00:09:51 · Luca Ferrari
[00:09:51] S3: We were very fortunate nobody gave us a $100,000,000. Maybe it would have been better to have someone give us $100,000,000 It's hard to... You don't get to AB test live, so I don't know what would have happened. There are things we could have done or done bigger or faster or sooner had we had that access to that sort of capital. There's value in having less. First of all, it forces you to be resourceful and frugal. I believe that in the long run, those qualities are paramount. It's easier to make them part of your DNA if you started there and didn't have much for a long time. That's certainly helpful. Also, believe that much of our competitive advantage we enjoy today, which we can talk about if you want, but that'll be that core team of, I believe, exceptional talent, ethnicity and very strong culture and our proprietary technologies. You can't really shortcut the development of those through money. You can probably shortcut it a little bit, but it's taken us thirteen years to get to this point. I'm sure that with access to infinite money, maybe we would have done it in 9007. But mostly the bottleneck is when it comes to technologies, you need to know what to build and exactly how. To do that, to acquire that knowledge, you need to work over time and solve problems and fail and find that the way you succeed is different. You don't go to Wikipedia and read what proprietary technologies do you need to build, what exactly do they look like to achieve what Bending Spoons has achieved? It's just a mass amount of knowledge that's developed in micro increments over a long period of time and solving many, many problems. In our case, acquiring companies and trying to transform them, improve them and run them on an ongoing basis. Similarly with people, You don't get to build a very strong employer brand overnight. It's not advertising. It's many years of some of the best students graduating at a certain university coming to work here and then telling their former fellow students. It's amazing. You should actually work at Bending Spoons and it's two becomes four and four becomes eight and over time you have thousands of amazing people or tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands applying and you have high credibility equally with culture.
00:11:56 · Luca Ferrari
We hired a person, spent a lot of time working with that person to really align on the principles on what we value. And then it's two people and then four people. Sure, you can do it a little bit faster. I'm sure if you're more experienced, you have more money, but there's no way to hire 500 or a thousand amazing people overnight and have that being a unit of common purpose, a uniform playbook as just a recipe for disaster. We needed the time. And I think having had the money wouldn't have been a problem per se, but I suspect that the pressures to get to certain results earlier or different types of results from say a VC potentially could have derailed our progress. Now, we have always operated with an insane sense of urgency. I just don't think you should be doing anything in life unless it's leisure without an insane sense of urgency, then don't do it. Because if it's worth doing, it's worth getting it done as well as and as quickly as possible. There's only advantages to that, really. You can apply that sense of urgency towards slightly different objectives and one could be. Let's just show 10% more revenue this year. Another one is let's build up a better employer brand. Let's figure out how to predict future performance in inexperienced hires and the latter types of pursuits are maybe less appealing to someone who's looking to see a return on their investment quickly. So I wouldn't change our background necessarily just because it's been good for the most part, but there are worse things in life than having someone throw a $100,000,000 at you.
00:13:22 · Paul Buser
[00:13:22] S1: Where does that mentality come from? And I ask that because you were 27 or so when Bending Spoons was launched. You had already had a failed startup for a couple years. You had worked in McKinsey. But going back even before that, this seems extremely, I'll say, odd or unique that you and your cofounders could have this sort of mentality. And the way I would view it in one way is inverting the typical company building mindset or venture building mindset. Wanting to go as fast as possible, but paradoxically, meaning that you have to go slow to build the foundation the right way. Were there influences from your parents, childhood, or otherwise? Anything that came to you all at that age where you were able to flip the typical company building path?
00:14:09 · Luca Ferrari
[00:14:09] S3: I don't know, think it's probably just a mix of extreme ignorancenarrow horizons. And then I'd like to think first principle, logically sound thinking. Our motivation was to try to build one of the most successful companies of all time. We knew we had close to 0% probability of achieving that, but we also thought, okay, we're probably not going to starve anyway in letting our engineers good degrees, we'll find a job if need be. If we are to try to build something from scratch, less ambitious about it, it's just more fun. Probably we get to attract better people. There's very modest downside to being wildly ambitious. If you think that way, then you're pretty much guaranteed that if you do what everybody else is doing, you will fail to achieve that objective. Maybe the smartest path to a reasonable outcome, a more mediocre outcome, cause you're likely also not to make massive mistakes if you emulate others. But if you look for a way to be outstanding in terms of your outcomes, then very likely the means will have to stand out too, at least in some ways. We decided to explore the vast universe of possible solutions to that problem and each underlying little problem, hiring, culture, technology, marketing, whatnot. And that took longer and we made mistakes that were probably avoidable, but I'm confident we stumbled upon ideas, solutions that turned out to be distinctive and powerful. It's all considered. I like it this way. It's been good, but it's been painful and long. And so I can empathize with someone who's looking maybe for a for an exit in three to four years by applying a tried and tested playbook or following input from a VC that maybe works. I don't think you get to build a Berkshire Hathaway that way. Not that you are guaranteed to if you follow what I just described, but at least you have a chance, I think.
00:16:00 · Paul Buser
[00:16:00] S1: So inspirational. I mean, we've been teaching for fifteen years at Notre Dame and have seen a thousand students. Every 22 year old comes with very similar questions every time. And for them to hear this kind of message that, I mean, in a way we think about is make time your friend. While you wanna be in a hurry, you wanna work and be ambitious as possible, you actually have a lot of time in front of you. And you need the time if you're gonna build the next Berkshire or Danaher or whatever company it is. In many ways,
00:16:28 · Luca Ferrari
[00:16:28] S3: it's like delayed gratification. There are paths for someone who's, let's say talented, especially if you're born in the right places. But generally speaking, there are paths to very high level of gratification and success with a much higher probability on a shorter timeframe. Again, could go into investment banking or consulting or join a successful scale up or be an entrepreneur in more conventional ways. And that's perfectly fine. If you're aiming for something truly massive, you need to have that urgency and work your ass off just as much, if not more and for longer. But you have to be patient on the timelines. You are basically building an engine, a rocket ship that will take you longer to take off. But once it does, it'll move 100 times the speed of your more rudimental vehicle that you're using for the other carriers. But if you measure yourself one year in two years in three years in, you look like you're trailing in many ways. Not everybody wants to work hard anyway, but even among those who won't, many are impatient and they need to see an immediate ratification occurring. And if that's your path, more like sometimes the private equity path that I want a bigger bonus this year. No moral judgment, perfectly easily understood, but you're unlikely to be an exceptional outlier twenty, thirty years down the line. I love the framing. Often,