01:46:46 · David Senra
[01:46:46] S0: Earlier, you said that assuming that first thing a company has to do is have a strategy, assuming that strategy is good, then the most important thing is talent acquisition. How do you articulate the strategy of Bending Spoons?
01:46:58 · Luca Ferrari
[01:46:58] S1: Basically, want to achieve the maximum level of operational excellence, which means getting the most out of a business possible, by any means necessary, both in our case, structural means, such as integrating everything on the same platform so that we eliminate all redundancies and we can achieve all sorts of scale advantages and network advantages, and sheer by investment in talent and technology. By any means possible, we want to achieve the greatest advantage as an operator. And once you have that, meaning a business is better off with you than with almost anybody else, once you have that for a sufficiently large number of businesses, then you're almost guaranteed to be able to compound capital very efficiently through acquisitions. Because by definition, mathematically, if a business is better off with you than with everybody else, if there are enough of those out there, you should be the best, the highest bidder when it's on sale, and the seller should still get excellent returns their sale and you get excellent returns. So we probably focus 99% of our resources and efforts being the best operator, building up that platform, unlocking as much of these structural advantages as we possibly can, and remarkably little in in the acquisition side of things. We are very deliberate, highly sophisticated, but once we have a powerful platform and these structural advantages, then it actually gets pretty easy to deliver very high returns through acquisitions. It's not that we see necessarily things in businesses that nobody else saw, just that we know those businesses are going do so much better with us than with almost anybody else. We can offer more.
01:48:38 · David Senra, Luca Ferrari
[01:48:38] S0: And that operational excellence allows you to bid higher as well. I think you said like you're pretty sure that you bid maybe 50% higher than the next highest bid on like Evernote, for example. [01:48:48] S1: Yeah. Mean, don't know if I cannot never know for absolutely sure because you don't, you know, obviously, the sell side only tells you so much, but I'm pretty confident that our offer was way, way higher than the... Which, by the way, in hindsight, we should have negotiated better. [01:49:05] S0: No, we talked about this at lunch. I think you have a very unique... Let's talk about this now. You had a very unique approach to negotiation. I'm pretty sure you explicitly said you don't want to come in as like how most people do. It's like, let me just put a really low number right now, and then you say a higher one, and then we go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
01:49:05 · David Senra, Luca Ferrari
[01:49:05] S0: No, we talked about this at lunch. I think you have a very unique... Let's talk about this now. You had a very unique approach to negotiation. I'm pretty sure you explicitly said you don't want to come in as like how most people do. It's like, let me just put a really low number right now, and then you say a higher one, and then we go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. [01:49:24] S1: I think in time, you want to be known as a I want to say generous, because obviously nobody buys a company as generos. But you want to come across or establish a reputation as someone who's trying to get the last penny out of a negotiation, you want to help the seller get good value from the transaction. But at the same time, want to be known as pretty firm. I put a number that I think is absolutely fair and highly competitive on the table. I probably think I could have gotten lower, but I'm not trying to get all the value out of this transaction at all. I wanted to get a lot of the value. But at the same time, I'm not going be available for a lot of back and forth. [01:50:09] S0: Can you tell them that upfront?
01:50:09 · David Senra, Luca Ferrari
[01:50:09] S0: Can you tell them that upfront? [01:50:11] S1: Generally, no. If they ask us, sure, but hopefully they do their research. I can only think of one case in recent memory, is actually quite recent, where we ended up raising our offer substantially because But the reason is so in that case, we were asked, forced really, by the seller to put a number on the table before we had the data we needed. And so, between not even participating or risking to having to change it a lot later, we said, okay, look, we don't know a whole lot based on what we know. We think we'd be happy to do this at between x and y. And then later, as we progressed into, you know, the sales sales process and and we got more data and we finally could form a somewhat complete opinion, we found that we could offer a lot more. And so we we increased that offer substantially. It's really rare. [01:51:07] S0: You increased the offer on your own or they said that's way too low? [01:51:10] S1: You know, don't actually remember exactly how it played out. [01:51:14] S0: How would you do that? [01:51:15] S1: Probably a mix of the two. [01:51:16] S0: How would you... Yeah. How would you do that today? I would imagine if you think this
01:51:16 · David Senra, Luca Ferrari
[01:51:16] S0: How would you... Yeah. How would you do that today? I would imagine if you think this [01:51:19] S1: is an I think I would it. I think I would do it similarly because we just didn't... We didn't have the data and the the data wouldn't be forthcoming unless we put a number on the table. I don't... We're not trying to prove a point and be dogmatic and say we only put a number on the table if we have absolute certainty. So we said, look, we are not highly confident in this number because we don't have a lot of data, [01:51:38] S0: but this is a number. Okay. So let's say in a different example, you have the numbers that you need. You put the number out. Is that number pretty firm? [01:51:45] S1: Yeah. Generally, yes. I don't think we increased it almost ever by more than five or 10%.