Luminate with Lan Anh Vu
00:19:27 · Lan Anh Vu
[00:19:27] S1: How are you scaling as a CEO? Was it easy for you to make the transition from being a founder to CEO?
00:19:36 · Luca Ferrari
[00:19:36] S0: You know, it's not that you switch from five people to 500 people overnight. It's at least it wasn't the case for us. So we, we progressed somewhat smoothly. So the challenges keep evolving. So I think I have probably three pieces of advice that I can share with others in my position on their way to similar job. I would say one is to condition yourself to continually take taking a step back and checking that you're working on the highest impact stuff you could be working on. It's very easy to get lost in details and process and things that are albeit important not the most important stuff you could be doing. The second one is to periodically measure where you invest your time literally on a per hour basis for a few weeks. Take note of what you do and you will probably be surprised by how much time you invest in things that you probably shouldn't be doing. At least you shouldn't be investing as much time as you do in. And the third one is to be uncompromising on hiring and coaching. Do the best job you can at those and don't be hasty because even though hiring a person earlier was not as good as a candidate you could get in a few months can help you in the short term, it will come back to haunt you over time, even in the short term, even if you look at it after a few months, as you'll be struggling a lot more to delegate and scale the organization because now the people around you are not as strong as contributors as they could be. And so you thought you would be, you were making a decision that would speed things up and ultimately just reduces your ability to scale pretty soon. So yeah, summarizing, focus on impact, track your time and adjust accordingly and take the time it takes to hire as well as possible and coach a lot. Even though that seems to be slowing you down, it will probably be the strongest tool of all when it comes to scaling the company, including putting you in a position where you can effectively delegate.
00:21:45 · Lan Anh Vu, Luca Ferrari
[00:21:45] S1: Did you have to change yourself as a person? I mean in the early days there were only five of you guys but now you have 500 plus people and the company is in a more structured organization. So did you have to change yourself as a person? [00:22:03] S0: One big change, so the how, like the intrinsics of the process, I'm not sure. I guess there's a lot of psychological analysis to be done there. But I think the, I can certainly speak about one of the aspects I have to work on. And that's by nature, I'm a people pleaser. I really want everybody to agree on every decision and be happy about everything. And as you scale, so generally speaking, rarely will the best decision be the one that makes everybody happy. That will probably be the mediocre decision that doesn't get anybody upset, but also doesn't make everybody fully happy. So the best decisions will probably upset some people, hopefully a minority, but still they will upset some people. And so if you want to be a good decision maker, well, it's critical that you listen to input from as many people as possible. Ultimately, you have to have the courage of making decisions, even though they will result in some people liking you less. And so it took me quite a while to develop the discipline, the courage, so to say, to make a decision that I think is right for the company in the long run, even though that will get a few people to not like me or like me less. Not that I'm perfect at it, but I've gotten a lot better with time compared to what I, what I used to be.
00:22:03 · Luca Ferrari, Lan Anh Vu
[00:22:03] S0: One big change, so the how, like the intrinsics of the process, I'm not sure. I guess there's a lot of psychological analysis to be done there. But I think the, I can certainly speak about one of the aspects I have to work on. And that's by nature, I'm a people pleaser. I really want everybody to agree on every decision and be happy about everything. And as you scale, so generally speaking, rarely will the best decision be the one that makes everybody happy. That will probably be the mediocre decision that doesn't get anybody upset, but also doesn't make everybody fully happy. So the best decisions will probably upset some people, hopefully a minority, but still they will upset some people. And so if you want to be a good decision maker, well, it's critical that you listen to input from as many people as possible. Ultimately, you have to have the courage of making decisions, even though they will result in some people liking you less. And so it took me quite a while to develop the discipline, the courage, so to say, to make a decision that I think is right for the company in the long run, even though that will get a few people to not like me or like me less. Not that I'm perfect at it, but I've gotten a lot better with time compared to what I, what I used to be. [00:23:27] S1: I want to talk about your struggle with Bending Spoons. At what point did you think, you know, we're actually doing this, we're actually going to make this? Was there any moment when you felt like that?
00:23:42 · Luca Ferrari, Lan Anh Vu
[00:23:42] S0: Well, it's it's a roller coaster, like they say. I don't wanna be I think there are days where you feel you're on top of the world and, you know you will succeed and then or you think you do. And other days where you are depressed and think everything is terrible. Interestingly, has happened consistently almost at every stage, regardless of the prior track record of success or failure. I guess I was a little bit more worried early on where when we had absolutely nothing to show for than I am today, but I'm still very worried of many days today even though we have a track record of I would say good results up to now. I think the more you achieve, the more you'd like to achieve. You see things, you know, you always, if you're ambitious, you probably always gonna always want to go 10x in terms of the impact, the size and the level of pride you can have for what you're built. So it's not that you have a feel on them. And also the more, the more you achieve, the more there is to lose and failure gets more hurtful if it occurs, I presume. So, as they say, you know, the higher you fly, the lower you can fall. So that also plays a part in balancing things. And third, I think if you assess your progress with intellectual honesty, I think you will see that luck plays a big role, at least in this profession, this world, a huge role. As you realize that luck plays such a big role, you also feel less in control of your future, which can be disheartening at times. [00:25:32] S1: Can you give us an example of the toughest moment that you had?
00:25:37 · Luca Ferrari
[00:25:37] S0: Sure. I mean, one very tough moment, possibly the toughest, I can't say for sure, was pretty early on. So as I mentioned earlier, we came from this two and a half years of really hard work with Evertale, this first startup, and then it fails entirely. We have to trash everything we've done. There was no value in that other than the learning and a little bit of the team that partly worked on the new project, the new startup too. So we were already exhausted emotionally from that failure. And as we were trying to get Bene Spoons off the ground, we had no capital, only €40,000 or about probably $45,000 that were left from the previous startup. And that they were the bylaws of that startup required that that money would go back to the investor. But because it was so little, the investor didn't think that it was worth the legal costs and complications to liquidate the company and get the money back. And they basically gifted it to us. So we had this €40,000 which was not a lot of money, as you can imagine, as funding for a new company and, and that we're emotionally exhausted, we're looking in all possible ways to generate some revenues early on to sustain the new project, the new company. We started trying to get clients, although we knew we wanted to build a company that builds its own products and doesn't do client work. We didn't want to build an agency. In fact, we're not an agency today. We have our own products with our own users. But early on, we thought that doing client work be a relatively easy way to generate some revenues and avoid going bankrupt so that we could then invest in building our own products. So we tried super hard the first few months to get clients. I remember sending thousands of emails, spending the whole day on the phone, and we couldn't get a client. I think we got one client for a project worth maybe 10 or €20,000. And it was exhausting spending twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, trying to get clients and getting no clients and seeing these €40,000 in the bank get burned bit by bit. So that was exhausting and I remember really having an emotional breakdown at least once. I even cried. I remember one of my co founders was great. He supported me there. I'm sure others had similar issues. Maybe they didn't express them in the same way, but that was really tough.