you're about, what you want to accomplish and how we try to do that. And you do that honestly. First of all, you need to know that and some people have, they're confused, but assuming you have a clear idea of what you want to build and how you need to articulate that honestly and clearly that will tend to attract people. It's not dissimilar from recruiting we talked about before. You laid out your vision and the mechanics of what you do well, you're more likely than not to attract people who are aligned with that, but it could attract people who misunderstand it or they're for speculative reasons. There's not much you can do in that regard, but hopefully over time as you keep preaching and telling the same story and conduct yourself consistently with that, a bigger and bigger percentage of your shareholder base will be aligned with your views. I do have full control of that. And so I just think control what you can control. There are so many problems to solve, and this is not one of them, I think.