20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato

26:08So it's closer to the truth. I'm intrigued. Do you do Figma and Figma make? Do you replace that with a lovable build? Do you actually just go straight to Cursor and Anthropic and Claw code? What does that usage on stack look like? It depends a lot on the team and the project. Each team decides their own stack and we don't impose anything. What do they look like that's different then? If you take one that's, say, Evernote, what is Evernote? And then take a WeTransfer. What is a WeTransfer? Yeah, so on WeTransfer, we have used Lovable quite a bit. We use Cloud Code a lot to build prototypes. On Evernote, I think we use Figma a lot still, just because it's easier to use the components that we already have to make it look like it's actually the same app.

26:54It's a bit more complex product, so it's harder to give the context to an LLM to build things that look very close to the original one. Do you think we are going to skip the design phase in the future of product build-outs and move straight to prototyping in these more Vibecode tools? I think so, to be honest. I think that the role of a designer will be as important as it is today maybe even more, but I think that the tools that we use will evolve. And so you won't work on pixels and then code, but you will likely merge the two things. I remember that when I got started with web development very early, when I was in high school, I wouldn't have a design that I would try to implement.

27:37I just have like HTML code and CSS, and I will try to tweak it to reach my results. It was a very manual process, but it was all contained inside the code editor, right? I think that in the future, it's going to look like that, where you are acting on the code and tweaking the code because it's so cheap and fast that you're just like tweaking the actual thing instead of creating an abstraction and then trying to apply it in the code. How does the proportion of designers to engineers change over time with AI? It's evolving so rapidly that I don't know how it plays out in terms of team organization.

28:14If I had to like come up with an answer right now, I would say that it's going to make designers faster and you can try more things. So today we have a backlog of 100 ideas and we know that we can only try 10 of them in a few months. You know, I think that we'll reach a point where we can actually try 20, 30, 40, 50, both because people will be faster, but also because the manual work to actually implement those prototypes will be much shorter. So yeah, I think this means that the designer who won't work necessarily on Figma as they do today in the future will work on building these prototypes and coming up with these ideas and they'll do it more and faster.

28:57That's fascinating to hear actually how you use different tools across different teams. If we progress that along one stage, we have the idea, we have the prototyping and the putting in the hands of customers. We then have the, I'm actually going to build it. How does the build process look for you internally? Usually is let's try to close the gap between the prototype and something that is production ready. Because the prototype, if you did it well, it's inexpensive. And so it means that it lacks a lot of the things that make it production ready. It's basically a probe to some extent. We call it a probe.

29:34It's a piece of software that is built to demonstrate that one metric is X or Y. and that's its only job. And so when people interact with it, they give you the answer, but it's not ready to be plugged into the broader product. And so this way you can get your answer, but then in order to be able to plug it to the broader product, you need to do some work. Do you think it's important to ship fast and be imperfect or to make sure that that gap between prototype, which is a probe, to fully beautiful product is seamless and complete? I don't adhere to one of the two schools of thought. I think speed matters when you're trying things and you're trying to find your way and you're probing the area around you.

30:21But then it's all about polish when you actually need to build something that millions of people use. You cannot have an experience. Do you feel that product difference in terms of behavior very much when you are working on a product like Evernote, millions every day, versus a much smaller user base with maybe a less frequent usage? Well, for sure. You feel more responsibility. You also feel like you stand on the shoulders of giants in some sense. Sometimes I talk to Phil Libin, who was leading Evernote a few years ago, and I don't feel like shipping bad stuff on Evernote just because it's always been such an important product and built in such a caring way.

31:04just by comparison I don't want to be I don't want Bending Spoons to have the name of those who are releasing subpar experiences I want us to have a good threshold for quality So when we have that quality and then we decide launch time okay got to release this what have been your biggest lessons on how to do product launches or feature launches well? When you want to deliver a lot of things to people who need them I think it's important to show that you are every week delivering useful improvements. So instead of doing a large and fancy launch, you try to do it in a way that feels like every week I'm getting something new.

31:44You know, it really convinces people that you're in for the long run, that you are doing stuff that matters. And especially that even if this week, nothing gets built that's specifically useful to me, since I've been here for a while, I know that Evernote updates every week. And so I know that at some point, something will be built that is for me, that I need and I use. Instead, when you want to innovate and you want to try to do a step change in the way people use the product, then it's important to be very considerate and very clear with communications. So for instance, let's talk about examples.

32:21When we built collapsible sections on Evernote or the slash command menu, these are utility tools that make your product more ergonomic, more polished, more useful. You don't need to be flashy about this. You don't need to do a huge launch and to merge them together and wait six months. You need them to put them in the hands of customers as soon as possible so that they can start getting utility out of it. Next week, we are announcing Evernote V11, and it's going to be a significant change compared to what Evernote is today. It's mostly a reflection of all the work that went through in the last three years but it's also containing three advanced AI features that are not available on Evernote today and when you do that it's important instead to like kind of make a mess a little bit not necessarily they should even be unpolished but like try to be noisy about it so that as many people as possible see that some drastically new functionality is landing on the product.

33:17Totally agree with you there and I love you saying that hey it's better to do small weekly improvements communicated well than like don't hear from us and then a big splash every six months you do Evernote monthly updates can you just talk to me about that the process of that what you learn and how you'd advise other product people from doing that this was born out of necessity meaning that when we acquired Evernote there were a few months in which we made the decision to work very deeply on the technological foundations of Evernote Evernote was launched in 2007 I think so it's almost 20 years old And so it's not full of bad code necessarily, but it's full of old code.

33:59And it's very important that we innovate that and we make it modern if we want to work on Everett for the next 10 or 20 years, right? We made the conscious decision of working on tech foundations. But as we were doing that, we were also communicating the acquisition and we were raising prices, as we discussed earlier. These three things combined for a customer are... A lot. A lot to take in. And so I think that we should have instead started allocating some percentage of our time, improving the product in very visible ways that basically reassured people, look, we are here for the long run. Yes, we are making drastic changes.

34:37Some of them are uncomfortable right now. We truly believe it's the best outlook in the long run. We need to do them right now. But we are also investing a lot on your user experience. We didn't do it. And so people were either skeptical, some were pissed, some were fine with it. and they understood. But I started doing monthly updates exactly because we saw that it was important to communicate to people what was changing in the product. Putting a face behind the product, I think is important. It's not like bending spoons as a vague entity that is working on Evernote. It's Federico and his team who are working on Evernote.

35:11What have you learned from doing those monthly updates? And how would you advise other product owners or CEOs on doing monthly updates to customers? I learned that user feedback matches reality and substance very directly. So when you issue a monthly update full of content that nobody needs, they'll just tell you, this is irrelevant, I don't need this, why are you working on this? They're very direct in a way that I find motivating, meaning that they're not trying to be kind, they're trying to be truthful. And so they just tell you if you're working on stuff that doesn't matter to them. You can do something very easy.

35:47You can look at our YouTube videos and look at the comments under the videos and see that when we started, we were learning. And so we didn't get every update right all the time. And people would just tell us, I'm pissed. You raised prices and now you're being this stuff that I don't need. Why? I don't understand. Lately, instead, we've become much better at understanding what people actually need, what they're asking us. And so comments are much more either neutral and like, yeah, good, now I need this other thing. Or yeah, this is finally, I've been waiting for this for years. It's exactly what I needed.

36:20Thank you. So the learning is if you do the substance right and you communicate it decently, people will tell you. If you don't get the substance right, people will also tell you. People literally sit down and take notes with these podcasts, which is great. And it's a real compliment to me that we're doing good and malleable things. As granular as possible, how do you record them? How long should they be? Should they include everything or just like the big highlight? How transparent should you be? Like, should you really talk about things that are bad? How would you advise me on those? Yeah, I sit down once a month.

36:52I think it's a decent frequency. I think it's enough that people feel like a lot is going on and not like too frequent where you need to be in front of a camera every day or every week. It should talk about what you're actually doing. One thing that we decided early on when we started doing this is we talk about stuff that either we already shipped or that we are launching right now. We shouldn't talk about plans that we have for the future. Sometimes we break that rule, but it's not like written in granite. But it's important that you don't just entice people with promises. You just tell people what they can do today with the product so that you build a sense of practicality and trust.

37:32You just tell them, look, slash comments are available on Evernote today. just update your app and you will be able to use it here's how it works the other side is you also need to teach people how to use this stuff it's a complex product it's not a shallow product by any means so you need to take a couple minutes to show them if something is very new here is how it works so come with me through through the experience so yeah i mean tell people what you've done tell them how it works tell them decently frequently and be upfront about negative stuff as well we were talking about kind of the launch itself and lessons from them what launch was the worst where you expected amazing and it didn't meet expectations and what did you learn from that it wasn't on evernote it's a product that we launched at bending spoons that we were really hopeful for it was called play on it was apple arcade before apple arcade it's almost exactly the same product right so a subscription you can play high quality games as much as you want you You don't need to pay for each individually.

38:33You don't need to pay to win. You don't need to unlock in-app purchases. You just pay a subscription like Netflix, but for mobile games, right? We believed that people would love this and it failed. We spent, I think, like five or seven million dollars on licensing and eventually didn't work. Was it immediately apparent that it wasn't working? And do you think when you have a product that isn't working, you can tell very quickly? It depends on how much you're lying to yourself. if you're very truthful and you have a plan for how do I validate that it's working with metrics then it's easy if you're like let's put it out there and see what people do it's a bit harder because then you you'll be hopeful you invested a lot in it and you'll try to find signals of usefulness and signals of retention and so yeah you should be very ruthless with yourself before you start and say these are the metrics that we'll look at when we launch to determine if it's a good product.

39:30And like, I'm the first one who's guilty. I often lay too much hope behind the product launch. Okay, so when we look at like play on this like Netflix, but for games, what did we not see that we should have seen? What's our takeaway from that to prevent that happening again? I think one big part of it that we learned is that when you watch a movie, you watch it two hours, and then you're done. And the next day, you want to watch another movie. And so it makes sense for Netflix to exist, because people want to consume different content. When you're playing a game, you get passionate about it, and generally games have a much longer lifespan.

40:02And so you can definitely play for a game for a month, two months, six months, even a year. I have a mobile version of Risk, the game, the board game on my iPhone. I downloaded it when I was in high school. I paid for it, and I still play it. Like yesterday, I was in an airplane, and I played it. It's been 15 years. And you paid once? I paid once, yes. It was a single-time purchase. wow yeah the lifespan of that of that experience is much longer in time and so it doesn't make sense to pay a subscription for something that that gives you that much runway as someone who's invested in gaming before there is this beautiful retention flatlining actually when you get to a three to five year line which is insane to say but when you look at your games like candy crush they still have this insane flatline three to five years in where it almost becomes like habitual usage every single day yeah i've never worked on a game i worked on an entertainment app that was very close to a game it was called live quiz it was do you remember hq trivia dude do i remember hq trivia i'm not that yeah yeah i absolutely do this it was a few years ago yeah smart mechanic getting everyone together same time like i think any behavioral change in product is exciting i worked on a clone of hq trivia as my first project at bending spoons when i joined it went hyper viral in Italy.

41:26We did 2 million registered users in Italy only. Italy is 60 million people in total. So one in 30 people used to play that game. Hyper viral, incredible virality. And it was so fun. It wasn't a good business. I think HQ Trivia wasn't a good business either, but super viral mechanic. But I'm a bit scared of games. It's very hard to make them work. It's even harder than a product, in my opinion, because it's about taste and it's about feelings and emotions and experience. utility, as we were saying earlier, you can somehow proxy utility. You can try to guess how useful a change is going to be in the future.

42:03With games, it's about the experience and the emotions that it gives you. It's completely qualitative. There's no... I mean, of course you can look at metrics and analyze them, but beforehand, before you launch, it's very hard to say if you're working on a good game or a bad game. What did you learn from doing the HQ Chivio clone? How intoxicating working on a successful product can be. It's just the experience of a lifetime to work on something that goes hyper viral. We literally launched as a beta test with friends and family. I remember literally telling people, don't tell others because we can only support, I don't know, 50 users simultaneously, 100 users.

42:42I don't remember the number, but I literally remember asking people not to tell others. And we never, never, never did anything else to make it grow. It just, from that moment, when I told my family and my friends, don't tell others, it just went viral from there. We even set aside some money, I think a few tens of thousands of euros to do marketing. We never touched them. It just took off. Sometimes you can see when a product works immediately. Does Bending Spoons do clones today? No, we don't launch new products. I mean, we probably would if we were decently convinced that we have a good shot at making something very good, very useful, successful, impactful.

43:23I'm not saying that we wouldn't, but no, it's been a while since last time we did. Playond was one big project, didn't hit in the way that you thought it would. What did you not expect to hit that suddenly did hit? And what did you learn from that? We were chatting earlier about never studying your successes, which is why we don't actually attribute lessons to them often. Yeah. Can you take me to what you didn't expect to hit that did in the lessons? Sometimes there are things that look a bit boring, and instead they just work. So, for instance, I think audio transcription on Evernote is one such example.

44:00We were almost about not to launch it because people weren't recording audio on Evernote. And so, I mean, chicken and egg problem, right? They're not recording audio, maybe because they don't want to record audio, maybe because there's nothing to do with the audio once you record it. We still decided to launch it because it was just like, qualitatively so good. It's basically state of the art, it's perfect. You just talk and it transcribes it. It's literally perfect. And so we decided, okay, let's build it and launch it and see what people do with it. We just observed people tweeting images of the transcription just because it was so accurate and they were like, I'm blown away by how good it is.

44:39So that's just one example of something that I didn't expect. What did you learn from that? That you should be very careful with your opinions. You should always try to resort to some piece of evidence instead of saying, I think it won't work or I think it will work. Do you have evidence that it's working or not? And so if you don't, you should try and build evidence and then you should follow that instead of saying, I think it won't work or it will work. We've covered quite a few different products from your WeTransfers to Evernotes to HQ Trivia Clones to your Play Ons. How is the team structured?

45:14I think people have this conceptual idea that basically Bending Spoons acquires companies, fires the team, and centralizes engineering a product. You can think of Bending Spoons as a horizontal platform to which we plug individual products. The platform is basically everything that you don't need to have at the product level. For instance, let's make an example, talent and recruiting or accounting, finance, legal. But not only that, also deep technological teams that power like data pipelines, monetization libraries, stuff that can be adopted by each product. This way, you don't need an Evernote recruiting team.

45:56You don't need a commute monetization technology team. You just need to have these pieces at the platform level. And then to this platform where we invest a lot, you can plug new products all the time. And so this means that the individual product team can be much, much leaner than it could be as a standalone company. And often we see the difference that it makes. Like we can acquire companies that are very large and run them with very few people in comparison. What's the biggest change? So you acquire a company with 500 people and it now runs with 50? Yeah, the orders of magnitude are around.

46:31It's very case-specific. It's very hard to... There's no, like... What was Evernote and what is it now? Evernote was a few hundred people and now it's less than 100. Got you. Where are those 100 people? That still feels like quite a lot if you actually think about the horizontal platform that's legal, accounting, recruiting, data pipeline. Yeah, I mean, at the product level. So just on the specific product. Does that not feel quite a lot in product in Evernote? I mean, it's not on product management. I'm just talking about the business unit. It contains technology, product, design, data science, monetization, growth, even management.

47:09You know, like all those people are, yeah, a few tens. Totally get you. Can I ask you, you mentioned monetization there, and you've mastered across different products, paywalls, and moving from freemium to premium. What have been your biggest lessons in scaling from freemium to premium in product? Mm-hmm. Again, that it's very case specific. You don't have a playbook that you then apply to each product. Let's take Evernote as an example. On Evernote, we inherited a monetization structure that was based on basically unlocking advanced features. As a user, you would pay to unlock business card scanning, for instance, or PDF annotation.

47:49This creates a mismatch between the experience of a free user and advanced user, right? because you literally have access to a different feature set. The way we approached it instead was, let's try to make it so that every user sees the power, the full power of Evernote. And so we literally made many features that were previously paid free. Offline is a big one, like offline availability of notes and notebooks used to be a premium feature, and now it's free. Instead, we monetize based on content. So based on how much you have on the product. And so if you want to create a lot, then you pay more.

48:27If you don't create much, then you can use it for free. So this basically aligns the incentives of, I'm an advanced user, I use it hours a day, I create tons of notes, I pay more, and I'm perfectly fine with it. I'm a very casual user, I don't use it much. I have a few notes, I'm just trying it out. You can try the full product without any constraint, and you just reflect the number of notes that you actually have. How do you feel about the quite aggressive paywalls? I quite often download consumer apps. And instead of the, I'm using it very simply, but like, you know, age your faces. Instead of like the do three and then you pay more, it's like pay more straight away.

49:05It's a very aggressive paywall strategy. How do you feel about how aggressive a paywall strategy should be and any lessons on that? The best way to monetize a product is always based on what works on that product. So you just try different setups and you see what works. It has been the case often where we've made the paywall more visible than in the past, just because acquiring products that have already grown and that already have a large user base, then you have more to unlock by monetizing people who are already there. Instead, if you are growing a product, then you might want to be a bit less aggressive and just get people to try more of the product for free, because maybe it will improve your K factor.

49:49It would increase the amount of people that they refer, basically, if they have a deeper experience with the product without interruption. It's very case-specific. Another element that I also just find fascinating from a behavioral kind of psychology perspective is push notifications. Do you have any lessons on what works, what doesn't work, and how you'd advise product owners? Yeah, we're not big on push notifications. We have used them in some products differently. So on Evernote, I think we don't use them at all. I mean, we use them for reminders, for people who set a reminder for a note or for calendar events, but we don't use them as a marketing strategy just because we think it would decrease the user experience.

50:32People would be pissed about it and they would turn them off, and so that would reduce the usefulness of the product. So we don't do it. on the other hand when working on live quiz the the hq trivia clone push notifications were literally the trigger to use the product because of course it's happening a couple times a day always at the same time but if you don't receive the notification there are fewer chances that you actually remember to play and so in that case it was it was a core part of the experience going back to the structure when you acquire a new business a vimeo an aol what happens then i know That sounds stupid, but does Luca say, hey, everyone, we're acquiring this.

51:11Who wants to work on it? Is that how it works? We take into account people's preferences. If somebody comes to me and tells me, I like to work on Vimeo, I'm like, that's great. It's great to know that some people are passionate about one or the other product. I mean, at the end of the day, I think people perform better when they are working on something they're passionate about. To the extent that it is possible, we always try to make it so people are working on stuff that they care about and they're passionate about. So we definitely encourage people to tell us. But it's not like we find volunteers to work on a product.

51:45It's more about functional leads. So our CTO, Matteo, our co-founder, myself, other people, we have in mind the structure of the product teams. And we try to see where we can find people that are best suited to work on new acquisitions. And you're like a Jedi ninja that kind of jumps from new product to new product. Yeah, lately I've done that quite a bit. It's a bit uncomfortable because you have to start fresh very often, but you learn a lot. You learn both about the specific characteristics of that product, but also about, you start seeing some patterns about how companies are run and these things.

52:25Do you get nervous? It's a big transition moving from, respectfully, the 30 day fitness to Evernote. That's a big transition. And then from Evernote to fucking Vimeo and AOL. Yeah. I remember I was on a plane. We were about to take off. I was in Malpens, I think. I was leaving to California to meet the Evernote team. And I was like, what am I going to tell these people. Like they are true professionals. And instead I'm just a guy with some startup experience. And what am I going to tell them? And so I lacked a bit of confidence. What I realized is that they're people. I was intimidated by the fact that many of them had like 20 years of experience being a VP at Yahoo or stuff like that.

53:10And they're smart professionals, but it's not like if they are and they have experience, then it means that you cannot talk to them. You can just have a very rational conversation with people and you just like try to do your best. Which quality code base was the best when inheriting it? I don't dive as deep into the code as my colleagues, so I'm not sure. I heard that the WeTransfer code base was very good. Which was the worst or most difficult to inherit? It doesn't have to be code base, but just like when you went into it as a product lead, you're like, oh. Well, Evernote, I'm not sure it was bad.

53:48I actually don't think it was necessarily bad, but it was complex. Like, just compare WeTransfer to Evernote. WeTransfer, in terms of complexity, could be one feature of Evernote, and Evernote has, like, literally hundreds of features. So, I mean, maybe not the simplest one, but it's easier as product surface to conceive and to think about. Evernote just has this long tail of small features, and it's 20 years old. When we transfer, if you fail an upload, people are going to be frustrated, but it's not going to be the end of the world. If you lose a note on Evernote, you will receive phone calls and rightfully, like understandably, it's what should happen.

54:28And so it's just critical that you do it well. Not only it's more complex, but it's also more critical and you should like triple check everything you're doing. So, yeah, it was difficult. Do you have horizontal paid marketing machines at Bending Spoons? And what I mean by that is does the marketing sit as a function on top of the product teams and they are a paid marketing engine for WeTransfer, for Evernote, for Vimeo, for AOL, da, da, da? Or do you have individual paid marketing machines for each entity? It's generally individual. You can think of the function versus team as a matrix, right?

55:03Each person belongs both to a function and the team. So I'm a product manager inside the Evernote team, for instance. So I'm inside the product function, inside the Evernote team. And so there are people who are inside the growth and marketing function. They work on Remini, for instance. Almost all people who do this are deployed inside business units. In terms of their actual location, how do you think about effectiveness of remote in product teams? I don't have a strong opinion on it, meaning that, one, I see that some of our best contributors work remotely or almost only remotely. And it's almost as if having the ability to craft an environment where you are almost cocooned inside your own habits and environment, you can just deliver your best work without distractions.

55:51Probably for me, I'm most effective when I'm at the office. But I do love having the flexibility to be able to meet my parents for a long weekend and just work from their place. I don't think that there's a clear winner between remote and in-person. I think hybrid is a very good mix of both. When you need to attract this level of talent, it's an extra requirement to have to ask them, you should also be physically in Milan. If it's not necessary, you just drop it. It's a false requirement, you know. You work with American teams that you often inherit and European teams that you sit with day to day.

56:31How do they differ in terms of work ethic, psychology, mentality? Honestly, I don't see that big of a difference. You don't? No. It's not like I spot a trend in how, I don't know, the WeTransfer team versus the Evernote team, just to name two that I worked very closely with. WeTransfer was based mostly in Amsterdam, some people in London too, Evernote in the US mostly in the Valley. I don't see a direct difference in culture. Was the StreamYard acquisition successful? Yes. I mean, I'm thinking about ways it could be defined as not successful, but none come to mind. It was a success financially speaking.

57:12We were able to increase revenue a lot. It was a success in terms of how much we were able to improve the product. Yeah, I would say it's definitely a success. Dude, I want to do a quick fire round with you. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. which company has Bending Spoons not acquired that you would most like to acquire because it would be great to work on? I mean I don't want to sound arrogant but I think I would love to work on Google it would be why it's just one of the best product in his Google search Google search but in general the Google ecosystem like they just have so much surface so so much intellectually stimulating stuff that you could work on.

57:54One of my favorite products is Google Maps just because of how useful it is every day, you know? And just even working on Google Maps would be great. Just as my, like, literally my personal taste, it would be great. But YouTube, Android, Google Search, all the AI stuff that they're doing, it's just like theme park world for OPM, I think. What is the most non-obvious app on your home screen that you love? Let's check. Yeah, let's do it. Polytopia. It's a mobile game. And I actually discovered it because apparently Elon Musk is a big Polytopia player. It's a turn-based strategy. It looks like Civilization, the game, but it's mobile.

58:37It's a bit simpler. When you have 15 minutes, you just play a match there. It's nice. Another one is Napper. Napper is a... So I had a baby in April. and napper is the app in which I log every time we feed her, every time she takes a nap. And it's good at predictions too. It literally is able to tell you when she's going to fall asleep with an accuracy of minutes. That feels like a Bending Spoons company. It might be, yeah. Tough retention. The retention there is like, fuck it, they're four years old, they don't nap anymore. It depends on how many babies you have, but yeah. That is true. But you're going to get some churn in between, dude.

59:18Yeah. What is the most non-obvious skill that a PM needs to be successful? I think great PMs are entrepreneurs, at heart at least. Like people who can come up with valuable ideas, find a way to implement those ideas well, focus on what matters, meaning that the idea needs to be relevant for a goal. Being successful financially is one, but also like doing stuff that goes viral and gets a lot of coverage. I mean, it depends on the goal, but you need to be very focused on what matters. The best entrepreneurs are great. Creative people are coming up with ideas. Designers are thinking what the UX should look like.

59:57Project managers that get the team to ship fast, and they ship fast with the team. So I think being an entrepreneur is a hell of a skill for a PM. Replit or Lovable? You can only choose one. I don't know. I think our teams use Lovable more than Replit. I personally use Reprit more than Lovable, though. Why? I prefer the UX. It's just that. Claude code or cursor? So I tweeted about the AOL acquisition, and the tweet went viral, and I noticed randomly a few large accounts followed me. It's not like I saw all of the followers and I went through the list and I didn't have time to do it. And so I said, let's see if I can rank my followers by how large their accounts are.

1:00:45But there's no tool that does that. And so I was like, yeah, let's see if I can build a little tool to do that. I'd pay a lot of money for this. No, seriously, do you have that? I have it. It doesn't work super well, but it works. I built it with cursor initially, and then it didn't work. And then I built it with cloud code. And it didn't one shot it, but I saw that it was improving the things that were broken faster. and so I went with cloud code in the end. Wow, love that. Which wins ultimately? I think at the end of the day, what you want to do is to have the preview on the right and the chat on the left or vice versa.

1:01:22But I think the code will become irrelevant. But I'm biased, I'm a PM, so I care about the prompt and the result. But I think that ultimately what you want to do is to deliver a great UX by giving the right commands. So I think that the cloud code is the way to go. But I think that cursor is a better UX today when manually looking at code and knowing the code still matters a lot. Seven and a half years at Bending Spoons. You can call up Fede the night before your first day and say, ah, I've done this before and you should know this. What would you tell yourself on that night before? Be bolder.

1:02:01I think sometimes I waited for somebody to give me permission to do stuff as if I was in school. And instead, when you start doing stuff autonomously and it looks like it's something smart and it can work, people will just cheer for you. It's not like anybody's going to stop you, at least not a bending spoon. If you have an idea for something that works, we're just going to be enthusiastic about you trying it. So I tend to be high agency, but I didn't have the confidence to just start doing stuff. And I'm glad that they pushed me to do it. but I would just tell myself, be bolder, start more things.

1:02:34If I wasn't afraid, I would do dot, dot, dot. I love Neuralink. I think Neuralink is the product, like the thing that can change the world the most in 50 years, including AI, in my opinion. So I know people love AI. I love AI. I use it every day. But I think that ultimately the way you perceive reality and the way it changes through Neuralink is going to be a bigger difference compared to having hyper-smart computers. So yeah, so Neuralink, if I wasn't afraid to fail, I would start a Neuralink competitor or find a way to work on Neuralink or even better, start a Neuralink product inside Bending Spoons.

1:03:17Fede, this has been so much fun, Stu. Thank you so much for joining me and I so appreciate you taking the time. I loved it. Thank you very much. But before we leave you today, On this show, we care about velocity. Most teams lose it in code review, not in writing code. Now, CodeRabbit fixes that. The second a PR opens, it leaves clear line-by-line comments, calls out what the change might touch, and offers one-click fixes. You can teach your organizational standards using your own custom instructions, such as cursor or clawed rules, and enforce them on every PR. CodeRabbit has so far reviewed more than 13 million PRs and installed on 2 million repositories used by over 100 ,000 OSS projects.

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