Inside Bending Spoons: Buying Airtable, AOL, Vimeo & Eventbrite

33:44It's also the positive externalities. You're basically communicating to everyone in the company that every position is up for grabs, that there's no position that if they work hard enough and if they're talented enough, they won't be able to fill. And this is a very powerful message. One quick off topic is that something I'm very proud of is that if you take a look at some of our business units, some of our products, some of our functions, you'll find that some of the people filling those very high leverage positions are not even 30, or maybe they've just turned 30. So especially in Italy, where you have a culture whereby people that have been in a job for a long time, they will be entrenched in those positions.

34:35But I would say even just worldwide, knowing that a person who is in their early 30s are managing companies and products worth billions of dollars, that's really insane. And again, that's made possible by the openness of giving everyone a chance. and so this is something that happened before with other leads that I personally asked to step down and at some point it happened with me as well I realized that Lorenzo this guy that we promoted had what it took and I'm proud of you know walking the talk and I'm even more proud because even though we made it a point since the very early days never to look at the founder figure as something different from anybody else, we don't want to idolize it in any possible way, there might be anyway an expectation that no matter how meritocratic you are, there might be limits to that meritocracy.

35:42For example, if that meritocracy conflicts with a founder, you'll stop applying it. And I think that one of the reasons why I'm proud of what I did was because since I'm a founder, that signal, that positive externality is even more powerful. And again, it's an even stronger message for everyone that any job is up for grabs, even the CEO job. Luca also likes to live by this quite well. And every December, he puts out a Google form? Yeah, yeah. He puts out a form where he asks people he trusts whether they believe that somebody else could take his role, that would be a better position to leave the company, whether anyone is dissatisfied with his performance.

36:41And it might look like some sort of performative act from outside. like you know nobody will really tell you that you're doing a poor job but he actually means it yeah and I think even more even if it didn't even if the the feedback or the signal didn't come through that google form in that process if he realized or if anyone realized that somebody at the company could do a better job than he could in that role he would be the first one to say there needs to be a change here. I'm absolutely sure of it, which is why I'm saying that, again, anyone, if they work intensely enough, if they're talented enough, could aspire even to that position.

37:30Well, I definitely believe that because when we did our long form sit down with Luca, he said a lot of the mission of the company is to become an ultimate truth seeker. And so I could definitely see him wanting all those data points around his performance and execution and how to make the organization better. Yeah, the ultimate act of truth seeking, right? Yeah. And then it's really interesting to your point earlier of even if they're young, if you have younger folks, you know, 20s, 30s, doesn't matter. If they're skilled, they will excel to the top. we're having Valley on. And I would say she's quite humble, but she's so impressive, leading 90 products and is the GM of AOL.

38:16Like it's so cool to see that kind of rise in a sense so fast within five years. Yeah, we love her. And in general, I think it's an intoxicating feeling that you get in here that nothing is precluded, that this is a place where you can really grow as quickly as possible. There's many components to a person growing professionally. And one component is absolutely experience. And the way we try to give people the ability, the possibility of getting that experience is by offering the chance to work on different products, even products that are very different from each other, all of them very relevant within the same company, which is quite rare.

39:06Growing professionally also goes through being surrounded by highly talented people, which is something that we try to ensure through the selectivity of our hiring process. But those ingredients are not sufficient unless there's a will to recognize that if a person proves themselves, there's no limit to how quickly they can grow. So again, all this package is necessary for everyone here to get that feeling of everything is possible. There's no limit to how fast I can grow. And one of the dream that we had when we founded Bending Spoons for sure was to create the best company in the world. Now, anyone will attach different meanings to what the best company in the world means.

39:56But for sure, one of the meaning that's very dear to us is being a company where people can really fulfill their potential in the quickest, in the most relevant way. One of the things you talk a lot about is startup mode. So what does that mean inside Bending Spoons? Right. So the expression startup mode was born out of the necessity to counter some of the most frequent criticism that we get when we acquire companies, which is that given that the acquisition and the integration often entails a decrease in headcount, a profound restructuring of teams, you know an external observer that's not privy to what happens in here will see that the number of people working on a product decreases as a consequence of us taking over and reasonably will determine, will argue that we don't care about making the product better.

41:02We don't care about evolving the product and that necessarily what will happen is that that product will deteriorate. The quality will go down and customers and users will not be served in the same way as they were before. And of course, this hinges on the fact that there must be a correlation between the size of a team and the quality of the work that's done on a specific product. Our argument is that that correlation is mild at best, and there are examples of the opposite. And startup mode is a very good shortcut for this idea. Like anyone, like a lot of people might have experienced themselves that what happens in a company during the startup phase, in the early years is very different to what happens when it grows into more of a corporate beast.

42:00Typically, people will associate to the startup phase as a period where, you know, there's a smaller team, often out of necessity. You don't have the resources to fund a larger operation. But then it's going to be all hands on deck. It's going to be a lot of fluidity in the roles and people, feeling that basically everything could be their responsibility, a sense of ownership that involves each and everyone, intensity in the work, you know, hard work, ambition, and, you know, what happens naturally is that, I mean, I'm not claiming that this is what happens with all companies. Matter of fact, there's a lot of companies that are able to scale and retain the startup vibe even when they grow up.

42:54And we try to be a prime example of that phenomenon. But what typically happens is that as a product becomes more successful, both founders and investors will feel it's actually the best thing to do to actually add people, to increase the team, because naturally you'll think more people, you'll be able to pursue more opportunities, more objectives, you'll be able to do more, you know, customers and users want to have more, you'll be able to evolve the product, there's so many things to do, you know, it makes a lot of sense. but if you don't navigate that growth in the right way and that's a super complicated things to do what naturally happens is that if you have a product and you add people in order to operate it you'll need to create a lot of sub teams you're going to have to split up responsibility different parts of the product will be managed by different teams and so you'll lose that sort of holistic approach to operating a product that you breathe so often when you see what happens in startups.

44:14Responsibility will fragment a little bit. Even people that have bright ideas and are hungry for impact, they'll feel like they'll need to involve some other teams for something to happen so everything kind of slows down what used to take days takes weeks takes months you need to add layers of management to handle the complexity and the increase in the communication complexity and then you start seeing some some misaligned incentives as well because you know if like during the startup days especially if employees are involved in the ownership of the company everybody knows that what's best for the company is you know best for for themselves as well but when the organization grows larger you start getting people that start optimizing for their own career at the detriment of what's good for the company and so you know one one thing that starts happening is that if I'm a manager I understand and I feel that if by if I want my role to grow in importance.

45:22I'll have to grow the number of people in my team and so on and so forth. But sometimes, you know, that growth might not be necessary. So you have all sorts of misaligned incentives. And ultimately, long story short, is that you end up with a company whose promise was we'll have more people, we'll do more things, but then everything kind of slows down and that doesn't happen. And it's not because people are not talented. It's just a consequence of, you know, incentives being placed wrongly or, you know, organization growth and stuff like that. So this is all to say that what we really try to do when we acquire a company, we go in and we allocate a team, is we try to bring back this startup mode.

46:11We try to bring back the sense of ownership. We try to make sure that whenever somebody has an idea, that idea can be pursued very quickly without having to involve four different teams. And as a consequence of that, you see the frequency with which we ship improvements increasing. And you even have fewer intermediaries between users and customers and the product itself. Often when we acquire products that are mostly sales-led in terms of their growth, will have one product manager that will be responsible for managing the product and at the same time managing the relationship with customers so they get an unfiltered view of what's necessary and they have all the knowledge to be able to talk to a customer knowing what's going to be easy to implement, what makes sense to prioritize, etc.

47:09So there are plenty of advantages that come down to simply undo some of that corporatification, if you can say that, of companies that happen through time. But to that, we add a lot of other things. So for one, talent, talent density. Even if you believe that all other things being equal, the companies we acquire are equally attractive to talent than we are. We do have an advantage that's very hard to replicate, which is that, and we were talking about this before, within our portfolio we have plenty of products so people that come into bending spoons they don't need to come in because they want to work specifically on vimeo or retransfer or aol but they need to be in love with the idea of being at bending spoons and they can actually be exposed to a lot of different products which has the nice consequence that they can have the same cv that they would get by jumping from one company the next every couple of years but without the need to go through another hiring process, learning the culture in a company and learning how the company operates, proving themselves to demonstrate that they deserve certain positions or certain roles.

48:31So, you know, we actually offer this insane combination of variety, but within the same culture, within the same organization. And at the same time, of course, we're better known because we are larger, we have scale, we're better known that every single product we acquire. So even that contributes to be more attractive. So through that mechanism, we're actually able to attract and retain talent that contributes to our talent density being higher, typically. And so if you have fewer people that are where talent density is higher, the typical result is that you can do much more with less. And then on top of that, you know, you also add the fact that by having experienced working on so many different products in different verticals, we've just learned a lot of lessons.

49:22You know, we failed a bunch of times to the point that we now know that it's best not to try that thing again because the likelihood of success is very low. What are the hardest lessons that you've had to learn? You know, as a product person, you actually need to be optimistic, right? You need to believe that if you come up with an idea, there's a possibility that that idea will be revolutionary, that, you know, will lead to great things. It's the basis of being able to generate those ideas in the first place. If you don't have that optimism, you're going to be like, oh, you know, nothing will work.

49:57You know, what am I even doing here? So you need to start from there. but you know being optimistic about a thing and a thing sounding plausible uh and a thing sounding like it could work is very different from from actually working in practice and so i think like the general like you know one of the things that you learn by working for decades on so many different products is how often your ideas are wrong how often you end up failing and and again you need to uh it's a sort of uh you know it's a trade-off it's a fine balance between retaining that optimism that uh at the 10th attempt or the 15th attempt will show you the way while at the same time retaining the common sense and the knowledge of probabilities that will tell you that a lot of things will fail so and so you avoid um over investing in things that sound good maybe you don't have validation for, or as I said earlier, you avoid investing in things that they sound pretty reasonable or pretty rational, but you see them fail a bunch of times before, and you don't think that it's just a matter of not having found the right product for them to succeed, right?

51:08So that helps a lot. It gives you a lot more common sense. It gives you a deeper understanding of reality, and it helps you focus your resources on the few initiatives that could really move the needle rather than having a more kind of spray and pray approach. I know we have a few minutes left, but I think it was really great to hear over lunch with you and Francesco, the team, how impactful the IPO was for you all and in many different ways. So I'd love to hear from you. I know you gave a speech at the IPO. What was your speech about? What was different? So it was a very emotional moment for me.

51:49One of the reasons is that like because of our culture we don't get to pause very often and you know celebrate achievements and milestones and pat ourselves on our shoulders of course I mean we're happy when things go well but we've always had this mindset like you know what's the next challenge what can what can we do better what can we do more and you know the IPO was a sort of like forced stop to that mindset so that like for one day we could just look back at what we accomplished and take it in so for me personally um like that day was was really a um you know they say that in near near death experiences you you have your whole life flesh in front of you i haven't tried those but that's what they say but in a way you know that i feel was was like a moment where all the all the you know the whole experience and all the failures all the all the hard work all the people that contributed to it you know they sort of um um manifested very clearly uh in my thoughts so very emotional uh have like fun memories of that day and uh well that that speech was substantially uh um was substantially uh you know showing that our uh take which is impossible sometimes it's just maybe and it's not that impossible after all.

53:18I mean, that IPO was a clear example of that. We compressed the time it typically takes to IPO to much less than it normally does. And, you know, the banks supporting us all believed that we would never make it for the day that we had planned to make it. So, again, one more demonstration that we believe in this impossible maybe tagline. And then it was just thanking everyone for the insane amount of hard work that went into making Vennerspoons. And I also had a personal reflection that I know was shared by a lot of people about the fact that, yes, it's Spoonhurst, as we call ourselves, that put in the hard work.

54:08But for sure, we benefited from having some friends, and family and people around us cheering on us and supporting us and believing in us and making it possible for us to focus on making this possible than our other things. And I know that that resonated with a lot of people, so I'm happy about it. But it was super emotional. And when I started talking, it was a short speech, so only a couple of minutes. But when I started talking, I felt the burden of representing everybody's thinking and everybody's emotion. And I also was reminded about the fact that it wasn't really something that could repeat itself, you know.

54:54So I had to make it work with just one attempt. Yeah. So at the very beginning, it felt almost impossible again. but then what I wanted to say and how grateful I was for the people there and outside for their effort was so powerful and so strong that I just delivered this speech. And it should have been Luca delivering it if he had decided to join us on the podium, but I admire him so much for deciding to join the rest of the team on Times Square instead. and so it fell on me not so much because I was the right person but because I gave a couple of speeches before and so I probably was the best second alternative to it but I'm really happy that I had that opportunity and yeah, it was definitely a moment to remember.

55:51Incredible. So many incredible stories. I said this before but I'm going to have to come back to Bending Spoons. You guys have so much going on here. Yeah, so much to tell. So much. Well, thank you so much, Matt. I really appreciate the time and all the expertise that you shared with us. Thank you. Thank you. Today's episode is sponsored by VCX by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. Learn more at getvcx.com. Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called Generated Assets, and it brings AI into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before.

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57:47So I'm one very excited to speak with you but also a little bit intimidated. You've been here for five years, you're the general manager of AOL now, you manage 90 plus products and it took you three applications to get in? That's right, yeah it took me three tries. The first one was for a summer internship a few years ago. I was still probably not ready so I got you know rejected right at the CV application. CV screening gone. Then I tried again for First Ascent which is a great event that we run for very highly talented students and I got rejected after almost getting at the end and after that I just said you know like I want to get in now.

58:41I was rejected too many times and I was like now I have to prove myself that I can get in so I tried again and the third was the charm. What age did you start applying because you joined when you were 25 you're five years into this. Yes. How did you know Bending Spoons was gonna be the most legit company on earth? So for this I have to thank my sister who's also a spooner, fun fact, she told me you should check out this company's really great, sounds super fun, when I was around maybe 22 and that's the first time I applied and by then like Bending Spoons was not of course as well known as it is today but the more I got to know it the more I got engaged and I understood it was probably gonna become a great company just because of the people who were running it and the people who were working here they were all awesome and I was like I want to work with these guys.

59:38So Christy was just telling me before we started that when you joined there was like there was an all hands or a meeting of some sort and you raised your hand to speak and you said how do I get involved in the most the largest projects here and you were just 25 at the time he was a little bit intimidated by that But then he also said that was pretty badass to come in fresh and immediately want to be put on the largest projects. And now you're GM of AOL and Manage 90 products. So what was the thinking there? I think I just wanted to be involved to really listen in to what other people were saying, how they were thinking about things.

1:00:20I feel like here the biggest thing you can do is to listen to people because everyone is so great and so talented. That is really a wasted opportunity not to listen in, at least in meetings. So that's what really that was the angle why I was asking that question back then. And I think over the years I learned how to just listen to people, understand more about what we do, understand the vision behind Bending Spoons from Luke, from Francesco, from the other Francesco. We have so many Francescos, but many Francescos. And I just, I guess I just leaned into the Benin Suze culture and it worked very well.

1:01:00In your five-year anniversary, Luca said you are two great things. You're very empathetic and then you're also a go-getter yesterday. So how did you develop this intense desire and I guess what you guys call extreme ownership? So I think everything was very much rooted in the first years I was here. At some point, I got asked to join an acquisition. It was a pretty small one compared to the ones we are doing now. And I joined there as a data analyst initially, but I was the only non-technical person there in the sense that I was working only with another software engineer. So I started working in many roles at once.

1:01:43I started doing customer support and design, product management, growth management. And I got to get a bit of everything that we do here and understand more hands-on what everything is really about. And I think this approach was really a privilege for me because it got me to understand all the roles, all the functions here, who does what, how things link together. And this kind of attitude, I think, is what really helped me then becoming a lead and helping others develop that kind of hands-on attitude and just, you know, get things done, which in the end is what drives this company. I think getting things done is what we like the most.

1:02:26Do you think most people put kind of superficial limits on themselves? And at what point do you break through that? Yes, I do think. And I think that's actually a great point, because this is one thing that Francesco Mancone, our CTO, really did well for me, because every time I told him something like, I don't know, Francesco, I don't know if we can do this. I don't know if we can manage to get there. He was always telling me, like, it's easy, you know. And once you click and you think that everything is easy to achieve, then impossible becomes really, really possible. And I think having this switch in mind is really what helped me with my trajectory here.

1:03:05Every time thinking nothing is too hard to be achieved, which I think is also in our motto because our motto is impossible maybe. I think that's really a mindset and it drives a lot of the impact we have here at Bending Spoons. Because you have had such a fast ascent, walk me through that. How did that happen and how did the AOL deal happen for you? So it was a pretty long journey because from this first acquisition I was telling you about, basically we started embedding a few more other mobile apps that were left without a team here and there. So it was really just collecting a lot of unattended products back then in time.

1:03:50And slowly we started understanding that there was still a lot of impact to unlock. and with more and more acquisitions coming into Bending Spoons many other teams and many other apps and products were embedded into my team and then there was this one big acquisition which was Mosaic which is a large suite of mobile apps. Once we acquired that the team by then was 50 people more than 80 apps and we started really thinking big about what we could achieve. After that another couple acquisitions came in and then AOL in January this year. When I knew about AOL and about all the technical challenges that were involved there, I almost always you know laid my eyes on it and I was like hmm that looks very fun.

1:04:43So I volunteered to take on AOL. But you're still managing Mosaic while you're leading AOL. I have other managers who support on both the Mosaic acquisition and Remini, which I'm overseeing. Most of my focus right now is on the AOL acquisition. So I would say 80 % of my time is devoted to AOL. Did you ever think that you would be managing a very large American company? No, absolutely not. No way. If you told me this, but even three years ago, I would say impossible. but again impossible maybe exactly like what is the process through an acquisition for you guys how big are the teams like how long do you set like maybe target dates milestones goals you want to reach like what is i have no idea what is the process like with an acquisition like that so when we start an acquisition we always start from you know some very solid basis on which we believe we can help the business grow, where we see very untapped potential, where we could drive impact, we usually select those targets.

1:05:59But after we acquire a company, that's where we really get hands-on on understanding everything. So we usually always start by interviewing everyone at the company to understand how things are working, like what we do, like what people do in their everyday work, what we can do better. And we really try to map out everything that there is to know about the business. Because unlike how many people could think about acquisitions, you don't really know everything until you really enter the door, right? So you don't understand everything there is to understand before buying a company. You need to get in, understand how people are running things, and decide like where you want it to go from there.

1:06:43After that, what usually starts is this transformation phase. This is the moment where we apply our Bending Spoons platform. We start designing the roadmap for the product, for the business, and how to make it grow. This phase for AOL was a bit different because there was this carve out to be done. we acquired AOL from Yahoo and we had to somehow re-platform everything onto the Bending Spoons platform from the Yahoo one and this took many months because it's technically and operationally very challenging but it's also I think the the most fun part of the of the project itself so I'm obsessed by operational excellence in general so I love to see things work out and you know puzzles that's what I love so did you find any surprises many many surprises many surprises but again nothing that would change you know our excitement about the about the acquisition so I'm going to be interviewing Jim Lanzone of Yahoo I think in a week or so this might come out around the same time?

1:07:59I don't know. You never know when these get released. But in the prep of that and speaking with their team, you know, it's kind of underrated. A lot of people will say, okay, you know, AOL is a dead brand. It's, you know, kind of like a zombie company or something like that. But talking with their team and understanding the acquisition, no, it was like it was a very healthy company. They got it to a great place. You guys are going to make it to an even shinier place. but what were like what were the kind of initial observations of the company and what you wanted to change? Yeah so as you say AOL was a pretty healthy business when we acquired it and it's still as of today.

1:08:46I think there are many misconceptions about the brand just because it's been there for a while. People think that it's dead but instead it has like millions and millions of users who are still very active and still very engaged. We have the news portal where we are envisioning to improve the content we can offer to users, the way we recommend content to users. And despite many perceptions, our user base is also very interested in exploring AI, maybe having someone who can start them to this experience. And of course, there is also the mail product and the mail product is extremely retaining by design, right?

1:09:26So people are extremely engaged with their mail. We have many ideas of how to make the mail better for our user base and we believe that the product has been slightly neglected in the past few years. So we believe to give it a fresh start with Manning's Booms. You have a data background, so how do you think in terms of data and kind of the measurements of what success looks like? So we are extremely scientific. I am also, but in general, at Bending Spoons, I would say we are very scientific in the way we approach things. So everything we do for our products, everything we want to test, we really test it.

1:10:07So we A-B test everything we release because we never want opinions to get in the way of success. So I'm never asking people to do something or we never say, let's do this and then we just roll it out because of an opinion or because of a hunch, because of an idea we have. We always test what we do. So that's where data really comes in. Unless there are KPIs that are really responding to what we're doing and that are indicating clear success, we don't release anything. So that's what I love because we have the possibility to test also very bold ideas and see how numbers and KPIs go in that direction or in the other.

1:10:53And then very statistically and very rigorously we apply the changes. Since Bending Spence is quite the first principles approach to software and you've worked across so many products, what are the commonalities between maybe mistakes that were embedded in initial products that you had to fix or kind of intuitive things that were missed or some things that were overlooked within those products? I think the issue most of the time is that while obsessing on perfection, people miss so many opportunities to get things done and testing things. So I think the analysis paralysis, especially when it comes to, for example, code deploy or infrastructural design, those things can really slow down a product.

1:11:47So you need very few but very solid basis when you build something, but then you need to add a lot of flexibility and make sure that there are not super constraining processes or approval lines and things like this. Because in my experience, those are the things that kill a product, the inability to act on the product. And sometimes companies, just because they become bigger and bigger, they tend to overweight themselves with these processes and approvals and inability to really run the business. Well, when you have an extremely talented and responsible team who really feel like owners of what they do, you really get to a place where people can drive change safely and meticulously, but without ever adding too much in terms of processes and all those things.

1:12:50So I think this is always reflected in the code. It's always reflected in the infrastructure, but it's also reflected in the processes people have to follow that sometimes are just overly long or overly burdensome, like cumbersome. What are the typical compositions of the teams working on various projects? It's very diverse. I wouldn't say there is one fits all kind of organization. It depends on the product, but I would say there is always maybe a 40, 30, 40 % of engineers in our teams, and the rest is divided into more business-oriented roles like product managers, growth managers, customer support managers, designers.

1:13:37So I would say a 40, 60 business, engineering to business. And where do you see most people are coming from? Yeah, so we are looking to hire talent across all Europe. So of course, we have a nucleus in Italy, just because that's where the company started. So that's where our brand is very strong. But I think we are becoming stronger and stronger in Europe. And at some point, very soon, probably, we're already doing it, we will start higher also in the US. For someone with such drive and motivation, this is a question I'll ask in most of my interviews. People will say like performance is derivative of who you surround yourself with or who you're inspired by.

1:14:23Where did you get that drive? Like who are the people that keep you motivated? You know, as cheesy as it could sound, really, I think all of my team does this with me every day. Just because it's composed of people who are so generally interested in moving things forward. that it's impossible not to feel driven in this company. When I first started, for sure, Francesco Mancone, who's the CTO today, and Luca, Luca Ferrari, our CEO, they have been two of the most relevant people in my growth. But there are so many others that it would be unfair not to mention just because they have all really participated in who I am and who I became in Bending Spoons.

1:15:08So I'm thinking of my software engineering lead, Martina. She's awesome. Many others, so many others. I really couldn't name them all, but so many. Do you find this culture to be unique between your friends' cultures or people you went to university with? I would say, sadly, in the sense that I wished for all my friends to have the same experience in their companies. but I feel like so far Bending Spoons has really been a one-of-a-kind at least in Italy so I hope many other companies will start you know applying this framework and the values that Bending Spoons have. Of course there are many others that are arising and that's exciting but for our most established companies I feel like we're not there yet and I wish people would start you know realizing that this is a model that really works and that we have so much talent in Italy in Europe that just waits for you know a good opportunity to make their talents grow and shine which that's that's what I really hope but we're not there yet so as we close out I have to ask you what are you most looking forward to the next 12 months I'm looking forward to making AOL shine and to finish this carve-out process so that we can really get hands-on on focusing 1 ,000 % on the product and making sure we can give the best experience possible to our users.

1:16:40What is the opportunity for AOL? I think there is so much. We have so many ideas on how to grow the company with synergies also with Bending Spoons products. There are so many. Our user base on AOL is extremely engaged, So we believe we can provide a lot of value for them through many, many different channels, many different ideas. We know what they like. So it's very easy for us to, you know, present them with very relevant either products or content on both levels. There is so much opportunity. Amazing. I really look forward to that. Vali, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Molly. It was great being here.

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