The Playbook on Buying and Running Companies Forever

I remember the stress levels with working our ass off for 3 years on the startup, which failed. Having this little money to try to make the dream come true. I had a real breakdown. 10 years go by and you look back and you're like, oh wow, I remember we were making half a million a year. Now we're making a billion. There is no shortcut. And I've seen nobody try because they just understand it's just too painful.

Luca, this is going to be very fun. We first met a couple of years ago, and I've followed the Bending Spoon story ever since with great interest. For those that don't know about it, since we're in Milan today, it's not, you know, in New York City, not everyone yet knows about Bending Spoon. Soon they will. Can you just tell us what it is, and then we'll go from there?

Right. We are a pretty unusual beast. Yeah. Unique almost, I think, as far as I can tell. I think a good representation would be 25% private equity, 75% tech company, meaning we acquire companies as a key engine of growth, 100% acquisitions, no minorities, like, and then unlike a private equity, which would typically look to sell them 3, 5, 7 years down the line, we buy off our balance sheet to own and operate forever. And unlike a private equity, which typically would make relatively shallow interventions, maybe change the management team, rethink the entire company, uh, try to come up with a vision for the most successful version of that company, and, and then work as hard as we can to close the gap between the status quo and that vision. And it could be rewrite the software, re-architect the cloud infrastructure, launch lots of features, redesign the UI, optimize monetization and marketing, rebuild big chunks, sometimes the entirety of the organization. So it's very Extensive, deep, time-consuming work, sometimes radical work. And if we do it right, that creates a lot of value we can reinvest in making our— call it our platform— more powerful. So build better proprietary technologies, better access to talent, more knowledge, and go after new, bigger acquisitions.

Can you say a little bit about the vision you have for the business, not in terms of how big it will be or the number of acquisitions or anything, but 5 years hence? I know you care very deeply about the culture of the people here. And kind of what the home office looks like and feels like. What— you have a huge ambition for what you're building. Maybe describe that ambition and that vision a little bit.

We felt inspired at the prospect of building, like, the company being our product, building an institution, you know, Berkshire Hathaway, that sort of company that people look at and think was a defining company of its generation. And so, to do that, scale is important. I think it's unlikely that you can be in that conversation unless the company is large and dominant. But also, there needs to be some level of excellence along certain dimensions where the company really stands out vis-à-vis the others. And for us, it's always been— besides being absolutely exceptional at the functional things, like being incredible at running these businesses, one part that we really want to be awesome at is spotting some of the best inexperienced talent in the world and being the ideal place for that talent to just skyrocket toward the maximum realization of their potential as quickly as possible. So we want to be the ultimate testing and training ground for incredibly talented and motivated people. And so the company 5 or 10 years out, I think, will still be a conglomerate of very interesting digital technology businesses, hopefully much more, and generally the company would be bigger. And I hope we can be much, much stronger at everything we do and have even higher levels of talent density and hopefully inspire others to try to raise the bar in how they run their businesses. And by the way, we started in Europe. We like the idea that Europe should have— it's fascinating that if you think about most of the very large, super successful companies globally, you think about almost entirely US or Chinese companies. Historically US, now China has more. Europe has very little. to offer in that regard, but it's a 700 million person continent, very good education. I'm not saying we should have $10 trillion companies, but we don't have a single one pretty much, I think, last time I checked. And so we hope we can be part of that movement showing that you can actually build such a company from— I mean, we're an international company with operations in the US too, but we're like the deeper roots, the original roots can be here too. We are not a periphery of the empire.

It was actually Daniel Ek, at Spotify who introduced us originally. And obviously, he's built one of the great European-origin businesses. Why do you think there are not more of them? Like, obviously, you're seeking to change this, but there's not that many. What do you think the deep reasons are?

I think the main reason is a matter of default. Why does California have so much— has had so much success over the decades? One of the reasons is, You have seen incredible companies being created and grown in California. You just assume that's where you go and do it, especially as a founder. You don't know much. Like you are ultimately, at least I was. I think that's true of many founders. You are a passionate, determined, maybe talented idiot, essentially. And so you don't have. You don't know the world enough to to actually determine what where the ideal location will be. If you even think about it, because typically, how many times have you heard of founders doing a kind of a locational study? Where should I start my company? It tends to be kind of momentum, like I happen to study here, I know people are there, I should probably just do it. And so a lot of talented Europeans, many of the most talented Europeans who have an entrepreneurial streak, I think they just default to building in the US, which has been fantastic for the US, of course. But there is a gap, I think. And if we had more virtuous examples of people who have built incredible businesses, again, with a seed in Europe, I think more people would not default to that and think, oh, I could actually build such a business from France or Portugal or Italy.

Was that a key part of the original vision that you wanted it to be a beacon for European talent and to show the world that a company like this could exist here? And if so, why? Why did you care so much? Why not just go to California?

I mean, it's difficult when you talk about what, you know, the sense of purpose, what inspires you. I think it's— we can try to rationalize it, but there's something comes from the gut. We just felt that there was a mission there that was worth pursuing, and that turned on our drive, our passion. And ultimately, we figured we love to build a business because it's— we love learning, we love challenge, and I think the business arena is arguably the most competitive field in which you can test yourself, of any field, even more than sports, academia. So we liked it to start with. Whether we fail in Italy, Denmark, Canada, the US, nobody cares. But if we build something remarkable from a country that doesn't see as many successes, that means something extra. It can be an inspiration, like I just said. It can help local businesses aim a little bit higher, raise their, their, you know, their, their standards. It can create competencies locally that can have a positive effect. And so we just chose to do it that way. We don't regret it. But yeah, there were very good arguments for us to maybe start in California, for sure. Like, that was a very reasonable point to make.

You said this idea of test yourself. If you think back on Bending Spoon's history, what was the first example of you really testing your own limits?

At the very beginning, we actually had another startup called Evertail. And that was a failure. We learned a lot. And actually, the strategy for Bending Spoon, we came up with it through the failure of Evertail. At the time with Evertail, We raised about €1 million all in all in VC money. And ultimately, the company was about to go bankrupt. We had about €40,000 left. That money belonged to the VC because of liquidation preferences, but it was too little for the size of that fund. And they told us, look, it's just too much hassle and legal cost for us to go through this administrative process of liquidation. You guys worked— were honest, worked as hard as anyone could demand. You keep the money, we'll sell our shares to you for a nominal €1, and, you know, go, you'll probably get something after taxes from it, and just go and get a nice vacation. But we're, you know, we're sick in the brain, and so rather than going on vacation, we took whatever we could, and that was the seed capital for Bending Spoons.

Wow.

This is 2013. And so it wasn't a lot of money, €40,000. We lived, all of us lived in the same apartment, very low burn rate, very low, as low as it gets still. €40,000, you don't do much, particularly as our vision was was to acquire companies.

Right.

So that's CapEx intensive, particularly at the beginning, while you can't use debt, because you are nobody, and you don't have a track record of cash flow. And so we figured we need a source of cash to kind of kickstart our acquisitive strategy. We figured certainly the easiest way is to just write software, build products for third parties. We are decent at programming and design. We should be able to do that. It seems like an easy business to start, maybe not to scale to gigantic levels. Just to get some cash, yeah. And so especially a co-founder of mine and I spent a good 3, 4 months, like 12, 16 hours a day, just emailing anyone, you know, anyone on the planet and cold calling people. Just, you know, we offered discounts. We're like, just hire us to do something. And I swear to God, we couldn't get Anybody, I mean, not a single soul hired us to do anything. Only contract we got was for about €10,000 from essentially a friend of one of my co-founders who I think took pity on us and said, yeah, we need an app for our small chain of burger places, you know, I'll give you €10,000 to build it. So that was after failure. I remember the stress levels with, after working our ass off for 3 years on the startup which failed. having this little money to try to make the dream come true and failing miserably at this sales effort, I had a real breakdown. I remember, I don't cry much, I cry maybe once a decade. I cried, I had a moment where I cried at that point. I remember I left the office, I just had to cry because I was like, goodness, it's been like 3 and a half, almost 4 years where we've been working like 100 hours a week, and we have nothing to show for it. So that was a massive challenge to my resilience, and I owe it to one of my co-founders who I think is naturally more optimistic and has better perseverance than I do. And he kind of comforted me, and we said, okay, at least, you know, we're in this together, and just keep going. Yeah, so we did, and of course I'm happy we did, but that was a pretty low point.

Didn't you have to get a job at McKinsey at some point to fund everybody else?

That was the previous startup.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, it's a cool story, at least I think it's cool. We basically, we graduate, 2 friends of mine, Francesco and Matteo, who happen to be co-founders at Bending Spoons too, and we have this idea of building this Everytail company. The idea was to create a self-writing diary of a user's life with AI. This is 2010, so AI was, nobody was talking about AI in 2010.

Yeah.

And interestingly, we were very early on AI, too early, in fact, because the product just didn't work well, because you didn't have machine learning, at least not in a way that you could scale for users. We had no money whatsoever, 'cause all of us essentially come from pretty kind of low-class families, whatever you want to call it, like we didn't have a lot of money. And as much as we didn't have an idea for a business that would require $1 billion in CapEx like a lot of startups today, we certainly needed some money at least to eat and pay for rent. And so we decided, okay, the 3 of us, we're going to look for a job. Whoever gets the most lucrative offer goes to work and pays for rent and food for the other 2. Once we raise seed capital, VC money somehow, then this person would resign and join full-time, and then we'd go and conquer the world.

Hmm.

So we all look for a job, and I get an offer from McKinsey. By our standards at the time, very lucrative, and so I said, okay, this is perfect. I'll be the one paying for rent and food. I was terrified that once I told— so I'm incapable of not being transparent. let alone lying, so I had to tell the partner at McKinsey that I would be working on this startup on the side.

Yeah.

I thought it was unwise in many ways, because I was absolutely certain they would withdraw the offer, but I'm like, I just can't, like, it feels dishonest. And actually, he was enthusiastic, and he encouraged me and said, absolutely, we'd love to have you, and, you know, if and when the startup takes off, you know, I wish you the best, and thank you. So, I was very grateful. I still have a very fond memory of McKinsey for that reason, like, a lot of gratitude, and And I worked there for about a year. Then we managed to raise initially half a million euros, then another half a million later from a VC. And I completed my project and I resigned.

Willingness to do anything to get going. I've never heard that before. One person funds the other 2 to be building and then you join them on the weekends.

There was no contract, nothing. 100% just trust, which I don't know. I just think it's, it's really a good way to live life. Sometimes you get some, some, some sour moments because of it, but It makes 99% of it so much more enjoyable if you don't have to be too transactional about it.

And so between Evertail and Bending Spoons, what was the— where did the insight come from to be sort of an M&A-driven acquirer of businesses rather than building them?

Evertail was your startup by the book, meaning this idea that probably won't work, but if it works, could be huge and very innovative. Like, nobody had attempted, as far as we could tell, anything like that before. And so we worked super hard. On that project for about 3 years. And naturally, as you are a startup or when you do something, I think you tend to network with people in a similar situation for a bunch of reasons. And so over time, we got to observe probably a couple dozen teams go through similar journeys as we did. And through that observation, we saw that, of course, most failed, which you would expect, and maybe 3 or 4 had levels of success. And we saw almost no correlation between the teams we considered more talented and more hardworking and those who came out on top.

Hmm.

And so we concluded probably, I mean, it's not a huge sample, but probably to go from 0 to 1, luck plays a huge role. There are so many factors and variables that you, you know, even if you're a genius and you work your ass off, you're still likely not to, you know, the stars will probably not align for you anyway. Whereas at the same time, we also found that our skills at all the functional things like software engineering, well, AI at the time, for what it's worth, product design, product management, marketing, although they were still pretty crude 3 years later, they were, you know, night and day relative to when we started. And we were on a clear path to, I'd like to think, excellence. And so we thought being really good at the functional knowledge and skills necessary to run a digital business really well is probably a matter of, if you're assuming you are reasonably talented, a matter of perseverance, effort, discipline. We know we can bet on that. We don't want to bet our entrepreneurial lives on getting lucky. So why don't we try to be excellent at the functional things and then buy businesses from people who either, you know, maybe got lucky or they actually, they're very good, but they Also, the passions changed between going from 0 to 1 to 1 to 2 to 10. Like, it's a different job. And so maybe there are very talented people who have gotten far. They're just a little bit fed up with it. They're not interested in running the next phase of it. We should be able to find situations where it's a great deal for both parties because of these factors. That turned out to be true. And now in hindsight, 12 years later, there is a lot more to it. There are structural advantages in integrating different businesses under the same roof. But at the time, we didn't have that insight. Which today is probably more important than what I just described. But what we had identified was enough to drive some level of success for the first maybe 5 or 6 years.

I'm going to come back to the beginning and the early acquisitions. But since you mentioned it now, describe what you've learned those advantages are that exist in having— I'll call it a home office that sits on top of a lot of different business units.

I'll give you an obvious one and 2 not so obvious ones. The obvious one is, of course, you get to Say you can negotiate with a vendor for cloud infrastructure, advertising partner, better—

Scale.

So that adds probably a couple of percentage points in EBITDA margins. It's good, it's useful. It's not transformative, but it's— or you can make an R&D investment in a general-purpose technology that many businesses can then leverage. And although that investment would be prohibitively expensive, irrational to make for any one of those businesses individually, it's actually very appealing if you can deploy it across. The 2 more important ones are, or at least equally important, but I think more important ones are, one, we can move R&D and also marketing resources fluidly across businesses. So in my experience, the R&D opportunity when you run a business is quite fleeting. It changes quite rapidly over time. So maybe you're new in a certain field, or that field evolves and there is an opening to expand the feature set, upgrade your technology. In time, that's going to be table stakes. There's a window when to do that actually yields substantial returns. But hiring people, coaching people, training people, organizing people is very slow unless you— so you really have 2 choices. Either you do, you make it happen in a few months, but you're going to do massive damage to your team, your culture, talent density is going to be low. If you want to do it right, it's going to take years. At the same time, as you go after an R&D opportunity, you basically build the features. Every business has a kind of a saturation point where there's nothing more, at least nothing more very substantial to build. But then you are stuck with a larger team, and of course it's costly, emotionally taxing for all involved to shrink that team. It's difficult. And so because of all these factors, in my estimation, most companies are years behind in terms of the optimal staffing. They're actually years behind what they should be could they control the people factor perfectly instantaneously. Some management teams are better than others, but it's, it's really just an inherent inefficiency of a single product model. But because we can pool at least part of our R&D resources and we really work on hiring people who are super flexible, adaptable— there's a whole batch of things you need to do for this to be feasible— we can move them very quickly and attack these opportunities and withdraw as the opportunities are not there any longer. This makes us super efficient both on the offensive and on the defense. Another major advantage of our model is that take Evernote. It's a very nice business, nice product, beloved product. Most people would consider the prospect of working at Evernote just average appealing. Like it's a nice, probably nice company, but it's also not my, I'm not as excited as I would be thinking about OpenAI or, you know, like the next big thing. So on average, a business like Evernote, no matter how charismatic, intelligent its leaders are, will attract somewhat average talent. There will be a Gaussian function and some people better than others, but Bentleyspoons is a model that's very appealing to people. First of all, it's growing fast, so it feels like we're going places.

Yeah.

You have variety, so you know that you can test your skills and fine-tune and expand your skill set across a variety of challenges and businesses and technologies. It's more, and in a way from the talent attraction perspective, much better than an Evernote standalone. And so all else being equal, we can attract stronger talent. Layer on top of that the ability to make massive investments in all the processes, the knowledge, and the tools required to attract and predict talent. So we have a massive investment in AI applied to predict future performance based on CVs, cover letters, test results. It's a very expensive investment to make. It's difficult to justify for a company that maybe only hires 20 people a year, smaller. And we can build on top of that inherent advantage by doing even better on, like, basically we have access to better talent, plus we'll be better at selecting within that talent pool than most companies would. So that gives us a major talent edge that's just not attainable for companies. I'm sure, again, OpenAI probably has access to many of the best talents, but like 99% of companies cannot say that. And we're better off. This year alone, this 2025, it's almost at the end of the year, we'll be receiving about 800,000 unique job applications. We'll be hiring 250 people.

Wow.

That's 1 in 3,000, 4,000. It's super selective. And it's not because I'm smart or anything, it's just inherent advantages of the bending spoon model. And of course, an employer brand built over a decade of investment, and people work here saying it's amazing, talent density is great. So you can't shortcut it. It takes forever, but you couldn't As a standalone company, even if you had the patience.

I heard somewhere that for a long time on Slack, your label was recruiter, which is kind of just pretty cool.

I think it still is. It still is. I think it's recruiting.

Is it still there? Recruiting. You mentioned the idea of building an employer brand for a decade plus. Talk about those 2 things, how they go hand in hand, and what you've done that's been most successful at building the employer brand.

By far talent density. We think about the jobs we offer as our most important product. So you need to know who your customer is, what you are offering, how you're differentiated, and have the courage of really focusing on that sharply. I find a lot of companies are almost afraid of someone not liking them, some team member getting offended by some practices, and they are— I think they are unappealing in general because they're too vanilla, too boring. They're nothing in a way, they're everything and nothing, and certainly they're not appealing for the most brilliant and driven people who want very clear, exciting opportunity. So we have focused pretty much from the beginning, getting better over time at it, on being the ideal place for incredibly talented and hungry, determined professionals. And we try to, we make a promise to them to surround them with incredibly high talent density, And, you know, I just mentioned how selective we are at the entry point. We continue to be selective throughout. That certainly brings to, you know, forces us to have difficult conversations, and there are moments of stress, but overall it's a clear net positive. And yes, it's a more intense, challenging workplace, but for people who want to be the most, you know, the best version of themselves professionally as quickly as possible, it's almost a unique opportunity. So that's our customer. That's the person we want to surround ourselves with.

Why is testing yourself so addictive? Like, what is it about it as a function that you and the team so enjoy?

It's difficult to tell. I suspect though, it's a common trait of a lot of people who have achieved greatness in their vertical. I'm thinking for some reason tennis comes to mind. And when I look at Novak Djokovic, Rafa Nadal. I don't know them personally. They both strike me as people who are absolutely turned on by the idea of testing their limits and pushing against those limits. And I don't think they wanted to win for the sake of saying, oh, I've won 23 Grand Slam tournaments. They love the idea that it was supposed to be impossible. And you know what? I'm going to— I want to prove it's not. It's one of the ways some humans are wired. But the truth is a lot of humans, a good enough number of humans is wired that way. And those humans are those who tend to have breakthroughs, excel in their fields, whether it's academia, sports, or business. And so if you wanna— if you feel that way yourself, if you want to win and excel in an area like we want to do with our approach, that's the kind of person I think you want to surround yourself with.

Have you learned anything surprising about yourself or about how the world works in all these years of testing yourself?

One thing I've learned It's cost me a lot of sanity and caused me some sleepless nights, is that consensus is overrated and even dangerous, at least when you're trying to achieve something. I'll be clear, I don't believe— I don't like the model of the, you know, the bright brilliant asshole or anything like that. I think you can be— you can not be a consensus seeker while being a perfectly respectful nice human being. I would prefer— I think, you know, that's the model I would espouse. But in general, if you're striving to stand out in your field, if you're very concerned about aligning everybody around that particular vision approach, not causing anybody to dislike you, criticize you, I think you're absolutely doomed to fail. Unfortunately, I'm naturally wired to enjoy consensus. I quite struggle with with friction and criticism by nature. And I think, at least personally, and certainly my capacity at the company, that's, uh, that slowed me down, caused me some pain that in hindsight was unwarranted and, you know, didn't bring any good to anybody. It's not— I felt pain and others benefited as a consequence. And, and instead, when you have a clear idea, you believe that's the right approach. And of course, you have listened to input with intellectual honesty, openness. So it's not a matter of pride, just a matter of intellectual conviction, that I think being able to just accept disagreement, pissing some people off, and just going very straight toward that goal is a superpower. At least he took— I'm not perfect at that for sure, but I'm much better today than I was when I started. But at least the first 7 or 8 years, I think I was absolutely terrible at it. Thankfully, others on the team were better, and so as usual in a team, you complement each other. I think a lot of management teams are too worried about having a percentage, for example, of their, of their team disagreeing with them, criticizing them. Instead, I think they, they should really try to— if they believe they have— they've got a solution, the path ahead, I think they should be willing to— they should be uncompromising in that regard.

So if we rewind time now to the early days where you've got this core insight that 0 to 1 is really hard and maybe somewhat random, you have this skill set that probably is really valuable in 1 to N. And you're going to go acquire businesses and apply the talent and skill set to make the products way better, bigger, faster, everything. What is the first couple of years of that process like? Like, how are you looking for companies? How do you have enough money? I'm sure you must have started small. What were some of the first acquisitions like? Talk us through the early lessons and early activity in the M&A markets.

Oh, yeah. I mean, in the beginning, again, we had those €40,000. So we were trying to get, you know, do some consulting, like I said, which never worked. I mean, basically brought no revenue, pretty much. We made the first acquisition, I think we closed it within the year, so pretty quickly, and we paid $10,000 for it. And I don't remember what it was called, but it was an iOS app to personalize your keyboard.

Okay.

Ultimately made $20,000 off it, like a very good return in a short period of time, but at a tiny scale. And then, you know, that $20,000 went into A couple other acquisitions and maybe turned into 40, but again, similar nature. So small product, uh, amateurishly built, uh, certainly no, you know, uh, institutional investors, no investors of any sort, definitely no professional management teams, typically one person.

A guy and an app.

Yeah, exactly. In parallel, we also launched a handful of products from scratch Again, to try to complement, learn things, because if you don't acquire almost anything because you've got no money, you're also not learning. So we were trying to learn, hopefully make some revenue. We had a couple of mild successes, like enough that it extended our runway. So many small things like that, and we kept adding and compounding. But slowly but steadily, $10K turns into $20K, and $40K, and $80K, and we've been compounding at pretty fast rates. I mean, if you look at our per-share revenue or EBITDA growth over the past 4 years, Where we are at a decent scale, I guess, like I said, about $1.3 billion this year, it's still about 75% per year. We're still compounding pretty fast. 10 years go by and you look back and you're, oh, wow, I remember we were making half a million a year. Now we're making a billion.

So in those early days, what were the key lessons that you were learning? Like, what did you start to realize were the right attributes of an app, a piece of software, a company that you might acquire? What were the things that you were after?

It's always been the same things on a high level, and that would be number one. So far, we've always focused on digital technology. We haven't bought supermarket chains, nor do we plan to, because you've got to be. I feel you want to stay reasonably within your circle of competence. Ideally, here and there, you want to take a step kind of half outside of it. You need to kind of keep pushing the boundaries because that will keep your TAM expanding as you expand within the TAM. But but I don't think it would be wise, especially as long as the model is. Works well, it's efficient to take massive leaps outside of the circle of competence just because. So digital technology, scale. Scale is relative, but we, because our approach is so hands-on, so time-consuming, I mentioned we can sometimes radically rethink a business or at least several components of it. We will do maybe 5 acquisitions a year, could be 1, could be 10 max. I mean, if it's really a stretch and each Some more than others will really go super deep and rethink the details, and the time investment and the effort does not scale linearly with revenue. So for us to do an acquisition that will bring in half a billion in revenue is not five times as time-consuming as one that will bring a hundred million. Maybe it's on average a little bit more time-consuming because it tends to be more complicated, but nowhere near linearly. And so we want to do fewer acquisitions but bigger. So first criterion is scale. And again, at the time, ten K looked like a big bet. How do we feel like today? We're actually hoping to invest easily a billion plus, but. Conceptually the same thing. The second thing is we need to be able to predict the future performance of that business. Otherwise, there's no way we can make a confident investment. We've gotten very sophisticated in times with statistical models and lots of assumptions and probability distributions. But at the essence of it, we need to buy stuff where we know where it's going.

Yeah.

At least with sufficient confidence. And the last one is we need to believe we can make meaningful, substantial improvements to that business. Not that it's a necessity, but it's difficult for us to imagine being able to make an offer that's super exciting for the seller and then being, okay, this is perfect, buy. You know, like, probably they wouldn't sell it to us for that price. These are the criterion— the criteria, and they have remained the same, but the level of sophistication, our understanding of these criteria over time is— I mean, it's incomparable.

Maybe we could talk about Evernote as a great case study because it's a I used to use it all the time. It was my like place of record for keeping my notes and book highlights and all these things. And people have heard of the brand and it was a big acquisition for you. I'm curious what you think of it as like the milestone acquisitions in the history of Bending Spoons, but I'd love to dive into that one, especially just to hear an example of like the whole story, soup to nuts of how you found it, what you saw, what you did, how you thought about price, what your team did, what's happened since.

I mentioned earlier at the beginning, it was all what we would call asset deals. individual apps and whatnot. And then we had a period of maybe 3, 4 years where we saw that that very basic small-scale model was going to saturate at some point in the not too distant future. We should do this at a bigger scale with structured companies, with management teams and large teams of professionals and institutional investors. I think we lacked confidence to take the leap immediately. And so we started losing a bit of focus and and looking at alternative strategies while taking tentative baby steps into that next level of the same thing, really, but just—

Yeah.

I guess it's a bit like I played locally, now I wanna do an international tennis tournament, to go back to the tennis metaphor. Will I be able to compete? And probably yes, if you're doing super well locally. Of course, you'll not be the best at that yet, but I think you can empathize with there being a little bit of hesitation and insecurity, right? And I think Evernote was the first such company, like, clearly, you know, within that definition. My guess is that we paid like 50% more than the next best offer. So it was really a win-win, which is the way I believe you should try to— any good strategy needs to be somewhat win-win, otherwise it will not go far. We were invited to that process. At the time, it wasn't something we took for granted because we were not so well known. So many times we missed out on process and sales processes that happened and took a look at it. I think we were very fast in making what turned out to be the winning bid. And we just saw a very good brand, although certainly slightly tarnished, but still, a quarter of a billion people had used Evernote.

Wow.

So a strong brand, an important use case, a lot of customers with thousands or tens of thousands of notes using Evernote to run their lives, really. And the product had not probably kept up with the times as well as you as a customer would have loved to see. And of course, you can only realize that fully once you're on the inside and really open the hood. But you can get a sense of that as a user.

Sure.

And so we bid, we won it, and then, yeah, we began our usual transformation process on a different scale, but essentially had a team of some of our best experts functional experts, you know, growth, product, design, and engineering. Go in, we met everybody, we spent a lot of time with everybody on the team and worked on projects and really got acquainted with the nitty-gritty details of the business, broadly speaking. And then started, you know, developed a roadmap for how to make Evernote more successful and got to work. And it's a completely different business today. I think in 2 and a half years we have released by now probably about 250 significant product improvements. It's difficult to be 100% quantitative of product improvements because, you know, there's no perfect definition.

That's true.

But in my estimation, we have been improving and innovating probably 3 to 5 times faster than before. We've been able to do this with a smaller team, really working on keeping all the positions that were critical, getting rid of projects and initiatives that we thought were tangential and really not adding a lot of value. Working on talent density, a culture of impact orientation and rationality, really trying to make sure that what we do moves the needle. And it's a lot. It's a million things that you bring in as a business with our platform. But we rebuilt almost entirely the codebase, the cloud infrastructure. There's almost nothing, at least nothing of the core components. It's now far higher performance. Nodes sync up in less than 10% of the time, in some cases 1% of the time.

I remember that being a problem when I was using it. That's why I stopped.

It is super fast. You would not tell the difference at all compared to the products you probably consider the best in the broader productivity. Like maybe you think Notion is top-notch in the broader productivity. I think if you tried Evernote today, you would consider they do different things, but the quality of the experience you consider probably on par. So we had to close a big gap there. Retention is at an all-time high, despite prices being higher, because now Evernote is substantially more— it varies by country, but it's probably on average, say, 60% more expensive, so it's substantially more expensive than before, but actually retention is better, because yeah, we did lose, say, I don't know, 10% of customers who were already not so sure, and once the price goes up, okay, I'm out of here.

Yeah.

But all the more engaged, loyal customers, they're still on board, and Customer satisfaction by any quantitative metric is better than it's ever been before. So we, but it was a very time-consuming effort, not something I think completely beyond what, say, a private equity could do without having its own R&D team.

Yeah.

And, and having to maybe be ready to sell within a few years. And again, we can't do it 100 companies each year, but we could do 3 or 5 or 6.

How do you know when there's pricing power? Like, If prices are 60% higher, you've made it a better product, so maybe that's why the price can go higher. But how do you think about price charged to end users across your universe of applications that you own?

It really depends on each case. I'll give you another case that's quite different from Evernote, and that would be Meetup. Meetup, historically, you could only use it as an organizer. You could only use it if you paid for it. We introduced a free tier so you could organize quite— we actually do quite a lot. For free, which kind of qualifies as a price decrease in a way. Like we gave away more for free. And we actually increased the price for the more advanced use cases, for the truly kind of dedicated. Based on my observation, there's room for being more sophisticated about pricing, which is different from increasing prices. Being better at segmentation, what's paid, what's given away for free, personalization, communications, experiences that ultimately all blend into monetization and the maximization of user LTV. Our direct experience is that there's a wide range of levels of sophistication in the market. Yeah, I'd like to think Bending Spoons being at the very top of that sophistication spectrum. Whether that translates into higher prices or lower prices or same prices, I don't know, but it certainly translates into a very different overall approach to monetization.

Just as a quick aside, why is it called Bending Spoons?

So when we started, we knew that we weren't going to be a one-product company. We still wanted the name to connect to something for us. A lot of companies are named after somehow after the problem they're trying to solve, or not all of them, but the problem they're trying to— or the product they're trying to deliver. And so we figured, okay, why don't we look for a name that somehow connects to some principles or values that we find inspiring? One of my co-founders, Matteo, is a big fan of The Matrix, the movie. Yeah, I think he watched the movie the night before, I'm not sure. But anyway, he told us, why don't we call— why don't we call it Bending Spoons? Um, you know, I watched the movie and there's this little bald guy who, uh, bends a spoon with his mind, and I think it's cool. And, and we initially— initially we didn't like it. I still have a spreadsheet with the different names, and in Bending Spoons I think we gave it like 4 out of 5 stars. There were a couple others that Got more stars. The one I remembered in hindsight, I thank God we didn't pick it: appeal. Because we were doing only apps initially. Now we do all sorts of technology and software. And so, you know, app appeal. I think it's awful for some reason. You know, the Luca from 2013 thought it was brilliant. Yeah. So it got five stars out of five. But we picked Benning Spruce, and the reason why we liked it was it connected to two principles or values that we they're still very dear to us. One is call it the power of the mind. The idea of bending spoons somehow, at least to me, inspires this vision of a powerful mind that can do things that appear impossible. And we're big believers that the human brain has incredible potential if you work on it and at it and try to really give it the tools. And the second reason why we loved it was that even if you have that brain, it again, it just intuitively feels like to get to the point where you can bend spoons, You've probably worked really hard at your craft. And we like the idea of almost anything in life that has value, you gotta work at it. I think it's true with a family, romantic relationships, your craft as a professional, your abilities as an athlete. I think almost anything that will really give you satisfaction requires work. And so, and plus it was kind of a unique name. We hadn't heard of any company called Bending Spoons. And so we figured it's probably memorable. Let's go for it.

I love it. I love that. And I love that movie. So now knowing the reference, it's great. Going back to the Evernote acquisition, you mentioned you paid 50% more than maybe the next highest bidder. How do you know the right price to pay? Like, how do you think about pricing assets as you buy bigger and bigger ones? We can talk about Vimeo, we can talk about AOL. You know, these bites at the apple are going to get bigger and bigger. Price matters. Of course, you have the ability to do a lot after buying it. So maybe that allows you to pay a higher price. But still, I'm sure you want to pay a a good, fair, responsible price? How do you think about it?

One is, how do you determine your function returns as a function of price paid? The second one is, how do we stay disciplined so we will really not pay more than we believe is right based on our expected returns, opportunity cost, what else we could be doing with that capital and what returns? So the first one is a matter of sophistication. And the second one is a matter of psychology, really, I think, discipline, patience. And the third one is, How well do we negotiate? So how efficient are we at positioning the ultimate price on that curve? Because the fastest but stupidest approach would be to immediately offer the very most you can pay, you know, and the opposite of offering a ridiculously low price is probably equally stupid. So you want to find the right balance. Interestingly, we actually are much closer to the former. We believe it's better to have a reputation for someone who offers a very fair price immediately but who's not going to be very willing to negotiate much. The first one, Like, how do you determine that return as a function of price curve? You've got to be very sophisticated at knowing what you're doing, having first-party data for benchmarking, asking the right questions, having good models. The output of the model is only as good as the assumptions you put in it, assuming at least the model is mathematically sound. And we certainly have very sophisticated cohorted models and whatnot. But main competitive advantage is in being able to run this business A lot better. I mean, it's we don't win because we're good at predictions. We win because we can run them better, so we can offer a good price. But it certainly helps. It's certainly marginally important to to making good predictions. And so you want to twelve years of experience running many businesses, running businesses from the trenches in the details, unlike a private equity, I think teaches you a lot more. So you understand why things went a certain way with certain business. You're wiser when you set the assumptions for your next acquisition in a way that I think if you stay on the financial layer or kind of Oh, I talk to management every week. You think you understand, I don't think you really do. There is a cost to pay, it takes time, but then on the bright side, you can't— you're basically smarter at then predicting the future when you find yourself in a similar situation again. So assumption setting is critical for us. We have many assumptions, each has a probability distribution, and we debate assumptions extensively without ever looking at what the model will spit out as a consequence.

Hmm.

That's forbidden. Because we think that if you see the P&L, basically the business plan, as you do it, there are all sorts of biases on it doesn't look good enough, and you're like, oh, maybe this is conservative. So we do not look at the output, only the inputs. We debate, analyze, dig for more data. Once we're happy that that's the best we can do at this stage, we run a Monte Carlo simulation, and then we look at this distribution of IRR, NPV, And that's the truth. Nobody can say, well, but you know, now that I see it, I think maybe we were a bit pessimistic with the assumptions. No, too late. I mean, this is now the truth. This is what will guide our negotiation. So that's phase 1. And then you make an offer. As I said, we try to make an offer that's sometimes the maximum we're willing to pay or close to it, because we think although we could probably get a better deal in the moment if we started lower, then we don't want to establish a reputation for people you can push around and get more out of.

Mm-hmm.

We're more like the Warren Buffett model of, I'll give you what I think is actually a very good offer. And I'm OK if I hear no, but don't think you can get 25% more out of me just asking. And then you've got to be disciplined when they ask for more than you're willing to pay. You absolutely need to not have fallen in love with that particular business and say, OK, you know what? It's not to be. We'll move on to the next.

What's your walkaway rate? Like, for every AOL, Vimeo, Evernote that you buy, how many did you want to buy that you ultimately Oh, well, it's—

we need to define this because we look at actually thousands of businesses each year. We don't make an offer to thousands of businesses. I'd say we probably make an offer to maybe, yeah, maybe twice as many as we buy. And you know what? We have never lost a bid before. There has never been a business we made an offer for and someone else got it. Those we didn't buy were ultimately the seller just chose not to sell to anybody. So that tells me our offers are typically super competitive. That's why we're probably not very good at negotiating, because I think some level of failure rate would indicate a more optimal strategy.

Right.

I guess you fail, you learn, you get better.

Can we talk about the history of the financing of the business? Because like you said, you've done very little direct equity capital raising before. You've done some debt. Has most of this just been buildup of free cash flow from earlier businesses until you have enough to buy the next thing and then just rinse and repeat?

Yeah, in short, the more sophisticated version is completely true what you just said for the first 5 years. Then we started using debt, pretty basic debt from commercial banks, not very high leverage ratios, 3.5 times EBITDA on a good day, generally lower, trailing EBITDA in the last 12 months. That helped accelerate. Before, we couldn't use that, because you need to have an established track record before they take you seriously.

Sure.

I would do the same if I were them. Since then, it's been essentially debt and reinvested earnings and debt. So we have raised a bunch of equity, but mostly to fuel secondary transactions, 'cause if you're in business for a long time, you start to get to a good scale, people are— are saying, okay, I've invested in this company, and I'm talking really just team members, 'cause from the beginning we enabled people, we pay just cash, no variable pay of any kind, and people can choose though to receive some of their cash pay in equity at a discount. It's very unusual, by the way. And so in time, people have accumulated positions, and that equity is worth nothing if there's never any liquidity.

Yeah.

So we started organizing secondary transaction every 18 months, 1 year, 2 years. We've had maybe 5, 4 or 5, 4 probably since 2019. And so mostly equity has been raised to finance those transactions, but occasionally the first capital increase of any significance was in 2022, I think. So yes, we have dilution from capital increases, very modest. Off the top of my head, I'd say maybe 10%.

Hmm.

We could also not have done any of those at all, We still did them because we figured, in a couple of cases, it helped us get over the hump to close a deal we couldn't without that little extra. With that, we were maxed out. But also, we figured if we bring in a little bit more in terms of high-quality international investors, that would be helpful for credibility, firepower if we need to go after a huge acquisition quickly, just optionality.

Yeah.

But we're generally very cautious when it comes to dilution. I think if you really believe in what you're doing, you should be, it should be painful to increase your capital base.

I don't know if it was Evernote or some other one. We've talked about Evernote, so maybe pick a different one. I'm curious for another acquisition, whether it's WeTransfer or Komoot or anything else. What's the AI photo sharing one?

Remini.

Remini, which I was just looking at before we started this morning. Are there other acquisitions that have taught you personally the most about your own process about doing this well that stand out in memory?

There was one time where, let's say we bought a product at the peak of, let's call it a viral moment. This is really not applicable to the type of businesses we buy today, but at the time it was a thing. It's many years ago now. And then as soon as we bought it, basically that viral wave was reaching and had reached the peak. And that That completely changed— we thought we had been conservative, but it completely changed our assumptions and led to drastically inferior returns versus what we expected. And that taught us to be absolutely paranoid when it comes to the sources of user acquisition. So basically, either we buy businesses where almost all the value lies in existing customers or users, like people— okay, these have been acquired, it's just about now managing them as well as possible. Or if a lot of the value is predicated on substantial additional user acquisition or customer acquisition, then we need to really clearly understand the drivers of that expected acquisition and make sure that these drivers are things we can predict. For example, we can make pretty accurate predictions of word-of-mouth rate under normal circumstances, but not under sudden viral moments. We don't feel very confident making predictions of future rates of user acquisitions through paid advertising, for example. So that was a big lesson learned. Another one that we learned, we actually went after Grindr, the LGBTQ+ dating app, in 2019. So the app was owned by a Chinese firm and CFIUS was forcing it to sell. It was a big bite for us at the time. We're much smaller. It would have quadrupled the company. We didn't have an equally substantial track record as we do today. So we, we, we went above and beyond to raise the capital, almost won the deal. Ultimately, we lost it because someone else offered a bit more, and we would have offered more still, but we just had capped out on available sources of funds. So that was a failure. We, we worked like— it took up— took us about 9 months of— I was My main thing and the main thing for several colleagues at that time, we were also very, very small. We had an M&A team of one person, so it really paused our growth. Had we bought it, it would have been an incredible acceleration afterward, but it taught us to be very careful to put all our eggs in one basket. And so in hindsight, I think we could have still tried to get it, but maybe not obsess so much over it considering how unlikely it was to make it happen and try to place another few bets so that that year— if you look at our growth those couple of years, it's way slower than almost any other year. And that's the key reason. Like, we put all we had into making that one thing happen. It didn't happen. We hadn't done anything else. Well, we had done some things, but nothing that would really move the needle. So I'd say we've gotten almost obsessive about seeing the world in terms of statistics. And with that model of the world, act accordingly.

Can you talk about AOL a little bit? Obviously, that's a name that literally everyone will have heard of, and I'm fascinated to hear the story of you acquiring the business.

So people know AOL as the way to connect to the internet back in the day, in the '90s, even the '80s, I think, actually. I think they started very, you know, pioneers. At some point, AOL was what Google was in the 2000s, you know, like was the hot new thing. So they had this, I guess, based— I mean, outside in, it seems like a failed merger, you know, with Time Warner and whatnot. And then they had different homes. It's actually a very good business. It lost all the customers that it had to lose over the decades. And today it's an email inbox and a web portal with aggregator of news and other content. It's a very good business with tens of millions of active users, very loyal users. Again, there's a lot of selection bias.

Yeah.

People who wanted Gmail have had decades to go for it.

Right.

Like, you know, people who really love that particular experience, they have lots of stuff there. Although the team has done a pretty good job, I think, at managing this business, there's, you know, a next level to be unlocked in terms of polishing the product, optimizing the offering, optimizing monetization. It's just a very good business that I think superficially people think, oh, it's probably legacy old, it's probably worth nothing, but actually it's a It's wonderful business. And in fact, again, I don't want to name names, but a lot of our companies in the broader messaging or email industry or segment, and that if you just read the news, you would think are doing super well and they're much larger. But actually, if you had access to the user count, P&L, including in time looking at trends, they are just not nearly as good. Like it doesn't even begin to compare. AOL is actually I believe a top 5, the 5th most used email inbox in the Western world. Crazy. Which is, you know, it's something. I mean, it's a pretty competitive category. Is it Gmail? No. If Google ever wants to divest it, we'd be happy to take a look. But it's a very good business that will be even better, I hope, that's the intent, as we pour our hearts and souls into improving every facet of it.

One of my mentors, who's done a lot of investing and building of software businesses over a long period of time, said that one of the ways that he made the most money or was the most successful would be that he would enter in product situations where there were 12 things going on and there should only be 3, that there was always just like too much stuff, too many features, too many products in the company. Have you found that to be true at all, that there's— especially with companies that are a bit older, that there's been this creep of stuff that gets added that's not necessary? Is that like a common element of your playbook to take 12 down to 3?

I don't know that it's necessarily common, uh, because not all companies do that, but we have seen it and it's quite true. I thought it was a contrarian view, but now that I know your friend thinks the same, maybe not as contrarian as I thought it was. But yes, um, I think people in general overestimate the value of R&D. Let me qualify. They think that generously pouring money into building stuff pays, pays off.

Uh-huh.

It's really not true at all. What we find is that there's a very small number of things that pay off handsomely, and most things are a waste of money. And while there is an element of you don't know before you do it, so for sure, a lot of it you do. For example, if you start from what your customers need, really focus on that rather than maybe what your engineers think is cool or fancy visions that have very little to do with the corp problems you're solving, you're probably actually already taking big strides in the, in a direction of greater efficiency. So, and by the way, it's not just about keeping costs more under control, but it's also doing the, the thing that matters better. Evernote today has a lower cost base than before, but I promise you, if you, if you take 10 users at random, power customers, power users, 9 will tell you that it's actually Higher performance, more resilient, a better feature set. And part of it is we've really focused on what these customers needed, you know, painfully needed. That helps you do more with less, essentially.

How do you think about taking capital from a fund that's a 10-year VC fund or something, or a private equity fund versus a Bally Gifford that's, you know, got capital that lasts forever when you're thinking about the right partners?

All else equal, we do prefer a permanent capital. And it's not so much because you— even permanent capital could ask you to, to liquidate.

Yeah.

It's just that they don't have to.

Yeah.

And I think the fact that they don't have to reduces the probability that you'll find yourself in a situation where it's, it's just an unnatural, complicated moment to do it, but you still have to do it. Incentives can become a little bit perverse. We haven't experienced that before, but I know stories of others having Done that. If, you know, there's an evergreen source of capital, I think you're less likely to find yourself in that unpleasant situation. However, I will add, I side more with investors on this than entrepreneurs, although in a way I'm—

More of an entrepreneur, yeah.

Certainly. I think a lot of entrepreneurs take money from investors and have a level of entitlement that they should never be asked To provide a return, it's like oh but why do you ask me to sell now? It's only been four years, five years. I think that's either naive or intellectually dishonest. Regardless of the particular bylaws that investor is subjected to, where maybe they could stay forever, ultimately an investor is trying to achieve some form of IRR.

Yeah.

With some time frame. So you should remain very respectful of the fact that when you take anybody's money, if you ask me, but certainly institutional money, you can't. find it shocking or disappointing, or then bitch about it in the entrepreneurial circles that they're asking, putting some level of pressure with you to sell.

You're in such an interesting seat because you're both investor and operator. And so you have the shared perspective that you're often buying things as an investor, but then running them as an operator. If you think across all the investors, pure investors that have come and studied Bending Spoons, some of them have made equity investments, secondary investments, What distinguishes the best investors? That— what do they do that's most different from those that are, let's say, average?

I'd say most good investors are— they recognize patterns. So I've seen a certain business model work, and they use that to select their investments. If done right, this is a very successful way of investing. And then there are the bad investors and the amazing investors. None of which is a pattern recognizer. So they actually assess each business in an ad hoc manner on its own deep fundamental merits. But it's much more difficult. And that's what divides the truly outlier investors from the bad ones. Those in the middle, maybe even leaning toward good, are pattern recognizers. But then the truly incredible ones, you sit with them and they're not saying, oh, you are the Uber of bicycles.

Yeah, yeah. You're the Berkshire for this.

They understand almost the laws of physics, to make a metaphor, that makes so that the apple falls. And that gives them certainly a lot of confidence, but also the ability to see what others don't. Because ultimately, a lot of the time, good investment is not determining that something is good. Like a lot of companies, most of us could tell they're good, but if everybody, or even not quite a lot of people, think they're good, probably the price embeds that goodness and it's not a great deal. It is what it is. It's like a lot of companies today in AI. Again, I'm not going to name names, but some probably deserve their valuation. Some history will prove were even cheap. But most, even the good ones, are probably too expensive simply because everybody wants to invest. So in a way, it's the same thing. The truly outstanding investors will be able to find something that's really good, but few people think is good. And the only way to do that is not to apply a pattern because by definition, if it fit a pattern, then Everybody, it's either bad by the pattern or good by the pattern. Everybody is on board. It has to not fit the pattern and you have to find ways of determining it's good. It's very difficult intellectually. It needs creativity, imagination, lots of logic, rationality. It cognitively is next level.

In that specific effort for bending spoons specifically, where have the best investors really dug in to get that physics understanding? Of your business that's different than how other things work? Like, where do the best dig in?

I think some of the best are really good at understanding people, at discerning who's really smart and not promotional from those who are not so smart but very good promoters. And so when you see a business has a strong track record and someone explains to you in a way that makes sense, it's not just a good story, but it makes logical sense, that's a huge indication that probably there's something there. First of all, you now know why things have worked out, and you can determine whether they're likely to continue working out. And second, if you're investing in someone who's made good decisions for the right reasons, not just out of luck, they're just more likely to navigate the future variables that will be thrown at them better than most. I know investors who invested, for example, in Amazon early days, who told me— one particularly— who told me that the main reason why he did, and he made a big bet on it, and it was a huge success. It was not because he did believe, you know, in the e-commerce model and all that, but he believed that nobody, very few people he had ever met, had the clarity of thought, the rationality of Jeff Bezos. And so a model he believed could, you know, had legs coupled with a person he thought was a brilliant leader, a very bright problem solver, that alone set that opportunity apart from a lot of other stuff. Yes, it would be difficult to have wide margins for a long time, but he was confident the company would be much better than at least it was priced at the time. So I think understanding people and their cognitive abilities is quite difficult. It requires in and of itself great cognitive abilities. I find that if someone is 8 out of 10 smart, they can only discern the 7s from the 6s from the 5s, but the 8.5s, the 9s, the 10s for them look like the same, like a big batch of, oh, they're so smart.

Yeah.

And so to be able to distinguish the 10s from the 9s and the 8s, you need to be probably close to a 10 yourself. And of course, experience and other elements too, which make it very difficult. They're not just brilliant from a point of view of logic, logic and analysis, but also rationality. Trying to really ignore— this person is really pleasant or charismatic. Yes, park it. What's really beneath that? It's difficult. I mean, we, we as humans have been evolution has made us animals of, uh, of, of gut, of emotion. But emotion investing, they're not good friends, I think, or at least good investing.

Another thing that you have to deal with in a unique way is this cocktail of incentives and motivation for different parts of the business. You have business units where a team is running an Evernote, for example. That's different than a Spooner that's in the home office that's being moved around and doing lots of different things. What have you learned about setting incentives for people to get the outcomes that you want in a fairly complex structure?

I don't know if this will disappoint you, but we don't. Everybody is paid a fixed salary, no variable pay, no stock grants, nothing. They can choose to invest part of their cash pay at a discount, not a crazy, but a pretty generous discount at the TopCo level. And that's it. The way we maximize alignment of effort is by hiring people we believe are high integrity, that have great professional pride, and then just treating them with the utmost respect. And I think most people will try to do what's right and do what's right for the business along the lines of the mandate you give— you gave them. So if you ultimately you're optimizing for bending spoons, not Evernote, 9 out of 10 people, if you're hired well and the culture is right, will take it to heart and do that. In fact, I believe sometimes setting financial incentives— of course, if people do well, they're likely to get more responsibility, higher salaries. It's not that it's— certainly there's that, but it's not as immediately tied to results next quarter or something very measurable. It's through observation in time. If you're great at your job, you'll probably get more, do more. But I think that sometimes when you set typical incentive plans with KPIs and whatnot, first of all, it's very costly. It takes a lot of time. So for that to be ROI positive, it's not enough that it adds value. It needs to add more value than the cost that's implied.

Mm-hmm.

It's absolutely guaranteed to create at least some perverse incentives, because nobody can set perfect incentives. The world is too complicated. It changes too fast, for sure. So even if you are a genius, whatever you set as incentives will be imperfect. So there is an additional inefficiency that whatever extra efficiency it is to overcome before you're even into black territory as opposed to red territory. I think also those kind of incentives tend to hinder relationships. They tend to make things more transactional. It's more difficult to have a proper problem-solving session where all we're thinking about is how do we win together. I think most people will have it in the back of their minds like, okay, how do I get the better bonus? Like, it's difficult to be entirely resistant to that feeling. And so I'm sure it could be done better, but we chose the simple Which is we just try to hire well, treat people respectfully, and just get rid of all that stuff and assume you'll do the best you can.

I'm sure you're always dissatisfied with the state of things and want things to get better all the time. What about Bending Spoons today are you most dissatisfied with?

Yeah, I'm that kind of person, by the way. I'm perennially unhappy, which I think sounds awful because in a way I feel guilt— I feel very fortunate. It's just I feel very fortunate, and I'm perennially unhappy. Which is a huge superpower and a curse at the same time. You could imagine. I mean, I'm not alone. I mean, many people in this world are like that. What is not good, or at least not as good as it could be? Well, one of the things that is critical for our growth is hiring and coaching. I am absolutely positive we offer literally, you know, one-of-a-kind level jobs, some of the best on the planet. I'm absolutely certain. Incredible talent density. learn faster than anyone else anywhere else. You get an opportunity to take on responsibility that's crazy. Most of our general managers run businesses on average $50 to $100 million in revenue. So if they were a scale-up, they would be considered a large scale-up. Many of these people are like 27, 28. Most of them are. I think very few are above 30. So unique opportunities, excellent financial opportunities too, whether it's very good salaries and investment opportunity in a company that's growing fast. We feel very privileged of getting a ton of great applications, like I said, a huge number. I think we should be getting more better, we should be better at identifying the raw talent. I know we're rejecting a lot of great applicants who are actually better than some of the people we hire, because we're just not good enough at spotting that talent in someone who has such a short track record, maybe a student, new graduate. That's an area of massive frustration in a way.

Mm-hmm.

I'm at the same time very proud of what the team has done there, and frustrated we can't yet do better. And I know that's one of the keys to growing fast and achieving what we set out to achieve. So it's certainly a major area. I'm always frustrated with, I think, our society is there's too much regulation. We're really working on the wrong stuff at the institutional level. People try to create economic growth and prosperity through more rules, just telling you, yeah, if we tell them exactly where to go with lots of rules, surely we'll be prosperous. They don't understand that it's quite the opposite. You get— you gotta get out of the way and create as free and open a playground as you can. We keep adding rules. Elon Musk once said something that I thought was brilliant, and I fully subscribe to it. He said we should have a rule that every new law is automatically removed, say, 3 years later, unless someone can make a really good case that's created a lot of value. Yeah, so we wouldn't have 10,000-page long civil codes or whatever, like, to be— where it's basically trying to prevent rare corner cases, unpleasant, sometimes tragic corner cases, while making 99.99% of the normal cases less efficient, more painful, some utterly impossible. But because they're not as newsworthy, because they're typically widespread and normal, those inefficiencies are not as interesting to talk about. In aggregate, they are just a massive tragedy, a much bigger tragedy than the one individual tragedy of one corner case. Ultimately, when it comes to regulation, the corner case wins and we regulate it away, but we make life much worse for everybody else 99% of the time. And so this frustrates me because I think we're just shooting ourselves in the foot as society, essentially.

What's your balance of time of like what I'll call maintenance hours of the business? You know, things that are repetitive, meetings with Teams, internal stuff, you know, keeping the trains running, versus space that you create to tinker with the business, try new things, stretch that comfort zone that you were talking about earlier? I guess the bigger— the question behind the question is like, what does your week look like? Like, how do you spend your time?

Well, it varies by period a lot. So for example, if we are— when we close a large transaction, I'm often there with a task force in the trenches meeting the team, and for weeks or even months sometimes, that will take up 50% of my time. If we're working on a big fundraise— we just raised the largest, uh, that round of any private company in Italian history.

Hmm.

And like we said, we raised $700 million at an $11 billion valuation, um, in equity. These 2 initiatives certainly took a substantial part of my time. And when we're not in fundraising mode, that goes down to a trickle. Maybe I have some calls with investors, but much less. So it varies, but I would say probably a fair split would be 50% of my time talent. I check each candidate before we extend an offer, I extend the offer, I talk to many of the new hires, I help with talent density, I help trying to push for being demanding. So that's probably 50% of my time. 50% of my time is, on average in time, probably financing and external relations, I would say. 50% of my time is these transformations of companies we newly acquire, and 50% of my time would be other, call it long-tail platform work, which is probably where I would put that thinking creatively about how to improve the strategy. And I work all the time, so I probably work as 2 FTEs, like I think most people in my position would. But it's probably these 4 categories are comparable in investment.

What did you learn during this biggest ever debt raise? Most of the people that I talked to for this are raising equity capital. I haven't had a lot of conversations with people that have raised lots of debt capital for something like an acquisition. So I'm curious about the whole process and how you would compare and contrast equity versus debt capital markets from a raising perspective.

Yeah, the mindset is quite different because an equity investor tolerates the risk of losing money vastly better because they have an upside that's essentially uncapped within reason. A lender is almost entirely intolerant to the possibility of losing because their upside is that 3% spread, 5% spread, depending on, depending on the exact financial instrument. It's still a limited and generally fixed upside they have. So they— it's all about not losing So a lot of the questions are more oriented toward understanding the potential worst-case scenario and the risks. Equity investors are more oriented toward the TAM. How big could this be? How quickly could we get there? The surprising part is a lot of banks, a lot of lenders are actually quite visionary. I heard people say, well, they're probably more boring because they're— actually, no. A lot of them are brilliant and visionary. So they're quite curious about the model and where it could How far it could go, and understand very quickly why it works. So I thoroughly enjoyed my conversations with lenders, at least as much as those with with equity investors. Perhaps because they have these, they have to be so paranoid about the downside. This breeds in them a thoroughness, a thoughtfulness that's not always the case with equity investors, for whom maybe that intuition of oh this team, this thing. Could go far is more important. Like catching the big wins is more important than, and so they can be wrong more often. So there may be a little bit more. They are a bit quicker in their judgment, a bit a bit more. But but I think lenders are quite an interesting type of investor to to talk to. And generally it works that you talk to a couple of anchor lenders, some of the biggest banks, typically those with a strong investment banking arm too. They help you figure out that kind of shape. They commit some of the money immediately, so you know you've got some of it covered and you know where you're going. And then you start bringing under the tent more players with other important roles and then lesser roles. And at some point it's just providing capital. And typically some of this capital is basically, it's with that lender, it will stay with you until maturity, 5 or 7 years down the line. Some of this capital you may want to syndicate. The lender tells you, okay, I'll give you $1 billion, but we agree that in the short term, we'll be going out to sell away essentially this $1 billion to many providers, each with $10, $50 million each, and they'll hold it for 5 years or 7 years. But I'm just giving you a bridge to that moment. You need the money now. You're doing M&A, for example, and we don't have time to talk to 20 parties plus. It would certainly leak that you're buying that target. So I help you get there, but then we agree contractually that we'll be transferring that credit from me to these other lenders. So that phase is also interesting, and it's quite optimized because the debt markets are huge. It's gigantic and vastly more efficient probably than the actually much smaller, say, VC capital markets. And so the process of how you take that credit from the point of view of a lender and syndicate it out is super It's super standardized by now. You can create a deck, you record a presentation, it gets distributed to—

Present.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You show up for 1 hour, maybe 3 times with batches of lenders. Like, it's super, super standardized, very efficient.

I'm so curious what you think about what I would call almost like a religious debate right now in the world of software, which is how AI will affect the sorts of businesses that you've bought historically. Will it enhance them? hurt them because it's easier to create replicas or copies or new versions. We talked about Remedy earlier, which is an app that you bought before ChatGPT that I'm sure has benefited tremendously from the advent of AI. How does this new tidal wave of technology impact your old businesses, how you think about new businesses, just your take on it in general?

Yeah, it's a complex discussion, and I think you're asking maybe a timeframe of 5 years because—

Sure.

AI changes the very fabric of our society 50 years out or something like a long timeframe in ways that are both exciting and scary. But in the medium term, I think for Bending Spoon specifically, I think it's mostly a good thing because we don't care too much about the risk to each individual piece of our business. Basically, most of our business units are 20% of our revenue or less.

Mm-hmm.

So even a dramatic decrease in one of them is still in the grand scheme of things, kind of a minor—

Percentage-wise.

Yeah, we've been growing at 75% a year. You know, like, I'd rather none of them decline, but some do, some will. Maybe one or two will decline fast. It's undesirable, but not existential. So for our model, it's highly diversified. A lot of what we do is being better, functionally better, at running this company, meaning having a higher quality output at a lower cost across the functions— engineering, design, product, growth. AI is an accelerator of both quality and efficiency if used properly, but it doesn't do it by itself. Maybe it will in 10 years, but today we've seen it clearly as we have invested internally in excellence through AI in our operations. A lot of it is custom integrations, proprietary technology, a lot of culture work on getting people to use it the right way. So like with every innovation in the past, we'll see a small percentage of companies being at the forefront of leveraging that, most companies being laggards. And I'm pretty confident that Ben& Spruce will be at the very cutting edge of using it. And we're already making strides there that, if anything, the gap in ability between us and most companies will even widen for years. But again, I think it's likely to mostly benefit an aggregator and consolidator like Ben& Spruce, assuming we stay disciplined.

Yeah.

Pricing, while being very disruptive for certain verticals. And some will be disrupted much earlier. So I think we as a society and investment community will be able to start seeing things and update our model of reality and predictions based on that. Can it be disruptive for many SaaS businesses? Absolutely. I think the time where we open up ChatGPT and we tell it, okay, build me Jira, is far away. Yeah, as far— like, it's not months away, it's not even a couple of years away. AI today can't do a lot for you beyond, say, research, copywriting, and maybe some basic content production, but it'll do more and more and fast. Like I said before, we were working with AI in 2010, so we're very early. I'm a big believer in AI, very big. However, even if it could build Jira today, it's not that easy to explain to it what you want when it's so complex. So I wouldn't underestimate inability of the user to get out of it what they need. These products have been honed to customer needs for a long time. You're already using them. There is an investment in them in terms of data. So not only does the tool need to get to a point where it can replicate that and with the same guarantee of performance, very difficult. Like getting to something that works the same 95% of the time, still we're super far from it. But that's an infinitely easier challenge than something that works essentially 100% of the time. Infinitely easier. But also you need to be able to guide it to build it the way you want. And as long as software is ultimately a relatively small share of wallet, like if you think about it, it's not an expense people will optimize first. It's not like a car that literally you plan your finances around before that truly eats into the overall size of the market, I think we're talking a lot of stars need to align. I think it's probably many years out.

You mentioned earlier that ultimately your main product is your company and the people that work here are the key people to attract the jobs or products themselves. What are some of your favorite ways of making sure once you get these amazing people, we talked a lot about data science and recruiting and the pipeline and the crazy number of applicants and so on. Once they're here, making sure that they get the most out of it and you get the most out of them, which is mutually beneficial. What are the sorts of traditions and things that you do that you think have most contributed to it being the kind of place you want to work?

Ultimately, the most important thing is to be very clear on what kind of company you want to be, your principles, your values, and then hire people who embrace those. And then you yourself, as a person who's maybe more visible than others, try as hard as you can to be the best paragon of those values as you can be, because that's most— more important than any manifesto or initiative or a big proclamation. There are certainly things you can do that help on the margins, help foster those values a little bit further. A few things we do that are, I think, unusual, or we love, are— one is called State of the Spoon. Twice a year we have somewhat the equivalent of an Apple keynote, but it's just internal, and most of our teams take turns on stage presenting their most proud achievement, and also failures and lessons learned of the past 6 months, what they're planning for the future. And it's always— there is an element of comedy and self-deprecation, which makes it, I think, quite entertaining. You laugh a lot. I always— it's like 3, 4 hours, and at the end of it, I have like— my jaw is painful because I've laughed too much. It's just fun. We organize all sorts of kind of almost cabaret things, and it's a great tradition, and it just helps us Be proud of the things we do well, remember not to take ourselves too seriously, we're not saving lives. You meet and learn about colleagues you maybe hadn't necessarily been close to before. Another one we do is an yearly retreat where we bring everybody to a remote, exciting, typically exotic destination for 7, 8, 9 days. on the company's time and dime. It's just a vacation, but with colleagues. The last one, so I don't remember in which order, but we went to Seychelles, Mauritius, the Dominican Republic. In the past, we went to Japan, Australia. We think it helps establish a level of trust, bonds with colleagues, and ultimately a company is people.

Mm-hmm.

So if you bond with colleagues, you're bonding with the abstract concept of the company to an extent. It's not the same thing, it's not enough, but it's part of it. We believe that it pays dividends in terms of, again, willingness to sacrifice, to be honest about problems, to do your best.

Why do you think there are not more Bending Spoons? I mean, it's kind of like asking why are there not more Berkshires? Like there's only one Buffett. But why do you think there haven't been more people that have taken advantage of this ecosystem, this huge TAM of companies that are more mature now that are— you can acquire that have installed user bases and low growth, lower growth?

There's always a first. Private equity wasn't a thing until it was a thing. And today you have trillions of dollars in private equity. So someone— you could have done private equity before KKR did private equity. Nothing prevented you from doing private equity in the 1930s. But to my knowledge, nobody was doing private equity. So at some point, someone comes up with an idea. It makes sense. It's efficient. It works. Others flock to compete. Sometimes that ruins the opportunity. Regardless, you have a market. This may be the case. We'll see. I think we have far superior competitive advantages than a private equity because essentially a private equity, every acquisition is almost a we start afresh in a way. In our case, we do well because of the platform and the structure. And so it would take many years for someone to build the employer brand, The talent pool, the culture, the technologies to get to really compete. So I'm actually not at all, which is also one of the reasons why you see me being pretty transparent about some of the principles. Because I, I think I thought about it and I figured if, if I started over knowing all I do, which I knew someone else typically wouldn't at all, but also because what I say here, yeah, it's the tip of the iceberg, but then from there to actual day-to-day, yeah, make it work. But, but even if I, if I started over with all I know. And even if someone said, oh, I trust you'll do super well, here's a billion dollars, to get to where we are now, say 12 years after the foundation of BanditsProof, it would take me maybe not 12 years, but easily 7 or 8. Like, it's a huge slog. You hire 2 people, you spend a year coaching them, and then you hire 4 and they coach them and you help you, and you build the technology slowly. You know, it takes time to write software and polish it. But presumably more will try. I would say that's to be expected. And It's being painful. Again, private equity is very difficult. But if you're bright, you understand business, finding someone who will give you, you know, not $100 billion, that's the best of the best over decades, but enough that you can have a business and it's worth trying is not that difficult. There are so many private equity firms. Ultimately, you just need to do well enough that you don't look bad, like you're around average, and many will die, but some even statistically will do well enough. So it's easy. The barriers to entry are low. And so you have a proliferation out of proliferation of wannabes. Some will prove to be great, some will be great out of luck, and so again you have more competition. But trying to build a Bending Spoons is, if you understand what you're doing, which is a prerequisite to even have a chance, it's dauntingly painful. I mean, again, many years from the ground up cultivating the little garden. There is no shortcut to it. So I think it's just not a model that when people see it, a lot of people have known about it, For years, as I've talked to investors, and I've seen nobody try because they just understand it's just too painful.

I have loved doing this with you. It's so fun to hear you be so transparent about what you've done to build this thing. It's such a unique business in a unique place. It's fun to do it here with you here in Milan. When I do these interviews, I ask everyone the same traditional closing question: What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

So when I was a little kid, I was. Almost pathologically shy to the point that I was, let's say, diagnosed with autism. I think the diagnosis was not necessarily particularly scientific, but that's to say I was so introverted and shy. I spent years in elementary school talking to nobody pretty much. So I go to middle school. In Italy, we have middle school between the age of 10 and 13, I think. And it's, uh, the first year, school year goes by, and I've talked to essentially nobody in my class. Literally. And we're late in the year, I think it's probably May, and, uh, uh, we're on a school trip, uh, uh, in the hills, just taking a stroll with our teacher and probably seeing some ruins or some Roman thing. It's a pretty common thing to do in Italy, plenty of ruins. Um, and all of a sudden, 2 classmates of mine come over, just hug me, and, and they just start talking. And they were the 2 outgoing, popular guys in the class. They just talked to me, and they, on the bus, they just dragged me with them in the back, and we started singing. And I'm terrified and happy at the same time because I did want to socialize. I just absolutely, I didn't know how. And they keep investing in this relationship for a long time, and they were 10 or 11, so little kids, until months later I felt confident in myself and I had turned into a reasonably Social person, like I could not the most social, not the most outgoing, but you wouldn't tell that I had been almost pathologically shy to the point that my mom brought me to a doctor. You know, like and I owed it to those two two guys. And what I learned during the third third and last year of of middle school was that so one of them got mad at me for something stupid, like a girl, I don't know, kissed me, not him. Like okay, stupid thing, twelve years old, and it lasted five minutes. But in those five minutes, he was furious, and he told me, "You remember two years ago when Alberto and I did this and that, and helped you, and involved you, and got you out of your shell? Well, we didn't do it because we thought you were cool, but because this teacher told us that you needed help." And he did it to hurt me to say that. But actually, I'd never felt more grateful in my life because it's very difficult if you think about it. for someone 10 years old to actually implement that request from a teacher, to go with the uncool guy, go through this slog of months where the guy barely talks, inviting him after classes to go to his place to play video games or play football. And they literally changed my life. It's probably the single thing that ever happened to me that I'm most grateful for.

Incredible. Closing story. I absolutely love it. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Patrick. My pleasure.