Luminate with Lan Anh Vu
00:09:26 · Luca Ferrari, Lan Anh Vu
We opened a position, say on LinkedIn, got 10 CVs and interviewed two people, hired one. And that's not to say that the people who joined the team were not good professionals in general, because they were, but they were just almost random selections and that doesn't generally work out well. I think you should be much more thoughtful as to what really you need for that position in that team, for that product, and then run a much more extensive and thoughtful and sophisticated selection process to find the person that fits that position as well as possible. This is something we have done with our second company, Bending Spoons. And that's proven important for us, but we didn't do it with that startup at the time. [00:10:13] S1: Yeah. So I want to ask about persistence versus giving up and moving on. How do you know though when to keep going and when to give up? [00:10:23] S0: We ran out of money. That was pretty, pretty easy. I'd like to tell you that we knew we'd do much better with the next one. I guess we felt that way. But the real reason is that we, we ran out of money. We didn't, we couldn't raise more. And then we had to shut it down. [00:10:44] S1: How did you get through failures? I mean, in The US people are failure tolerant. You know, they say try again, try harder. But here in Europe, is perceived as negative, shameful. So what's your approach to failure and how do you get through it?
00:11:04 · Luca Ferrari, Lan Anh Vu
[00:11:04] S0: Well, it sucks, of course. And it's true that in Europe there is a bit of a stigma, at least more so than in other places. I think something that, a couple of things that really helped. One was as we saw that we were failing, we had a pretty clear idea about some of the mistakes we've made like the two I mentioned earlier. And we couldn't wait to do it again so that we could avoid making the same mistakes and have a better chance. So the feeling that failing also meant having a fresh start where we could do things better, that was energizing. I think if you think about it that way, can help see it more as an opportunity than just a failure. Of course, it's still failure. I mean, we would have preferred to succeed the first time around, I guess that was not an option in the end. And then the second thing was that we had a really strong relationship among ourselves, especially you know, the three co founders I mentioned, but also a couple of people who had joined the project later and who helped start Bending Spoons subsequently. And when you have a relationship with a lot of trust, a lot of mutual respect and admiration, and you have determined that you're excited to work with that person or those people in the long run, then, you know, sharing the burden of failure helps as opposed to feeling that it's all on your shoulders. [00:12:31] S1: So how did you get from Evertale to Bending Spoons? What was the founding moment? How did you get the idea for the second startup?
00:12:41 · Luca Ferrari
[00:12:41] S0: So with Bending Spoons, we had a pretty unusual approach to building a company. Most companies are started to build a specific product and that's the way we started, or the approach we followed as started Evertale, the first startup. The Bene Spoons, perhaps because we got burned with Evertale, perhaps because as we got smarter about entrepreneurship, we found what we thought would be a better way. We chose to take a different approach that is rather than building a specific product, we chose to build a platform of technologies competencies, employer brand talent, company culture, data that's optimized for operating a variety of digital products. So we build the engine that builds the product as opposed to building the product directly. That has pros and cons compared to the more conventional approach. But I think one of the advantages is that it enabled us not to put all of our eggs in the same basket product wise. We didn't have to have the right idea and hope that it will be successful for us to survive as a company, thrive and grow. We could take multiple shots at it. And so that's what we did. We started with small products, small opportunities, but also low risk, generated a little bit of cash flow from those and reinvested in improving our competencies, our technology, our employer brand, expand the team, and improve our company culture, launch or acquire new product, rinse and repeat. And ten years later, because it's ten years in June that we started Bending Spoons, we have achieved some good results with about half a billion people who have used one or more of our products and currently over a 100,000,000 monthly active users.
00:14:30 · Lan Anh Vu, Luca Ferrari
[00:14:30] S1: Wow, amazing. Talk to me a little bit about the internals of how Bending Spoons is run, how things are located, what is the process? It's like on the inside, what does that look like? You know, how many people are you now? [00:14:45] S0: Yeah, so it's about 500 people in total. The coal won another spooners. So it's a lot of Spooners and we have a lot of us work in what we call the platform. So all of the horizontal non product specific technologies and operations Say there will be teams working on building advanced marketing technologies or general purpose AI or developer experience tooling. There's dozens of such teams and then we have product teams that you can imagine they operate a little bit like if they were a company in and of themselves. So they have their software engineering, product management, product design, data analysis. All of these functions represented within the team and these teams just run one or more products. And then over time, we allocate, we continually allocate resources, capital, and time toward the opportunities, the product opportunities that we think are the most promising at that particular time. [00:15:54] S1: You said that you have 500 people right now, right? [00:15:59] S0: Yep. [00:15:59] S1: And I heard that you have a near zero turnover rate. What's your secret?
00:15:59 · Lan Anh Vu, Luca Ferrari
[00:15:59] S1: And I heard that you have a near zero turnover rate. What's your secret? [00:16:06] S0: Yeah, well, we have near zero unprompted turnover rate. Wow. Well, I don't know. Tried to build the best workplace we could. The guiding principle is to create a place to work where for the people who make these decisions, who design these systems, who try to improve the workplace, we always try to ask ourselves what would a workplace where we would want to work for for decades, what would it look like? And then we try to create that, you know, make that vision a reality. It boils down in my experience to a large degree to hiring fantastic people who fit the culture well and are talented and passionate, and then giving them a lot of freedom and responsibility to operate. I think if you work with people who are amazing and you have a lot of responsibility, but also the freedom to pursue those objectives more or less on your own terms. Of course, there are always some compromises to be made. I think 80% of what makes an awesome workplace is already taken care of. And then if you add on top competitive compensation and good benefits, that's important but I think that's a little bit less important than it has to be adequate but for it to really be amazing, the workplace, I think it's about the people for the most part. So that's where we place the craziest focus. [00:17:37] S1: You said that you hire fantastic people passionate about their job and their work. Talk to us about your hiring process. How do you hire?
00:17:49 · Luca Ferrari
[00:17:49] S0: Well, first of all, you need to know what you're looking for. I find that many people hire, they have a vague idea what they need and then they start hiring. Rather, you have to think really hard about what you need in each position and you have to be very selective with criteria so you can't at the same time want someone who's smart, hardworking, passionate, good team player, empathetic with the seven years of experience in that particular field. Like that person just doesn't exist. And so if you have too many criteria, you try to verify with your hire, you're gonna hire someone who's basically mediocre on everything. Rather, you should focus on hiring someone who's exceptional at one or two things and then create teams where the collective is exceptional on all the things that are needed, but not one individual necessarily is. So first of all, be clear on what you need. Second of all, be very selective with your criteria so you don't try to hire for everything which only leads to mediocrity. Then try to develop a selection process where you test for those criteria, for those qualities as accurately as possible. And that generally means practical work rather than interviews, which are really tend to be really biased in their outcomes and rather than merely relying on how the candidate sells themselves to you. So look at actual achievements and then test people practically. Those are the best ways in my experience to be predictive with your hiring assessments.