01:03:55 · Luca Ferrari, David Senra
[01:03:55] S1: It got super simple. [01:03:56] S0: Yeah, it's got all kinds of weird shit and wires coming out of there, and then the second version's a little less, and then the third one's just beautiful. And I accidentally... I actually posted the clip, like, two days ago of Toby saying this on the podcast, and then I just quote treated it with the picture of the the raptor, and then somebody asked for Elon's explanation. He goes into and responds to, like, how he thinks about this process. But he's completely obsessed with the going ultra hardcore on simplification, on deletion. [01:04:21] S1: It is superpower. Super, super powerful. Because, yes, it breeds speed, scalability also, besides which is a slightly different thing. [01:04:30] S0: But you just nailed it. It's like, even goes into, like, well, if I have, like, the complexity is nonlinear, like you just said. If I have a 100 parts in this engine compared to if I have five, like, does the supply chain look like? What does the manufacturing look What is repairing it? Figuring out what actually went wrong? There's just a million other things that get more complicated with more complexity.
01:04:50 · Luca Ferrari
[01:04:50] S1: Both people don't focus on simplification. For some reason, I think it's really probably there are anthropologic reasons. There are certainly societal reasons, but people do not focus on simplification unless, again, they're, you know, unusual, you know, radical lateral thinkers like Elon or or you teach them. But when they do, the second problem, they tend to be incremental in it. But often, by far the biggest wins in terms of simplification is complete removal. For example, just said Elon is a master, in our context, I remember we were banging our heads against the wall a decade ago, approximately, with job titles. So we, like pretty much every company we had, we were very small, but still enough people that job titles were a thing. So you wanted to, you know, maybe have the senior this, staff that, or director. And we were trying to develop definitions, who should be a director. You know, like you need to... If that exists, if it's a thing, you probably need to define it. Spending time trying to define it. And then you assign someone that title, whether it's senior engineer, and then the other guy who's not senior engineer is disappointed. Why is she senior engineer and not senior engineer? Well, because of this or that, so you need to have that conversation. Then it's emotional draining. At some point, we were looking for ways to streamline it and simplifying it, and someone said, why do we even have titles? What's the benefit of titles? And and someone else is like, well, you need titles. Everybody has titles. And why do people have titles? Let's really try to dig deep into the root cause, because I agree. I mean, everybody has said probably there's some benefit. I mean, let's not be arrogant. There's probably some benefit. What what... What's that benefit? And we ultimately determined that the benefit was that people really needed titles for, let's say, bragging rights. It feels good to be able to to show progress in one's career, and they're useful if you need to find a new job, to be able to very conveniently and efficiently convey a level of experience or capability you have achieved. And so we were like, okay, but all we're saying here is probably true, but also not something that the company needs to be involved with. Right?
01:06:54 · Luca Ferrari
And so we just got rid of titles, and we told people, you can pick your title for your CV, LinkedIn, whatever. We we don't need to know. We don't wanna know. We don't need to approve it. We don't wanna see it. Just don't embarrass us. Like, you know, don't... You're a new hire. Don't say you're the CTO because then people will question our integrity as a company. But as long as it's broadly reasonable, we're good. We have never introduced them again. We don't have any titles. I mean, the person runs product, which technically would be called a CPO. We have an algorithm. It's just product management lead. As simple as that. It's completely automated. What do you mean it's completely automated? The organization is based on algorithmic rules, so that if you have direct reports and if these reports are product managers, automatically this tool will call you product management lead. But whether you have two or 200, you're a product management lead. So there's no discussion. We don't need to agree whether you are or aren't. There's no senior, junior, director, VP. And I just made the example of the, let's say, top most leader in product for us, it's just... This has the same quote unquote job title as a person leading one person. And if he needs to, you know, do something with his LinkedIn, he could put whatever he wants out there, and it's just we never have to have this discussion. So we never looked back, we probably saved easily hundreds if not thousands of personal hours in terms of defining the terms and having emotionally draining discussions with people. Never had a problem, not single instance of someone complaining that we didn't formally assign to them my title ever, ever out of, at this point, many hundreds, actually multiple thousands of people. So that's an example of something that everybody does a certain way, that if you are trying to simplify incrementally, maybe you achieve a little bit of uplift, maybe 5%. But if you get rid of it completely, it's liberating. It's a 10x improvement potentially or whatever the baseline they want to... However you want to measure it. And often, not always, but often find these opportunities on a product, get rid of an entire part of the product.
01:08:56 · Luca Ferrari
2% of people use it, it's adding complexity to code base, bugs, issues, and sure, someone will be disappointed, but the 98% of people who don't use it, you can serve them so much better that one year on down the line, you'll be two x as as well off. Just do that. Don't slowly transition out a million migrations, headaches, issues.
01:09:15 · David Senra
[01:09:15] S0: I found one of my all time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. AppLovin allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovin ads are full screen video ads that are watched for an average of thirty five seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal and AppLovin achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So you wanna get started quickly before all of your competitors are on Applovin. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com. Before we go back to these other cultural tenants of you, tell me what this automated system you just described that's like running the company in the background. What is this?
01:10:33 · Luca Ferrari
[01:10:33] S1: Yeah, wouldn't say it runs the company in the background, but we are pretty fanatical about technology in general. I personally was involved with AI in 2010, which at the time, it looked weird because it wasn't a thing really today. Obviously, if you're now building a startup with AI, people look look you at What the heck are you doing? Of course, you should be building a startup. You know? Carried with us this passion for using technology and cutting edge tools to be more productive, more effective. We have invested pretty heavily at Bending Spoons over this point, over a decade to develop basically you can look at it as an operating system, at this point over 50 proprietary tools that run almost everything that we do or at least supported through automation. And then we buy companies and it's almost like installing them on this operating system and a lot of the operations are subsequently run homogeneously, consistently and very efficiently through it. For example, we have one system to manage payments. We have one system to run AB tests. We have one system to predict user lifetime value. We have one system for recruiting and talent predictions. We have one system to orchestrate the many AI models we use internally to run our operations, so we always use the ideal one in terms of cost, quality. We have one system to authorize different colleagues to have access to different systems, let's say credentials management, one system for data aggregation and processing, and the list goes on and on. And we keep refining them and we have kind of an open source community internally whereby we have platform teams who own these different tools and make them better by the day. But then each of our businesses, as they use them, they find ways that they come up short. They can add features, fixed bugs, and as they improve them, these improvements are propagated and automatically made available to the entire portfolio of businesses. So adding businesses actually makes us better as a whole, not just because we're adding some revenue, but because we are adding another entry point for innovation, improvement ideas on this kind of operating system. And it's been a boon for us. It's hard to estimate exactly how much in terms of efficiency effectiveness it's added, but it's certainly trustworthy, I'd say.