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- [00:01]
IBM Representative
The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works. At IBM, we've seen this firsthand. But by embedding AI across hr, IT and procurement processes, we've reduced costs by millions, slash repetitive tasks, and freed thousands of hours for strategic work. Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM,
- [00:33]
Bailey Lipschultz
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio news
- [00:37]
Bloomberg Host
We've got Luca Ferrari, the co founder, CEO and chair of Bending Spoons, joining us from the Nasdaq. Also with us, Bailey Lipschultz, Bloomberg News IPO reporter who joins us here in the studio. Luke, I want us to start with with what exactly the portfolio is and sort of how you want to communicate to investors what you're going to do with assets that many people remember from the world of Web 1.0.
- [01:02]
Luca Ferrari
Thank you for having me. First of all, let me explain how we operate because it's quite unusual, perhaps unique. We've spent the last 13 years building what I consider an exceptional platform of very high talent density, a culture of high performance and rationality, 50 plus proprietary technologies and operating system for running digital businesses as effectively and as efficiently as possible, and a lot of data that helps us make better decisions at the stage of acquisition and then operations. And then what we do with this engine is we go and acquire Digital businesses with AliExpress potential and we integrate them very deeply onto this platform in a way that I haven't seen anybody do before. They share the entirely the same technological layer. We have a core team that moves fluidly across all our businesses and we transform them deeply. We rebuild the org technology, the monetization, we accelerate innovation, launch new features. So it's a pretty unique model. And as you were describing, we have established over time a portfolio of brands, some of which are very well known and some of which are more dated. We also have bought more up and coming companies, but there's a bit of both. We win, we do. Well, not necessarily when the company we buy is young or old, growing fast or more stagnating, but when we can make that trajectory a lot better. So that's, that's what we try to excel.
- [02:34]
Bailey Lipschultz
Luca, we were talking earlier about this and I just am interested if you can explain for viewers kind of the path to better monetization. Again, you have about a half a billion monthly active users, but only a small fraction of that are actually deriving value from what does that mean for the company going forward and how do you grow that?
- [02:51]
Luca Ferrari
Yeah, exactly. Half a billion people use our products, quote unquote. Only 9 million people, so roughly 2% pay for them, which obviously is an opportunity. We also believe that it's important to provide excellent value to our customers. So we're not looking to monetize as much as possible and we're happy to have a vast population of users who use our products without paying and they bring value through word of mouth and, and that will probably continue to be the case. But yes, we have an opportunity to monetize better and we have a history of doing that, I think quite successfully. So yes, going forward, hopefully we can, we can improve the percentage of our users who choose to pay for our products and look at ultimate. Yeah, go ahead, Luca.
- [03:34]
Bailey Lipschultz
No, just thinking through though, kind of what changes when companies go public. Now you have to answer to public investors and obviously that draws the potential towards, you know, partnering with AI companies, letting them train their limbs off of their data. How are you guys thinking about the potential partnership opportunities? Again, it's no longer a company where you and your friends are running it. Now you have to answer to the public investors. Is there any sense of pressure from them that you would need to better monetize and therefore partner with, say, an open air anthropic?
- [04:04]
Luca Ferrari
I think management hasn't been a company run by friends like that in a long time. And we feel we are a highly professional organization. We've had blue chip investors on board for many years. Baila Gift for Durable Capital have been with us for many years at this point. So we have operated as rigorously and seriously as it gets for as long as I can remember. Obviously the constituents would be a little bit different as a public company, but I don't think we're going to change our views. We're trying to maximize value 10 or 20 years out and we'll continue doing that. In terms of data, we have never sold any data. We've never enabled any third party to train their models on our data. We don't have any plans to do that. And you know, I'll let you know if that changes, but right now that's our stance.
- [04:50]
Bailey Lipschultz
Luca, I'm trying to understand a little bit more too about the business model. You guys have identified more than a thousand digital businesses in Europe and North America that could be attractive acquisitions over the next few years. That's according to your listing document. It feels like, are you just buying your way to growth and masking perhaps a slowdown in retention? Is that the strategy?
- [05:14]
Luca Ferrari
I mean, we. Yes, we are buying as a key engine of growth. I think there's no difference in putting dollars against marketing driven growth or R and D driven growth or M and A driven growth. They're just different levers you can pull. We found that with our platform, M and A has been by far the most efficient. We have doubled the company, roughly speaking, every year as long as I can remember. So not too shabby. We barely raised any equity in the past. Certainly much more efficient than we would have achieved through more conventional means. Having said that, almost every time the companies we have owned we have improved retention, monetization, organic growth. So we're managing these assets for the long run. We have never sold a company we bought, nor do we plan to. We try to be excellent stewards of these businesses again with a 10, 20 year view, as long as we can project out. But yes, we do anticipate that the vast majority of our growth will come from acquisitions. And as long as that's where the highest returns come, we'll take it. We like it a lot.
- [06:21]
Bloomberg Host
Luca, the next acquisition. Look, tell us what it'll be. If you don't, I'm going to give you a gimme or you're going to give me a gimme, I guess. What's the theme and the theme that you're looking for?
- [06:39]
Luca Ferrari
We're not thematic as an acquirer. If you look at our portfolio, we have enterprise businesses, we have consumer businesses, we've got ticketing, we've got video platforms, a little bit of everything. So what we look for is businesses that we can improve tremendously, whether it's the product as a loyal customer base. But it's a bit dated that you could overhaul the user experience, add features, improve the technology, whether it's the monetization isn't efficient, maybe the cost base is bloated, maybe a bunch of these at the same time. And let's say the customer facing side of things can vary, but those fundamentals have to be. At least one or two of these have to be in place for us to be interested. So we're always looking at a bunch of companies. Hopefully we'll acquire additional companies during the rest of the year. But yeah, even if I wanted to, I couldn't share any theme. We don't think that way.
- [07:33]
Bailey Lipschultz
Yeah, we aren't surprised by that. Good one by Tim Doe. Luca, one question though. When you hear SaaS Apocalypse, does that present opportunity or does that present risks? Just thinking through the portfolios of companies doesn't seem that difficult to me as someone who's not that smart to replicate some of the portfolio companies using a Claude, for example.
- [07:54]
Luca Ferrari
Oh, I totally agree. I mean it's, it's very easy. I'd say it's been very easy for at least 10, 15 years. Replicating. Take AOL writing a mobile or desktop email app. There's probably several hundreds of them out there. Eventbrite has been copied a million times. AI doesn't change that. It was already very easy. It makes it even easier. But there's so many clones at this point that it doesn't make any difference. There's a world now, the world we live in, where building a ticketing platform is impossibly difficult and Eventbrite is the only one to exist and it's maybe worth a billion dollars or $50 billion. And now with AI becomes easy and that's bad news. But that's not. Again, that's not the world we live in. It's been very easy to replicate product like Eventbrite for a decade. So any success that these companies are having right now is. Is not based on a lack of technically viable alternatives. They win because they have a brand or a network effect or switching costs. And so I don't think that will really change going forward. We haven't seen any degradation whatsoever in any metrics. If anything, AI has been a major tailwind for us. Ultimately, the main disadvantage of our model is that these transformations are very operationally intensive. We need a lot of excellent people to work really hard to rebuild again, the software features monetization so we can do a million of these acquisitions per year. Not that AI solves that entirely, but it loosens that bottleneck substantially. Our revenue per Spooner Spooner is like our core team of people who help us transform the companies went up from about a million dollars in 2023 to a run rate of roughly $4 million in Q1 2026, with AI being clearly the main reason for. For that massive growth. So.
- [09:50]
Bloomberg Host
Well, Luke, we don't have a ton of time left and a few more questions we want to get to. I want to focus in on the AOL part of this. You bought that from Apollo one and a half billion dollars approximately last year. AOL in full disclosure. Many years ago I worked at a version of aol. It's known for still having people who actually pay for it, but it's just a shadow of what it once was. When you say you're trying to get more people to pay for the products and services that you own, how do you get more people to pay for AOL.
- [10:19]
Luca Ferrari
So AOL currently has approximately 30 million monthly active users. Only a small percentage of these pay others are monetized through advertising. Unlike most of our user base where often we don't use ads at all. Unlike people think actually OL has been growing for several years. I can't really speak as to what happened 10 or 20 years ago, but at least the last three, three or four years it's been on a slow growth trajectory. We expect it to continue, maybe accelerate a little bit going forward. There are multiple opportunities to improve this business as you could imagine. The product. I think the product is better than people think it is but it's not on par with some of the competition. So we look forward to improving it substantially, both the email client and the web portal. We believe that there is plenty of opportunity to improve the underlying technological foundations, especially the advertising tech stack and the recommender system that chooses what content you see on the web platform. I think it's one of the most exciting acquisitions we have carried out in recent years.
- [11:27]
Bailey Lipschultz
Hey listen, you and your co founders Luca hold 100% of the Class A shares and almost 83% of the voting rights. We've seen this with some other tech companies. You're coming to market with a controlled company structure and a highly acquisitive strategy. What decisions, if any, should public minority shareholders realistically expect to influence over time?
- [11:54]
Luca Ferrari
I think we will take input to heart. I'd like to think we have a history of intellectual honesty and open mindedness. These are key values internally and externally for us. Naturally, if someone chooses to invest right now, we'd have to trust that we'll make the right call. That's what it is with this sort of governance. But I certainly can promise we'll be listening honestly agreeing with everything we're told, but listening for sure.
- [12:22]
Bailey Lipschultz
Hey, listen, as you know, it's very different to be a private entity and a publicly held company. What's top of mind? The pressures you think you might feel though now as a publicly held company.
- [12:32]
Luca Ferrari
I don't know, I haven't done it before. I don't presume to know. I'm sure it's going to suck in many ways. We'll try to do our best not to succumb to the pressure and noise and stay focused on execution. We have a plan for the next 10 or 20 years. It's going to be a challenge. We can't afford to lose focus. So that's the goal here. Stay head down, work hard, stay rational. We'll see. We're optimistic but I'm sure we could make mistakes, so we got to be careful.
- [13:01]
Bailey Lipschultz
Well, I'll just tell you, every quarter, those earnings reports, we love to go over them. So we're looking forward to your first earnings.
- [13:07]
Bloomberg Host
Luke, are you going to go check out a World cup game while you're here?
- [13:11]
Luca Ferrari
I'd love to. I don't think I'll have time, but I hear it's been great. People are talking about repeating, you know, again in the States in four years, so maybe that time I'll be able to.
- [13:24]
Bloomberg Host
I think the folks at FIFA will have something to say about that. Luca, thanks for joining us. Appreciate your time. Luca, for our CEO of Bending Spoons, the company going public today. Luca joining us live from the nasdaq.
- [13:36]
IBM Representative
The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works. At IBM, we've seen this firsthand. But by embedding AI across hr, IT and procurement processes, we've reduced cost by millions, slash repetitive tasks, and freed thousands of hours for strategic work. Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business.
- [14:05]
Venture Global Representative
IBM Never bet against American Grit or American Energy through innovation. Venture Global is not only building some of the largest energy facilities in the world right here in the United States, but delivering American energy at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time. So while others are busy talking, we're busy building. That's Venture Global. That's unstoppable energy.