00:54:49 · Luca Ferrari, David Senra
[00:54:49] S1: I think sometimes, course, one of the greatest entrepreneurs, right, to ever do it. And I think a lot of people focus on the eye for detail. Certainly had that. The perception of what consumers would want. Certainly good at it. I think maybe that wasn't even like his main thing, but I believe what we would call extreme ownership in his case just is we'll probably call it differently, but I think deep down it will be the same thing. Just he cared so badly about seeing Apple succeed the way he thought it should, like, by building those amazing products. And and when you want something so badly, you're not guaranteed to win, obviously, but it just sets you apart. Because there's million or a [00:55:34] S0: thousand different little decisions you're gonna have to make, and you're just going to pay attention and care more about every single little decision. I've I've mentioned this quote so many times on on these conversations we get to have with these founders on the show, but I think Josh Kushner just... It's one of my favorite quotes I've ever heard. Josh's point was just like, if you have to pick the person that is the smartest or the person that has the most experience or the person that wants it more, you always pick the person that wants it more. [00:55:56] S1: Oh, yeah. [00:55:56] S0: I think that's Totally. Kind of where you're getting with extreme ownership.
00:55:56 · David Senra, Luca Ferrari
[00:55:56] S0: I think that's Totally. Kind of where you're getting with extreme ownership. [00:55:58] S1: Completely. Look. We... What we found is that there is a level of, let's call it intelligence, broadly speaking, not just purely, let's say, logical, analytical, but that's necessary, at least in our endeavors. But after you pass a certain threshold, which is admittedly a fairly high threshold, but we're not talking about an ingenious level, then it's almost all how badly you want Like, you... Do you really wanna be amazing? I was talking about this with, again, some new joiners yesterday or or the day before. I brought up brought up the example of Rafael Nadal in tennis. I think I've said this before. Most experts I've talked to believe he wasn't even probably a top 50 talent in his generation, but went down as one of the three best for sure. Some say the best or second best to ever do it. And where he really stood out was that extreme. Ownership. He just woke up in the morning, and he was like, I'm gonna be the best tennis player I can possibly be. I'll give it my all. 100%. And Did [00:56:55] S0: you read his autobiography? It's called Rafa. I haven't. You should. I think you'd be interested because, like, a lot of people don't know the amount of injuries that he had when he was younger. [00:57:03] S1: He shouldn't have even been able to play [00:57:05] S0: at all, much less be one of
00:57:06 · Luca Ferrari
[00:57:06] S1: the best ever do it. Unbelievable. Absolutely. Like, what I said to those new joiners, I told them, I don't believe there is almost any chance you will fail to have an amazing career, at least at Bending Spoons, probably almost anywhere, certainly at Bending Spoons where we try to be extremely meritocratic, if you really bring it, like if you're an extreme owner. I would bet there's less than a 1% chance you fail to have an amazing career because we know you're smart, We tested that. We're unlikely unless you cheated somehow. I'm unlikely to be wrong. You have the... You know, you studied what you needed to study, so you have some of the foundations. It's almost all about do you come to work to be amazing, to be better today than you were yesterday, to see your team be better, to see the company take a step in the right direction, or do you come to work basically waiting for the day to be to be over? You know, like, of course, you're gonna try to be okay at it, but you don't really care too much as long as you're you have a job and you're in your mind. And if you're part of the former group, you'll you'll do extremely well for sure. So that's, you know, really a a key cultural tenet for us. We we we select for it. We try to to foster it. We will much rather have a smaller team of people who feel that way than vice versa. And by the way, it's contagious. So if have a high density of people who feel like they're highly accountable, proactive... Because if you're an extreme owner, so you care tremendously, you're can be entrepreneurial, because you'll be paranoid about things that could go wrong and enthusiastic about new ideas and how you can improve things. If I ask you to do something, you will not forget, you get it done. More so, you'll even come back and do more things than I expected you to, and that will be incredibly exciting for me. And I don't want to show you that I can be just as good. So it's just there is an escalation of positive reinforcement that you accomplish if there is a high density of that feeling within the team. As soon as you dilute that, the people who feel that either leave or lose it. You can't have an extreme owner. Like, Steve Jobs famously was was looking for a players, and I I think he was looking for people who who had that desire, that drive to be...
00:59:06 · Luca Ferrari, David Senra
To to do something amazing even even before looking for people who are brilliant. Obviously, you wanna have both if you can, but you can never have a think... I think a high performance team where more than a small fraction of people lack extreme ownership. So that's really number one. And then there's, you know, many other things that are important, but secondary to this. [00:59:26] S0: What are some of the things that also important?
00:59:28 · Luca Ferrari
[00:59:28] S1: Yeah, one thing that we call relentless simplification, we believe that most things don't matter. Most things do more harm than good. However, humans have a tendency to add complexity, do things and do those things that destroy value. So if you leave an organization, almost any environment, let's say unattended, and you don't provide guidance in this regard, it will tend to become more complicated. People will be adding parts. And when I say parts, it could be expanding a team, it could be adding a step to a process, adding an entire new process if it's a product, adding a feature to the product, new rules. I'm making a general point, but it applies to almost any human endeavor. People will tend to add pieces, very rarely remove pieces. And with every piece that you're adding to this ensemble, this system, you're not adding complexity linearly because you're not just adding with the piece, you're also adding interdependencies, interconnections with some and sometimes all of their pieces. And so if you go from three to four pieces, the system is not getting, say, 33% more complicated, it's maybe getting 40% more complicated or 50% depending on the connections and how these new connections impact the other connections. Most human organizations, if you don't make a conscious effort to achieve simplicity, so avoiding this increasing complexity and embodied with strong complexity, we'll go down that path. That's how we got to our modern society with all the bureaucracy and complicated regulation. A lot of it, or almost all of it, probably when it was introduced, it was meant to be a good thing and maybe in a vacuum it was, but then people fail to account for the cost of these interconnections and frictions. So we have this value or this principle whereby we ask everyone who works here to first of all, every time someone is suggesting that we should be adding complexity, the burden of proof is on those making that suggestion. The people who support the thesis that we shouldn't be adding that complexity don't need to prove it. They're done. It's just to raise a flag and say, I don't think we should. So the burden of proof is on those who want to add complexity, which helps reduce the addition of complexity dramatically, and the complexity you add tends to be hopefully more often not good complexity because you have to prove it.
01:01:52 · Luca Ferrari
And so hopefully, if you're intellectually honest, that should be a good idea. Then the other part of relentless simplification is that we want people to be on the lookout for existing complexity and suggest that we should be removing it. Understanding how we operate and the biases that accompany us throughout our lives is very important. Charlie Munger famously studied biases, and I think knowing your weaknesses or likely weaknesses is 50% of avoiding them or overcoming them. So knowing that we as humans tend to be this thing called consistency bias, also inertia bias. I mean, I've heard it, you know, slightly different things called with with slightly different names. Essentially, we tend to assume the status quo is fine and we focus on deltas that happen, new things that are added or changes. We stop seeing, we become blind to our surroundings as they stay the same day after day. And so we ask our colleagues and all of us to make a conscious effort to question what's already there. The longer it's been there, the more we should be questioning whether it's still an F positive so we can look for things we can get rid of.