Luminate with Lan Anh Vu
00:00:02 · Luca Ferrari, Lan Anh Vu
[00:00:02] S0: Hi, everybody. This is Luca Ferrari. I'm one of the cofounders and the CEO of Bending Spoons. We're a technology platform with over a 100,000,000 monthly active users. And, you're listening to Luminate, with Lan Anh Vu. Happy to be here. [00:00:27] S1: Hello there and welcome back to Luminate podcast. I'm your host Lan Anh Vu. Today's guest is Luca Ferrari, co founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, one of the world's leading mobile developers. The company's apps are currently being used by more than 100,000,000 people every month, with over 500,000,000 app downloads to date. Its apps include popular video editing tool, Splice, and AI based photo editor, Remini. Luca has raised over $600,000,000 from Sanpaolo, Ryan Reynolds, Bradley Cooper, Eric Schmidt, and many more. In this conversation, Luca takes us through his career where he got his entrepreneurial back. We also get into some of Luca's lowest moments, including a couple of times he actually broke down. So I think you're going to learn a lot from him. All right, now let's start the show. Luca, welcome to the show. [00:01:38] S0: Happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
00:01:38 · Luca Ferrari, Lan Anh Vu
[00:01:38] S0: Happy to be here. Thank you for having me. [00:01:40] S1: Oh, we're super excited to have you on Luminate. So I want to jump right in because there's so much talk about your career journey. I know you were born and raised in a small town in Italy with just 900 people and most of the people there are farmers. And you've always been a curious person. You love to learn new things. And when you were five years old, you told your mom that your greatest dream was to know everything. So I love to hear more about your childhood. What was it like growing up? [00:02:14] S0: I think it was a pretty, pretty good childhood. I was pretty lucky to have loving parents. I'm a single, I'm an only child. I was raised with this nice village you just described. Small but tightly knit community, supportive community of people. So I had a chance early on to learn the value of mutual support and honesty, work, hardworking people, generally speaking, my parents, first and foremost. So I learned that too. And yeah, as you said, I was fascinated from a very early age with knowledge, insight, thinking more generally. And I had this dream of acquiring old knowledge, which I realized was impossible, and I found that frustrating. I just like the idea that there would be something that could be known that I still wouldn't know. Yeah, but I was very little, as you said, five or six. So at that age, I guess you have dreams that are not always grounded. But I think you also have that naivete, retaining some of that is probably a good thing throughout life.
00:02:14 · Luca Ferrari, Lan Anh Vu
[00:02:14] S0: I think it was a pretty, pretty good childhood. I was pretty lucky to have loving parents. I'm a single, I'm an only child. I was raised with this nice village you just described. Small but tightly knit community, supportive community of people. So I had a chance early on to learn the value of mutual support and honesty, work, hardworking people, generally speaking, my parents, first and foremost. So I learned that too. And yeah, as you said, I was fascinated from a very early age with knowledge, insight, thinking more generally. And I had this dream of acquiring old knowledge, which I realized was impossible, and I found that frustrating. I just like the idea that there would be something that could be known that I still wouldn't know. Yeah, but I was very little, as you said, five or six. So at that age, I guess you have dreams that are not always grounded. But I think you also have that naivete, retaining some of that is probably a good thing throughout life. [00:03:24] S1: And so when you were a little boy in high school, what did you think you were gonna be?
00:03:32 · Luca Ferrari
[00:03:32] S0: Well, so high school, I don't remember. I remember that before then was hoping to become a forest guard. I'm not sure whether that's the proper term in English, but basically those people who patrol forests and just check that poachers don't get to the animals and no fires are started or the forest is protected. Loved animals and nature and that felt like a noble profession. That was my dream as a little kid. And I think there was a gap in my teenage years where I didn't really think about what kind of person I should become in terms of work. And then later, I resumed thinking about that probably around when I got closer to 18 and then my university years. I felt I was upset that I didn't know what to do with my life. I had this urge of building something, but I didn't know how to do it and what that something could be. Again, I guess it was a mix of me being naive and definitely quite ignorant about the ways of the world and my surroundings up to that point, having been very provincial, I wasn't raised in a big city or wasn't accustomed, didn't have any exposure to people who had an international mindset or an entrepreneurial mindset. But then at university I was lucky enough to meet other students that were much more knowledgeable and had thought about the opportunities that, you know, lie with entrepreneurship and technological innovation. So they just introduced me to the internet. I only had access to the internet kind of late in my teenage years. So I was pretty behind I think in many ways at that time. I discovered blogs like TechCrunch and what people were doing. It was just instant love for me. I was like, Oh my God, this is what I want to do too. I want to build something big, valuable, admirable that I can be proud of and that can last a long time and make a positive impact. I want to be part of building that. Let's get started. That was my immediate reaction, I would say.
00:05:46 · Lan Anh Vu, Luca Ferrari
[00:05:46] S1: Right. And talk to us about, your time in Denmark, because that was a defining moment for you because you started your first company there in Denmark and not in Italy. [00:05:59] S0: Yeah, that's right. So I completed my studies there and then I was very lucky to meet two people who I became close friends with and who I also developed great admiration for, hopefully that was mutual. So we decided to start a company together. And because we were in Denmark, a little bit out of inertia, we decided to start a company there. I mean Denmark is a good place to start a company. Know, low bureaucracy, good talent, good education. So it was actually not a bad choice anyway. [00:06:36] S1: So this first startup is called Evertale. [00:06:39] S0: Yeah. [00:06:40] S1: You managed to raise €1,000,000 for Evertale. But after two and a half years, the business wasn't able to become self sustaining. So you shut it down. Talk to us why it failed.
00:06:55 · Luca Ferrari
[00:06:55] S0: Well, I mean it failed for multiple reasons. Number one, we had this idea of creating a self writing diary of a user's life. So you would install the app and then the app would we're talking 2010, so it's quite a long time ago. At the time, to my knowledge, there was nothing like this. So it was a pretty innovative idea. A lot of people wanted to have a diary, most people wouldn't do so because it takes a lot of time. So we figured we're gonna solve the problem for them, it's going to be huge. And it would be completely automated because this app would collect all the necessary information by just being active in the background on your phone. And then you could just amend the information, make your diary better. It would be private to you. It sounded nice. A lot of people we tested the idea with seemed interested. But then once we actually developed it, most people either freaked out because they realized that it was pretty invasive of their privacy, Although we didn't share the data with anybody, but still seeing that an app collects enough data about you to be able to tell you where you've been, what you've done, what you've met, things like this was pretty shocking to a lot of people. So that was the first reason why it didn't work. And the second reason was that even those who were fine with that and trusted us with the data, they wouldn't come back to the app. They would once or twice, but then, you know, it wasn't something they interacted with. So the problem there was not so much that the idea didn't work, like it's not unusual for an innovative idea not to work, but that we had spent so much time just among ourselves, co founders, early team, developing the idea, discussing the idea, we had not run any early, at least not any serious extensive, any early experiments with potential customers to verify some of the hypotheses that were underlying the idea. And so we spent way more time building something that had zero value than it would have been necessary to get to the same conclusion. So I guess the learning there is don't spend too much time in the garage, actually talk to potential customers, build really rough MVPs to test what you have in mind, check that it makes some sense and that someone will be excited about it. The second mistake we made was that we were too superficial in building the team.