Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:00:01 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:01] S0: Ramp is the only platform built to make your finance team leaner, faster, and better, saving businesses 5% annually on average so you can stay focused on growth. Ramp just opened for business in The United Kingdom. So if you're running running a business in The UK, you can now use Ramp's AI powered finance platform to manage cards, expenses, bills, approvals, and accounting all in one place. I run my business on Ramp and so should you. Learn more at ramp.com/invest. Rogo is the AI platform purpose built for financial institutions serving tens of thousands of bankers and investors at hundreds of leading firms worldwide. Rogo's AI agents autonomously execute large chunk of your firm's workflows. They can screen deals, draft SIEMs, run buyer outreach, and due diligence on data rooms, all with full security and compliance handled. Every action feeds rogo intelligence, the firm's context layer, turning years of deal experience into a secure, governed institutional memory that makes each new transaction stronger than the last. To learn more, visit rogo.com/invest. OpenAI, Cursor, AMP, and Vercel all have something in common. They all use WorkOS. To achieve enterprise adoption at scale, you have to deliver on core capabilities like SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and audit logs. Instead of spending months building these mission critical capabilities yourself, you can just use WorkOS APIs to gain all of them on day zero. Visit workos.com to get started. Hello, and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and wanna go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at joincolossus.com.
00:01:56 · S1
[00:01:56] S1: Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purpose only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
00:02:25 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:02:25] S0: My guest today is Luca Ferrari. Luca is the cofounder and CEO of Bending Spoons, which he describes as 25% private equity and 75% technology company. Founded in 2013, Bending Spoons fully acquires and operates digital companies like Evernote, Meetup, Vimeo, and most recently AOL. Our conversation explores the unique model behind Bending Spoons and the culture required to scale it. Luca shares exactly how their acquisition playbook works from identifying promising businesses to rebuilding every part of them across product, design, monetization, and marketing. We discussed their approach to financing long term ownership through both debt and equity, Luca's obsession with finding and developing exceptional talent, and his decision to build the company in Europe. I found Luca's description of himself as perennially unhappy to be the clearest window into how he builds. It's a mindset that fuels his pursuit of excellence and defines the culture at Bending Spoons. Please enjoy my conversation with Luca Ferrari. For those that don't know about it, since we're in Milan today, it's not New York City. Not everyone yet knows about Bending Spoons, soon they will. Can you just tell us what it is, and then we'll go from there?
00:03:31 · Luca Ferrari
[00:03:31] S2: We are a pretty unusual beast. Unique almost, I think, as far as I can tell. I think a good representation will be 25% private equity, 75% tech company. Meaning we acquire companies as a key engine of growth. 100% acquisitions, no minor ities. And then unlike a private equity, which would typically look to sell them three, five, seven years down the line, we buy off our balance sheet to own and operate forever. And unlike a private equity, which typically would make relatively shallow interventions, maybe change the management team, We actually rethink the entire company, try to come up with a vision for the most successful version of that company and work as hard as we can to close the gap between the Cisco and that vision. And it could be rewrite the software, rearchitect the cloud infrastructure, launch lots of features, redesign the UI, optimize monetization and marketing, rebuild big chunks, sometimes the entirety of the organization. So it's very extensive, deep, time consuming work, sometimes radical work. And if we do it right, that creates a lot of value. We can reinvest in making our platform more powerful. So build better proprietary technologies, better access to talent, more knowledge and go after new bigger acquisitions.
00:04:40 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:04:40] S0: Can you say a little bit about the vision you have for the business? Not in terms of how big it will be or the number of acquisitions or anything, but five years hence, I know you care very deeply about the culture of the people here, what the home office looks like and feels like. You have a huge ambition for what you're building. Maybe describe that ambition and that vision a little bit.
00:04:59 · Luca Ferrari
[00:04:59] S2: We felt inspired at the prospect of building the company being our product. Building an institution, Berkshire Hathaway, that sort of company that people look at and think was a defining company of its generation. And so to do that scale is important. I think it's unlikely that you can be in that conversation unless the company is large and dominant. But also there needs to be some level of excellence along certain dimensions where the company really stands out vis a vis the others. And for us it's always been, besides being absolutely exceptional at the functional things, like being incredible at running these businesses, one part that we really want to be awesome at is spotting some of the best inexperienced talent in the world and being the ideal place for that talent to just skyrocket toward the maximum realization of their potential as quickly as possible. We want to be the ultimate testing and training ground for incredibly talented and motivated people. And so the company five or ten years out, I think will still be conglomerate of very interesting digital technology businesses, hopefully much more and generally the company would be bigger. And I hope we can be much stronger at everything we do and have even higher levels of talent density and hopefully inspire others to try to raise the bar in how they run their businesses. And by the way, we started in Europe. We like the idea that Europe... It's fascinating that if you think about most of the very large super successful companies globally, you think about almost entirely US or Chinese companies, historically US, now China is more. Europe has very little to offer in that regard, but it's 700,000,000 person continent. Very good education. I'm not saying we should have $10,000,000,000,000 companies, but we don't have a single one pretty much, I think last time I checked. We hope we can be part of that movement showing that you can actually build such a company. We're an international company with operations in The US too, but the deeper roots, the original roots can be here too. We are not a periphery of the empire.