00:02:43 · David Senra, Luca Ferrari
[00:02:43] S0: So you just said you're trying to build the best company there ever was? [00:02:47] S1: Yeah. Just, again, aspirationally. Don't take it... It's not it's not meant to be arrogant. I I know we have a very slim chance, but just, you know, the waking up in the morning and thinking we're not building a nice church or trying to build the greatest cathedral that anybody has ever built. That's a lot more exciting to me. Gets you further. It's more fun, energizing. Better people will wanna work with you. And I think one of the big ways in which life is interesting is surrounding yourself with amazing people, better people than than you are, if possible. [00:03:14] S0: Do your co founders feel the [00:03:15] S1: same way? You'd have to ask them. I think we probably, for the most part, I'd say. [00:03:20] S0: But is this something that you guys repeat to each other throughout the company? You're trying to build the best company ever?
00:03:20 · David Senra, Luca Ferrari
[00:03:20] S0: But is this something that you guys repeat to each other throughout the company? You're trying to build the best company ever? [00:03:25] S1: We're not big on founders. I know this is maybe ironic to say, you know, given your your your podcast, but we we try to eliminate the idea of founder from this company as much as possible. We we think it distracts people from from the company. The company is a center. And and whether you're a founder or you joined a little bit later, all that matters is your contribution, your trajectory. The people at at the company, those at least I know the best and with whom I work the closest, regardless of whether they're founders, I think broadly they share this ambition. So... Yes. But it's not necessarily a founder thing. It's more of a Venue Spoons thing. [00:04:01] S0: The way I've been describing you to other founders is, like, almost like Luca is like the Galapagos Island of, like, entrepreneurship. Right? Because if I'm not mistaken, when we were talking, you're like, well, I don't really listen to, like, podcasts. I didn't read books. I didn't study other entrepreneurs. You've kind of evolved the way you build your company, like, completely independent of anything going on around you.
00:04:22 · Luca Ferrari
[00:04:22] S1: Yeah, I think part of that is, I don't know how much the audience knows about Bending Spoons, but we started in Copenhagen, Denmark quickly thereafter moved it to Milan, Italy. These are not exactly, especially Milan, exactly and certainly not at the time over a decade ago, a center of entrepreneurial pursuit and an ecosystem where you've, you know, you turn left and right and you have all these other start up start ups or or advisers and whatnot. So... Of and course, were absolute nobodies. So it's not that we could pick up the phone and call Jeff Bezos. Right? So we just had to figure things out on our own. We were trying to build, as perishional speaking, the best company in the world. If you emulate what most people are doing, you're pretty much guaranteed to, you know, at best be mediocre, mediocre plus, maybe you execute a little bit better. But if you want to try to be the best of the best, you need to take some risks and rethink things. And so we figured, okay, let's try to experiment, invent, think from first principles, and we will make more mistakes. It will take longer than if we copied some of the tried and tested approaches, but we should be able to find at least a few insights, few new ways that will set us apart. And I think being more isolated geographically has probably played to our advantage in that regard so that we weren't under the influence of of the mantras that everybody, you know, the big startup hubs over time was was preaching. Let's give a little
00:05:47 · David Senra, Luca Ferrari
[00:05:47] S0: bit of background of Bending Spoons. You had a startup before Bending Spoons that failed, right? Yeah. Okay. What did you learn from that failure? And then what lessons did you learn from that that helped you start Bending Spoons then? [00:05:59] S1: Yeah. So that was called EverTail. We were... It went on from 2010 to 2013. We were using AI to write diaries automatically. So you would install an app and collect data and figure out what what you'd done, where you had gone and whatnot. It was actually pretty cool, but never managed to make it scale. Commercial failure. Some of the most crucial lessons were one, the importance of of talent. So we had a very small team at peak, maybe 12 people. But we saw that the contribution of the the best person we had on the team relative to, like, the, say, the medium person, forget about the the, you know, the bottom, but was easily 10 times as great, literally worlds apart. So that taught us, okay, range of productivity, at least in our field in digital technology is massive. So the value of having on board that sort of individual is gigantic. And also, that person who was performing at the peak in that group was actually one of the least experienced people. And so that showed us, okay, maybe experience, certainly valuable, but not as critical as people sometimes tell you it is. If you have someone who's really smart and really cares, often they'll be able to deliver as much value, if not a lot more value than someone with a lot more experience.
00:07:22 · David Senra, Luca Ferrari
[00:07:22] S0: Let's give a concrete So I'm just gonna pull up the notes. When we were having lunch, I was like, oh, this is too good. And I started just texting on WhatsApp. I'm like... And I think at the bottom, I say, like, these are notes for when you do the show, even though this was, like, eight months ago or whenever it was. And you you mentioned that. You're like, hey. You said something interesting. You're like, I'd rather hire young graduates. Let's talk about the Evernote story in one second. So you said most executives are overvalued or overrated in your opinion. I'd rather hire young graduates graduates. Find someone good and then saturate their capacity. Can you give examples of how you've done this? [00:07:54] S1: Why talent, let's say over experience? I think there are a few reasons for that. Number one, most of the things we do, and I mean broadly, in most industries probably, certainly in the technology industry, are not rocket science. They do not require immense amounts of notional knowledge and repeated, you know, extensive track records. They require actually a good brain and a desire to do well, to achieve first and foremost. And also our field technologically, but also in terms of customer expectations evolves very quickly. Experience gets tail relatively fast. Wait, before you go [00:08:39] S0: on, sorry, I'm going interrupt you. Explain more about customer expectations evolve rapidly in your field.
00:08:44 · Luca Ferrari
[00:08:44] S1: Yeah, I think, you know, I'm not sure how it works if you sell salt, but when it comes to selling technical tools, what people consider excellent today or an intuitive interface or effective monetization are very different from what things looked like ten or fifteen years ago. Completely different. Mean, I'm sure at least, you know, people in the audience for at least, I don't 35 years old will remember what software looked like in in the early two thousands. And, you know, by today's standards, that's primitive and almost unacceptably bad, and people would never use it or buy it. And the ways you'd build that software... And by the way, that's just the, say, customer facing layer. But then behind the scenes how and this is only something that probably people can understand if if they build software before or work with AI, the way you efficiently wrote software in the, you know, in the in 2010, there's very little resemblance to how you do that today in 2026. Whatever people learned back then, yes, some of it will port. I'm sure you are more mature emotionally, you know how to work with others and whatnot, but a lot of that experience, basically, you can throw it away. The value of accumulating many years of experience is not as great that I believe as as some people think it is. And I... Additionally, not all experience is created equal. You can actually get worse through experience. If you're exposed to low standards, for example, of performance, you'll normalize those over time, and you'll actually be a less capable team member than someone who has never been exposed to any standards. And maybe, you know, naturally is inclined to believe idealistically perhaps that the bar should be held higher. Or if you've been working for a long time in an organization where the way to progress and succeed is by pleasing others and doing what they tell you to do, even though you don't necessarily think it's optimal for the organization, call it politics. I don't know that that experience will make you a lot more capable necessarily if you, for example, join a company like Bending Spoons, where I'd like to think we're a radical meritocracy and we try to be rational in deciding and do what's right for the company. For all these reasons, experience can be extremely valuable, but it's not necessarily extremely valuable.