← Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy![Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] — Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy cover](https://megaphone.imgix.net/podcasts/b29cbd80-b93a-11f0-a1b7-2b977c9469a2/image/39f7864ea628f71a81b94662bd4a86df.jpg?ixlib=rails-4.3.1&max-w=3000&max-h=3000&fit=crop&auto=format,compress)
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446]
01:20:35
Loading summary
Transcript86 lines
- [00:00]
A
The best operators have a relentless focus on leverage, finding ways to multiply their impact rather than just working harder. But here's what I see happening in finance teams everywhere. Brilliant people getting buried in expense management. Busy work. If you think about it, you become a finance leader because you love strategic work. Modeling scenarios, optimizing capital allocation, finding the insights that actually move the business forward. But instead you're chasing receipts and categorizing transactions. It's the opposite of leverage. This is exactly why I'm so bullish on what the team at Ramp has built. Kareem and Eric understood that every minute spent on manual expense management is a minute stolen from high leverage work. So they automated all of it. Automatic categorization, receipt matching, spending controls that actually work. I love the network effect that this creates. When finance teams at companies like Shopify and Stripe automate the mundane stuff, they free up cycles to think bigger, to ask bigger questions, spot patterns others miss and make the kind of strategic bets that separate great companies from good ones. The math is simple. Get your time back, focus on what matters. Check out ramp.com invest and see what happens when you eliminate the busy work cards issued by Sutton bank member fdic. Terms and conditions apply. As an investor, gaining an edge means having the right tools. And one platform leading the way is AlphaSense. Trusted by 75% of the world's top hedge funds, AlphaSense is the market intelligence platform that gives institutional investors access to over 500 million premium sources, from company filings in broker research to news trade journals and more. And with its recent acquisition of Tigus, it also includes the world's largest library of expert interview transcripts. Over 200,000 calls covering more than 24,000 public and private companies all in one platform. So investment teams can move faster, go deeper and make high conviction decisions with confidence. Now AlphaSense is transforming the research process with the launch of its Deep Research tool, part of the next generation of its AI powered platform. Unlike other deep research tools, AlphaSense's version is purpose built for investment research. It runs multi step iterative analysis using Alpha Sense's proprietary content, including those 200,000 expert transcripts and in minutes services. Insights that would take multiple interviews and days of digging to uncover. It's like adding 10 analysts to your team, helping you accelerate analysis, deepen understanding and make sharper decisions. See it in action@alpha-sense.com invest in asset management, growth often depends on customization. It's the nature of the beast in our industry and I know having experienced the problem firsthand as an active manager. It's a competitive differentiator to tailor products and services to clients preferences. Those of us growing our businesses always want to say yes to customers. It means delivering a tailored portfolio, a tailored report, or a tailored expectation for service. Saying yes leads to growth and it also leads to customization and a big trade off. The more you grow, the more complexity you absorb. The more you say yes, the harder it is to scale efficiently and consistently. That's where Ridgeline comes in. Ridgeline automates customization. It gives asset managers the ability to deliver personalized experiences at scale without adding headcount, manual work or operational risk. Having been an early design partner myself, I saw firsthand the power of taking an entirely clean sheet of paper to building the system. We've all been waiting for a front to back platform that combines all the firm's core functions on a single data set. It's how leading firms stop choosing between growth and efficiency and start saying yes to both. I believe the best firms will be built on Ridgeline as their operating system. I also believe they'll be a leading case study in combining the power of systems of record and AI. If you haven't spent time with them yet, I urge you to see what Ridgeline might unlock for your business. Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick o' Shaughnessy and this is Invest like the Best, this show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts@joincolasis.com Patrick O' Shaughnessy.
- [03:55]
B
Is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit PSC um VC.
- [04:23]
A
My guest today is Luca Ferrari. Luca is the co Founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, which he describes as 25% private equity and 75% technology company. Founded in 2013, Bending Spoons fully acquires and operates digital companies like Evernote, Meetup, Vimeo, and most recently aol. Our conversation explores the unique model behind Bending Spoons and the culture required to scale it. Luca shares exactly how their acquisition playbook works from identifying promising Businesses to rebuilding every part of them across product design, monetization and marketing. We discuss their approach to financing long term ownership through both debt and equity. Luka's obsession with finding and developing exceptional talent and his decision to build the company in Europe. I found Luca's description of himself as perennially unhappy to be the clearest window into how he builds. It's a mindset that fuels his pursuit of excellence and defines the culture at Benning Spoons. Please enjoy my conversation with Luca Ferrari. For those that don't know about it, since we're in Milan today, it's not New York City. Not everyone yet knows about Bedding Spoon. Soon they will. Can you just tell us what it is and then we'll go from there.
- [05:29]
B
We are a pretty unusual beast. 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. And then unlike a private equity, which would typically look to sell them three, five, seven 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, we actually rethink the entire company, try to come up with a vision for the most successful version of that company and work as hard as we can to close the gap between the Citrus Co 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 platform more powerful. So build better proprietary technologies, better access to talent, more knowledge, and go after new, bigger acquisitions.
- [06:38]
A
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 five years hence? I know you care very deeply about the culture of the people here, what the home office looks like and feels like you have a huge ambition for what you're building. Maybe describe that ambition and that vision a little bit.
- [06:57]
B
We felt inspired at the prospect of building the company, being our product, building an institution. 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 a 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. We want to be the ultimate testing and training ground for incredibly talented and motivated people. And so the company, five 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 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. 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 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. We hope we can be part of that movement. Showing that you can actually build such a company. We're an international company with operations in the US too. But the deeper routes, the original routes can be here too. We are not a periphery of the empire.
- [08:49]
A
It was actually Daniel Ek at Spotify who introduced us originally. Obviously he's built one of the great European origin businesses. Why do you think there are not more of them? Obviously you're seeking to change this, but there's not that many. What do you think the deep reasons are?
- [09:02]
B
I think the main reason is a matter of default. Why does California has had so much success over the decades? One of the reason 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. Ultimately, at least I was. I think that's true of many founders. You are a passionate, determined, maybe talented idiot. Essentially you don't know the world enough to actually determine where the ideal location will be if you even think about it. Because typically. How many times have you heard of founders doing a location study? Where should I Start my company. It tends to be momentum. 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 I could actually build such a business from France or Portugal or Italy.
- [10:12]
A
Was that a key part of the original vision? That you wanted it to be a beacon for European talent, to show the world that a company like this could exist here? If so, why? Why did you care so much? Why not just go to California?
- [10:23]
B
It's difficult when you talk about the sense of purpose, what inspires you? I think 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 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 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. There were very good arguments for us to maybe start in California. For sure, that was a very reasonable point to make.
- [11:20]
A
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?
- [11:29]
B
That happened constantly. 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 Spoons, we came up with it through the failure of Evertail. At the time, with Evertail, we raised about a million euros all in all, and 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 of you. You keep the money, we'll sell our shares to you for a nominal €1 and you'll probably get something after taxes from it and just go and get a nice vacation. We're seeking the brain and so rather than going on vacation, we took whatever we could and that was a seed capital for Benning spoons 2013. It wasn't a lot of money. 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 to acquire companies capex intensive, particularly at beginnings. 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 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.
- [13:03]
A
To get some cash.
- [13:04]
B
Yeah, especially a co founder. And I spent a good three, four months, 12, 16 hours a day just emailing anyone on the planet and cold calling people. We offer discounts. We're like, just hire us to do something. I swear to God. We couldn't get anybody, not a single soul hired us to do anything. The 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. We'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 three 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 three and a half, almost four 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 comforted me and we said, okay, at least we're in this together and just keep going. So we did and of course I'm happy we did. That was a pretty low point.
- [14:27]
A
Didn't you have to get a job at McKinsey at some point to fund everybody else?
- [14:30]
B
The previous startup? Oh, okay, yeah, it's a cool store. At least I think it's cool. So we graduate two friends of mine, Francesco and Matteo, who happen to be co founders of Benny Spoons 2 and we have this idea of building this Evertail company. The idea was to create a self rising diary of a user's life with AI. This is 2010, so AI was. Nobody was talking about AI in 2010. 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 way that you could scale for users. We had no money whatsoever because all of us essentially come from pretty low class families, whatever you want to call it, we didn't have a lot of money. And as much as we didn't have an idea for a business that would require a billion dollars 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 three 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 two. Once we raise seed capital, VC money somehow, then this person would resign and join full time and then we go and conquer the world. So we all look for a job and I get an offer from McKinsey which was 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'm incapable of not being transparent, let alone lying. So I had to tell the partner at McKinsey that I would be working on the startup on the side. 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. It feels dishonest. Actually he was enthusiastic and he encouraged me and said, absolutely, we'd love to have you and if and when the startup takes off, wish you the best and thank you. I was very grateful. I still have a very fond memory of McKinsey for that reason, like a lot of gratitude. And 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.
- [16:16]
A
Willingness to do anything to get going. I've never heard that before. One person funds the other two to be building and then you join them on the.
- [16:22]
B
There was no contract, nothing. Yeah, 100% just trust. I don't know, I just think it's really a good way to live life. Sometimes you get 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.
- [16:36]
A
Between Evertail and bending spoons, where did the insight come from to be an M and a driven acquirer of businesses rather than building them?
- [16:45]
B
So Evertale 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 three 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 three or four 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. And so we concluded it's not a huge sample, but probably to go from zero to one. Luck plays a huge role. There are so many factors and variables that even if you're a genius and you work your ass off, 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, AI at the time, for what it's worth, product design, product management, marketing, although they were still pretty crude three years later, they were night and day relative to when we started. 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 is probably a matter of if you assume you are reasonably talented, a matter of perseverance, effort, discipline. 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 maybe got lucky or they're very good. But also the passions change. Between going from 0 to 1 to 2 to 10, 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 five or six years.
- [19:01]
A
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 having I'll call it a home office that sits on top of a lot of different business units.
- [19:12]
B
I'll give you an obvious one and two not so obvious ones. The obvious one is of course you get to negotiate with a vendor for cloud infrastructure advertising partner better. So that adds probably a couple of percentage points in EBITDA margins. It's good, it's useful, it's not transformative. Or you can make an R and D investment in a general purpose technology that many businesses can leverage. And although that investment would be prohibitively expensive, irrational to make any one of those businesses individually, it's actually very appealing if you can deploy it across the two more important ones are at least equally important. But I think more important ones are one we can move R and D and also marketing resources fluidly across businesses. In my experience, the R and D opportunity when you run a business is quite fleeting. It changes quite rapidly over time. So maybe you're new 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 that actually yields substantial returns. But hiring people, coaching people, training people, organizing people is very slow. So you really have two choices. Either you make it happen in a few months, but you're going to do massive damage to your team. Your culture talent 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 and 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 because of all these factors. In my estimation, most companies are years behind in terms of the optimal staff. They're actually years behind what they should be. Could they control the people factor perfectly instantaneously? Some management teams are better than others. It's really just an inherent inefficiency of a single product model. But because we can pool at least part of our R and 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 defensive. Another major advantage of our model. 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, partly nice company, but it's not as excited as I would be thinking about OpenAI or 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 Venue Splunts is a model that's very appealing to people. First of all, it's growing fast, so it feels like we're going places. 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. So all else being equal, we can attract stronger talent layer. On top of that, the ability to make massive investments in processes, knowledge, and the tools required to attract and predict talent. 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 basically, we have access to better talent. Plus we will 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 99% of companies cannot say that 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. That's one in 3,000, 4,000 super selective. And it's not because I'm smart or anything. It's just inherent advantages of the Benning Spruce model. And of course, an employer brand built over a decade of investment. And people work here saying it's amazing. Talent 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.
- [23:27]
A
I heard somewhere that for a long time on Slack, your label was recruiter, which is pretty cool.
- [23:32]
B
I think it still is.
- [23:33]
A
It still is. You mentioned the idea of building an employer brand for a decade plus. Talk about those two things, how they go hand in hand, and what you've done that's been most successful at building the employer brand.
- [23:43]
B
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. 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 of getting better over time at it, on being the ideal place for incredibly talented and hungry, determined professionals. We make a promise to them to surround them with incredibly high talent density. Just mentioned how selective we are. The entry point. We continue to be selective throughout. That certainly forces us to have difficult conversations and our moments of stress, but overall, it's a clear positive. Yes, it's a more intense, challenging workplace, but for people who want to be 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.
- [24:57]
A
Why is testing yourself so addictive? What is it about it as a function that you and the team so enjoy?
- [25:05]
B
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 when I look at Novak Djokovic, Rafa Nadal, I don't know Them personally, they both strike me as people who are absolutely turned down by the idea of testing their limits and pushing against those limits. I don't think they wanted to win for the sake of saying, oh, I won 23 Grand Slam tournaments. They loved the idea that it was supposed to be impossible. And you know what? I'm gonna prove it's not. It's one of the ways some humans are wired. But the truth is, a lot of humans 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 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.
- [25:55]
A
Have you learned anything surprising about yourself or about how the world works in all these years of testing yourself?
- [26:02]
B
One thing I've learned that'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 don't like the model of the bright, brilliant asshole or anything like that. I think you can not be a consensus seeker while being a perfectly respectful, nice human being. I think 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 friction and criticism by nature, and I think, at least personally and certainly my capacity as a company that slowed me down, caused me some pain that in hindsight, unwarranted and didn't bring any good to anybody, I felt pain, and others benefited as a consequence. And instead, when you have a clear idea, you believe that's the right approach. And of course, you have listened to input, intellectual honesty, openness. So it's not a matter of pride, just a matter of intellectual conviction. Then I think being able to just accept disagreement, pissing some people off, and just going very straight toward that goal is a superpower. Not perfect at that, for sure, but I'm much better today than I was when I started. But at least the first seven or eight 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 team disagreeing with them, criticizing them. Instead, I think they should really try to. If they believe they've got a solution, the path ahead, they should be uncompromising in that regard.
- [27:49]
A
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 skillset to make the products way better, bigger, faster, everything. What is the first couple years of that process 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? Talk us through the early lessons and early activity in the M and A markets.
- [28:19]
B
The beginning, again, we had those 40,000. So we were trying to do some consulting, like I said, which never worked. Basically brought no revenue. Pretty much the first acquisition, I think we closed it within the year, so pretty quickly. And we paid 10,000 for it. I don't remember what it was called. It was an iOS app to personalize your keyboard. Ultimately made 20,000 off it. Very good return in a short period of time at a tiny scale. And then that 20 went into a couple other acquisitions and maybe turned into 40, but again, similar nature. So small products, amateurishly built. Certainly no institutional investors, no investors of any sort. Definitely no professional management teams. Typically one person, a guy in the app. Yeah, exactly. In parallel, we also launched a handful of products from scratch. Learn things, because if you don't acquire almost anything because you've got no money, you're also not learning. So we're trying to learn, hopefully make some revenue. We had a couple of mild successes, 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 40 and 80. And we've been compounding at pretty fast rates. If you look at our per share revenue or EBITDA growth over the past four years, where we are at a decent scale, it's about 1.3 billion this year. It's still about 75% per year. We're still compounding pretty fast. Ten 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.
- [29:45]
A
So in those early days, what were the key lessons that you were learning? 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?
- [29:57]
B
It's always been the same things on a high level. And that would be. So far we've always focused on digital technology. We haven't bought supermarket chains, nor do we plan to. I feel you want to stay reasonably within your circle of competence, ideally here and there. You want to take a step outside of it. You need to keep pushing the boundaries because that will keep your TAM expanding as you expand within the tam. But I don't think it would be wise, especially as long as the model works well. It's efficient to take massive leaps outside of the circular competence. Just because so digital technology scale, scale is relative. But because our approach is so hands on, so time consuming, I mentioned we can sometimes we radically rethink a business, or at least several components of it. We will do maybe five acquisitions a year, could be one, could be 10, max, if it's really a stretch. And each some more than others, will really go super deep and rethink the details. 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 100 million. Maybe on average a little bit more time consuming because it tends to be more complicated, but nowhere nearly nearly. So we want to do fewer acquisitions, but bigger. So first criterion is scale. And again, at the time, 10K looked like a big bet. Or do we feel like as a beta 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, 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 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, probably they wouldn't sell it to us for that price. These are the criteria and they have remained the same. But the level of sophistication, our understanding of these criteria over time, it's incomparable.
- [32:00]
A
Maybe we could talk about Evernote as a great case study, because I used to use it all the time. It was my place of record for keeping my notes and book highlights and all these things. And people have heard of the brand. It was a big acquisition for you. I'm curious what you think of as the milestone acquisitions in the history of bending spoons. I'd love to dive into that one. Just to hear an example of 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.
- [32:25]
B
At the beginning it was all what you would call asset deals, individual apps and whatnot. And then we had a period of maybe three, four years where we saw that very basic small scale model work was going to saturate at some point in the not too distant future. And we figured we should do this at a bigger scale with structured companies with management teams and large teams of professionals and institutional investors. But will we be able to do as well or at least enough there? And we were quite. I think we lacked confidence to take the leap immediately. And so we started losing a bit of focus and looking at alternative strategies while taking tentative baby steps into that next level of the same thing, really. But just I guess it's a bit like I've played locally now when I do an international tennis tournament to go back to the tennis, 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. And I think Evernote was the first such company, like clearly within that definition and it was very successful and so it gave us. And so was it for the sellers, by the way. I think it was a great deal for both parties. My guess is that we paid 50% more than the next best offer. So it was really a win win. 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 processes, 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. You can't say that of a lot of products.
- [34:05]
A
Wow.
- [34:05]
B
Yeah, a strong brand, an important use case. A lot of customers with thousands or tens of thousands of nodes using Evernote to run their lives, really. And so that means potentially good retention. The product had not probably kept up with the times as well as you as a customer would have loved to see. Of course, you can only realize that fully once you're on the inside and really open the hood and you get a sense of that. As a user, and I was a user actually before I acquired it. I've been a user since 2014, I believe. And so we bid, we won it. We began our usual transformation process on a different scale, but essentially had a team of some of our best experts, functional experts, growth, product design and engineering going. 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 developed a roadmap for how to make Evernote more successful and got to work. It's a completely different business today. I think in two and a half years we have released probably about 250 significant product improvements. It's difficult to be 100% quantitative of product improvements because there's no perfect definition. But in my estimation we have been improving and innovating probably three to five 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 move the needle. And it's a million things you bring in as a business with our platform. But we rebuilt almost entirely the code base, 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.
- [35:51]
A
I remember that being a problem when I was using it. That's why I stopped.
- [35:53]
B
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 and it's probably on average say 60% more expensive. So it's substantially more expensive than before. But share retention is better because yeah, we did lose 10% of customers who were already not so sure. And once the price goes up, okay, I'm out of here. But all the more engaged, loyal customers are still on board. And customer satisfaction by any quantitative metric is better than it's ever been before. 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 and D team and everything 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 three or five or six.
- [37:00]
A
How do you know when there's pricing power? 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?
- [37:13]
B
It really depends on each case. I'll give you another case that's quite different from Evernote and that would be meetup. So Meetup, historically you could only use it as an organizer. You could only use it if you paid for it. And since we acquired it, we introduced a free tier so you could organize. We actually do quite a lot for free. 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 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. I'd like to think Benning 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. It certainly translates into a very different overall approach to monetization.
- [38:18]
A
Just as a quick aside, why is it called bending spoons?
- [38:21]
B
So when we started, we knew that we weren't gonna 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, or the product they're trying to deliver. Of course, that wasn't an option for us. 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. Watched the movie the night before. I'm not sure, but anyway, he told us, why don't we call it Bending Spoons? He watched the movie and there's this little bald guy who bends a spoon with his mind. And I think it's cool. Initially, we didn't like it. I still have a spreadsheet with different names, Bending Spoons. I think we gave it like four out of five stars. There were a couple others that got more stars. The one I remembered in hindsight, thank God we didn't pick it. Appeal. We were doing only apps initially. Now we do all sorts of technology, software. But appeal? I think it's awful. For some reason, the Luca from 2013 thought it was brilliant, so it got five stars out of five. But we picked Benning Spoons. And the reason why we liked it was it connected to two principles or values that are 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 add 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, just intuitively feels 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 plus, it was a unique name. We hadn't heard of any company called Benning Spoons, and so we figured it's probably memorable. Let's go for it.
- [40:21]
A
I love it 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? How do you think about pricing assets as you buy bigger and bigger ones? We can talk about Vimeo, we can talk about aol. 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 good, fair, responsible price. How do you think about it?
- [40:49]
B
One is how do you determine your returns as a function of price? 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 at 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? How efficient are we at positioning the ultimate price on that curve? The fastest but stupidest approach would be to immediately offer the very most you can pay. The opposite of offering a ridiculous low price is probably equally stupid. So you want to find the right balance, interestingly, 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. So the first one, how do you determine that return as a function of price curve? You got to be very sophisticated at knowing what you're doing, having first party data for benchmarking, asking the right questions, having good models, but the output of the model is only as good as the assumptions you put in it. And we certainly have very sophisticated cohorted models and whatnot. But main advantages in being able to run these businesses a lot better. 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's really marginally important to making good predictions. And so you want to. 12 years of experience running many businesses from the trenches in the details. 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 are 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 as a probability distribution and we debate assumptions extensively without ever looking at what the model will spit out as a consequence. That's forbidden because we think that if you see the P and L basically the business plan as you do it, there are all sorts of biases. It doesn't look good enough. And you're like, oh, maybe this is conservative. We do not look at the output, only at the inputs. We debate, analyze, dig for more data. Once we're happy, that's the best we can do at this stage. We run a Monte Carlo simulation and then we look at the distribution of IRR npv. And that's the truth. Nobody can say. Now that I see it, I think maybe we were a bit pessimistic with the assumptions. No, too late. This is not the truth. This is what will guide our negotiation. So that's phase one. And then you make an offer. As I said, we try to make an offer that's sometimes the maximum will to pay or close to it. Because we think, although we could probably get a better deal in the moment if you started lower, then we don't want to establish a reputation for people you can push around and get more out of. 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 okay if I hear no, but don't think you can get 25% more out of me. Just asking. And then you 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, okay, you know what? That's not to be. We'll move on to the next one.
- [44:03]
A
What's your walk away rate for every AOL vimeo evernote that you buy, how many did you want to buy that you ultimately didn't?
- [44:09]
B
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 twice as many as we buy. 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. It also tells me we're probably not very good at negotiating because I think some level of failure rate would indicate a more optimal strategy. I guess you fail, you learn, you get better.
- [44:40]
A
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.
- [44:56]
B
Yeah. In short, the more sophisticated version is completely true, what you just said for the first five years. Then we started using debt, pretty basic debt from commercial banks. Not very high leverage ratios, 3.5 times CBD 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 serial. Since then, it's been essentially debt and reinvested earnings and debt. We have raised a bunch of equity, but mostly to fuel secondary transactions because if you're in business for a long time, you start to get into good scale. People saying, okay, I've invested in this company and I'm talking really just team members because from the beginning we enabled people. We pay just cash, no variable pay of any kind. And people can choose 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. So we started organizing secondary transactions every 18 months, one year, two years. We've had maybe five, four, 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%. 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 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. Credibility, firepower if we need to go after a huge acquisition quickly. Just optionality. But we're generally very cautious when it comes to dilution. I think if you really believe in what you're doing, it should be painful to increase your capital base.
- [46:47]
A
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. The AI photo sharing. One remedy, which I was just looking at out 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?
- [47:10]
B
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 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 know 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 we learned. We actually went after Grindr, the LGBTQ dating app, in 2019. So the app was owned by a Chinese firm and cfuse was forcing it to sell. So long story short, 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. 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 down available sources of funds. So that was a failure. Weworked. Took us about nine months. My main thing and the main thing for several colleagues at the time, we were very small. We had an M and 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 obsessed so much over it, considering how unlikely it was to make it happen and try to place another few bets 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 we put all we had into making that one thing happen. It didn't happen. We hadn't done anything else. We had done some things, but nothing that really moved the needle. So it taught us to think more in terms of probabilities. Not that we weren't before, but I'd say we've gotten almost obsessive of seeing the world in terms of statistics with that model of the world. Act accordingly.
- [49:58]
A
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.
- [50:06]
B
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 pioneers at some point. AOL was what Google was in the 2000s was the hot new thing. So they had this outside in it seems like a failed merger, Time Warner and whatnot. And then they had different homes. It's actually a very good business. It lost all the customers that they had to lose over the decades. And today it's a 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. People who wanted Gmail have decades to go for people who really love that particular experience. They have lots of stuff there. And at the same time we think although the team has done a pretty good job I think at managing this business, there's 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 wonderful business. And in fact again I don't name names but a lot of companies in the broader messaging or email industry or segment and 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 user count pl including in time looking at trends, they are just not nearly as good. Like it doesn't even begin to compare. AOL is actually the fifth most used email inbox in the western world.
- [51:31]
A
Crazy.
- [51:31]
B
Which is at something. It's a pretty competitive category. So is it Gmail? No. If Google ever wants to divest it, we'll be happy to take a look. 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.
- [51:48]
A
One of my mentors who's done a lot of investing and building 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 three. That there was always just too much stuff, too many features, too many products in the company. Have you found that to be true at all? That 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 a common element of your playbook to take 12 down to 3?
- [52:16]
B
I don't know that it's necessarily common 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 it's not as contrarian as I thought it was. But yes, I think people in general overestimate the value of R and D. Let me qualify. They think that generously pouring money into building stuff pays off. It's certainly 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 core problems you're solving, you're probably actually already taking big strides in a direction of greater efficiency. And by the way, it's not just about keeping costs more under control, but it's also doing the thing that matters better. Evernote today has a lower cost base than before, but I promise 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 painfully need it that helps you do more with less.
- [53:32]
A
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 got capital that lasts forever when you're thinking about the right partners?
- [53:43]
B
All else equal, we do prefer a permanent capital. And it's not so much because even permanent capital could ask you to liquidate. It's just that they don't have to. 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 just an unnatural, complicated moment. Incentives can become a little bit perverse. We haven't experienced that before, but I know stories of others having done that. But I think if there is an evergreen source of capital, I think you're less likely to find yourself in that unpleasant situation. 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. 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 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.
- [55:04]
A
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 had made equity investments, secondary investments, et cetera, what distinguishes the best investors? What do they do that's most different from those that are, let's say, average?
- [55:29]
B
I'd say most good investors, 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 that's much more difficult. 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 in the truly incredible ones, you sit with them, they're not saying, oh, you are the Uber of bicycle.
- [56:10]
A
Yeah, you're the Berkshire for this.
- [56:12]
B
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 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 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 truly 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 it's either 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 its good. It's very difficult intellectually. You need creativity, imagination, logic, rationality. It cognitively is next level in that.
- [57:14]
A
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? Where are the best?
- [57:26]
B
Dig in some of the best. I'm 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, he did believe in the E Commerce model and all that, but he believed that very few people he had ever met had the clarity of thought, the rationality of Jeff Bezos. And so a model he believed 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. Requires in and of itself, great cognitive abilities. I find that if someone is 8 out of 10 smart, they can only discern the sevens from the sixes, from the fives. But the eight and a half, the nines, the tens for them look like the same, like a big batch of oh, they're so smart. And so to be able to distinguish the tens from the nines and the eights, you need to be probably close to a 10 yourself. Of course, experience and other elements too, which make it very difficult. They're not just brilliant from a point of view of logic and analysis, but also rationality. Trying to really ignore this person who's really pleasant or charismatic. Yes, park it. What's really beneath that? It's difficult. We as humans have been. Evolution has made us animals of gut of emotion. But emotion investing, they're not good friends, I think, or at least good investing.
- [59:36]
A
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? Fairly complex structure.
- [59:58]
B
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 top core 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 gave them. So if you ultimately, your optimizer for many spoons, not Evernote, nine 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. Certainly there's that. But it's not as immediately tied to a results next quarter or something very measurable through observation. In time, if you're great at your job, you'll probably get more, do more. I think that sometimes when you set typical incentive plans with KPIs and whatnot, first of all, it's very costly. Takes a lot of time 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. 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 needs to overcome before 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, okay, how do I get the better bonus? 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 way, which is treat people respectfully and just get rid of all that stuff and assume you'll do the best you can.
- [61:57]
A
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?
- [62:06]
B
I'm that kind of person. By the way, I'm perennially unhappy, which I think sounds awful because in a way I feel very fortunate. In 3C, I feel very fortunate. Am I perennially unhappy for some reason? Discontent, which is a huge superpower and a curse at the same time? You could imagine what is not good, or at least not as good as it could be. One of the things that is critical for our growth is hiring and coaching. I'm absolutely positive. We offer literally one of a kind level jobs. Some of the best on the planet. Absolutely. Certainly incredible talent density. You learn faster than anywhere else. You get an opportunity to take on responsibility. That's crazy. Most of our general managers who run businesses on average 50, 100 million in revenues, 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. 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 off, 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. 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 our societies. 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 got to 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 subscribed to it. He said we should have a rule that every new law is automatically removed, say three years later, unless someone can make a really good case that's created a lot of value. So we wouldn't have 10,000, 1,000 page long civil codes or whatever. We're 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, there 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. This frustrates me because I think we're just shooting ourselves in the foot as society essentially.
- [65:01]
A
What's your balance of time around this idea of being constantly discontent? What's your balance of time of what I'll call maintenance hours of the business things that are repetitive meetings with teams, internal stuff 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. The question behind the question is what does your week look like? How do you spend your time?
- [65:23]
B
Varies by period a lot. So for example, when we close a large transaction, I'm often there with a task force in the trenches meeting the new team for weeks or even months. Sometimes that will take up 50% of my time or 70% of my time. If we're working on a big fundraise which has raised the largest debt round of any private company in Italy in history, and like we said, we raised $700 million at an $11 billion valuation in equity. These two initiatives certainly took a substantial part of my time. When we're not in fundraising mode, that goes down to a trickle, maybe 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 two FDs like I think most people in my position would. But it's probably these four categories are comparable in investment, on average, in time.
- [66:47]
A
What did you learn during this biggest ever debt raise? Most of the people that I talk 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. I'm curious about the whole process and how you would compare and contrast equity versus debt capital markets. From a raising perspective.
- [67:05]
B
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 the exact financial instrument. It's still a limited and generally fixed upside they have. It's all about not losing it. 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 actually, no, a lot of them are brilliant and visionary. So they're quite curious about the model and how far it could go and understand very quickly why it works. I thoroughly enjoyed my conversations with lenders at least as much as those with equity investors, perhaps because 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 thing could go far is more important, like catching the big wins is more important and so they can be wrong more often. So they're maybe a little bit quicker in their judgment, a bit more. But I think lenders are quite an interesting type of investor to talk to and generally it works to you. Talk to a couple of encore lenders, some of the biggest banks, typically those with a strong investment banking arm too, they help you figure out that kind of shape around. 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 quote unquote, just providing capital. And typically some of this capital is basically it's with that lender, it will stay with you until maturity five or seven years down the line. Some of this capital you may want to syndicate. The lender tells you, okay, I'll give you a billion dollars. But we agree that in the short term we'll be going out to sell away essentially this billion dollar to many providers, each with 1, 10, 50 million each, and they'll hold it for five years or seven years. But I'm just giving you a bridge to that moment. You need the money now you're doing M and 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 standardized by now. You create a deck, you record a presentation. It's. You show up for one hour, maybe three times with batches of lenders. Like, it's super, super standardized, very efficient.
- [70:03]
A
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? Will it hurt them? Because it's easier to create replicas or copies or new versions. We talked about Remini 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.
- [70:36]
B
Yeah, it's a complex discussion and I think you're asking maybe a timeframe of five years because 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 Benny Spoon specifically, I think it's mostly a good thing because we don't care too much about, within reason, the risk to each individual piece of our business. Basically, most of our business units are 20% of our revenue or less. A dramatic decrease in one of them is still. Yeah, we've been growing at 75% a year. 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. Lastly, 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 have 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 Benny Spruce will be at the very cutting edge of using it. So we're already making strides there that if anything the gap in ability between us and most companies will widen for years. But again, I think it's likely to mostly benefit an aggregator and consolidator like Benny Spoons, assuming we stay disciplined with 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. Now, 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. 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 fast. We were working with AI in 2010, so we were 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 the inability of the user to get out of it what they need. These products being honed to customer needs for a long time you're already using them, there is no investment in them in terms of data. So not only does the tool need to get to a point where you can replicate that and with the same guarantee of performance, very difficult. Like getting to something that works the same 95% of the time, we're super far from it. But that's an infinitely easier challenge than something that works essentially 100% of the time, infinite 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, 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 are talking a lot of stars need to align. I think it's probably many years out.
- [73:57]
A
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?
- [74:26]
B
I think 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. That's more important than any manifesto or initiative or proclamation. There are certainly things you can do that on the margins, help foster those values a little bit further. Personally, a few things we do that I think are unusual, 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 six months. What they're planning for the future. There is an element of comedy and self deprecation which makes it, I think, quite entertaining. You laugh a lot. It's three, four hours and at the end of it, my jaw is painful because I laugh too much. It's just fun. We organize all sorts of almost cabaret things, so it's a great tradition and it just helps us be proud of the things we do. 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 a 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, and everybody's there. Being together, making friends, it's expensive, naturally, but we think it helps establish a level of trust, bonds with colleagues. And ultimately a company is people. 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 willingness to sacrifice, to be honest about problems, to do your best.
- [76:25]
A
Why do you think there are not more bending spoons? It's kind of like asking, why are there not more Berkshires? Like, there's only one Buffett. 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 you can acquire, that have installed user bases in low growth, lower growth.
- [76:41]
B
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. You could have done private equity before KKR did private equity. Nothing prevented you from doing private equity in the 1930s, to my knowledge, nobody was doing private equity. 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. 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. Which is also one of the reasons why you see me being pretty transparent about some of the principles. I thought about it and I figured if I started over knowing all I do, which someone else typically wouldn't at all also, because what I say here, yeah, it's the tip of the iceberg, but then from there to actual day to day, make it work. But even 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 Benispoos. It would take me maybe not 12 years, but easily seven or eight. Like, it's a huge slog. You hire two people, you spend a year coaching them, and then you hire four and they coach them and you help you and you build the technology slowly. Takes time to write software and polish it. Presumably more will try. I would say that's to be expected. I also think there are some things that are harder to do than other things. It's being painful. Again, a private equity is very difficult, but if you're bright, you understand business. Finding someone who will give you 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 and 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. The barriers to entry are low. And so you have a proliferation, other 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 the bending spoons is, if you understand what you're doing, which is a prerequisite to even have a chance. It's dauntingly painful. 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.
- [79:13]
A
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 and 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?
- [79:29]
B
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, middle school between the age of 10 and 13, I think. The first 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. We're on a school trip in the hills, just taking a stroll with our teacher and probably seeing some ruins or some Roman thing. Pretty common thing to do in Italy, plenty of ruins. And all of a sudden, two classmates of mine come over, just hug me, and they just start talking. And they were the two outgoing, popular guys in the class. They just talked to me. And on the bus, they just dragged me with them in the back, and we start singing. And I'm terrified and happy at the same time because I did want to socialize. I just didn't know how. And they keep investing in this relationship for a long time. And it worked. 10 or 11, so little kids. Until months later, I felt confident in myself. And I had turned into a reasonably effective social person. 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 and I owed it to those two. And what I learned during third and last year of middle school was that one of them got mad at me for something stupid like a girl I don't know kissed me, not him. Stupid thing. 12 years old and it lasted 5 minutes. But in those 5 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? 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 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 the slog of months where the guy barely talks, inviting him after classes to go to his place to play video games. They literally changed my life. It's probably the single thing that ever happened to me that I'm most grateful for.
- [81:45]
A
Incredible closing story. I absolutely love it. Thank you so much for your time.
- [81:50]
B
Thank you, Patrick. My pleasure.
- [81:52]
A
If you enjoyed this episode, visit joincolasis.com where you'll find every episode of this podcast, complete with hand edited transcripts. You can also subscribe to Colossus Review, our quarterly print, digital and private audio publication featuring in depth profiles of the founders, investors and companies that we admire most. Learn more@joincolasis.com subscribe.
- [82:17]
B
Sam.