Bending Spoons CEO on going public, buying old tech brands and The Matrix

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1:16Fill out your intake form, meet with a licensed provider, and if approved, ModAlert ships straight to your door. Go to mod.com to get started. That's M-O-D dot com.

1:55is a control tower for making work move seamlessly through the organization. Connecting people, systems, data, and increasingly AI agents so that things don't happen in silos. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com. One of my co-founders, Matteo, is a big fan of the movie The Matrix. And there is a little kid at some point bending a spoon with his mind through telekinesis. And so, Matteo, they were We're brainstorming names, brings up the name, and we like it a lot for a few reasons. One, it just captures the idea that the mind is powerful, it can do a lot, more perhaps than you intuitively think it can.

2:35And also we thought the name was kind of a little bit funny. Hello and welcome to the interview from Times Tech, our weekly conversation with the people shaping the future of technology. I'm Katie Prescott. And I am Danny Fortson. I've got such a treat for you this week. I got an interview with what I think is one of the best named tech companies on the planet, Bending Spoons. Is this after Uri Geller? No, although actually that has had an impact on the business. When they try and look for news about them, they keep coming up against some of Uri Geller's finest work. Bending Spoons, for listeners who haven't heard of them, is valued at$20 billion.

3:18It listed on the NASDAQ earlier this year. And it's headquartered in Italy. I can tell you there are not that many Italian tech companies of this scale, right? No. It's kind of an extraordinary story, and we'll get into it. But they buy up old tech companies and suit them up. It's almost a private equity company meets tech. Right. So who have they got? Evernote. Remember them? I do remember Evernote, yes. AOL? AOL, yes. So another reason it's unusual is you've got this Italian company and they've got lots and lots of techies and engineers. So as they go into these companies, and unlike a private equity company, which might just strip them out, they haven't sold on any of these businesses.

4:05They plug in their own tech, they zhuzh up their management teams and try and make them better and keep them going. Did you say zhuzh up? I couldn't think of another way of describing it. Zhuzh. So this sounds really interesting. My question is, why? Because the idea of buying up a bunch of old apps, like my father-in-law, he's the only person I know who sells an AOL.com email address, for example. So buying up these old apps that are kind of like, it's like an island of misfit toys, right? Like the covered in Toy Story. Yeah, exactly. And then we're like powering, steaming ahead with AI and all this new stuff, you know, occasional humanoid robot, of course.

4:50So whereas Bending Spoons feels like it's almost like looking backward and kind of trying to keep these things alive. I've got questions. I've got questions. And I don't want to give away too much before you hear the interview because he goes into all of this. But if you think about the name Bending Spoons that has come from the matrix, it is meant to make your mind twist in unexpected ways. And they have gone to buy these companies because they see value in them and have created value in them. So it was started in 2013 by four Italian engineer graduates. And they all, including our guest today, Luca Ferrari, have done extraordinarily well out of it.

5:29As I said, it went public earlier this year. And hopefully, if you listen to the interview, all of your questions will be answered. I have been really looking forward to this interview. You may not remember, but last year, I think I spoke to you for the first time and you were on your way somewhere in an airport. Since then, a huge amount has happened with Bending Space, not least you going public a few months ago. What's that been like? What are your reflections on being a public company after so long being private? And what's that transition been like? I try not to think about it too much, to be honest.

6:03It feels like being a little bit naked. It makes you uncomfortable. So I try to forget that we're a public company. Just I try to stay focused on building useful, powerful internal technology and finding good acquisition targets and trying to be as good as possible at what we need to be good at. We have been thinking about going public for a while, I guess, because it typically helps you get access to more and cheaper capital. And as a capital intensive business where we need capital to grow faster, we are well aware of the headaches and pressures that come with being a public company. We've experienced some of that, but it's early.

6:39Ask me again in a couple of years, so I'll have a longer track record. And when you talk about feeling naked, is that because of the share price, which is a live graph of investor confidence in you? Is it because of having to open up your books to public scrutiny? I think it's probably three things. One is, yes, you need to transparently publish a lot about the company, which is fine. There's nothing to hide, but it just still feels a little bit weird that you have to show the whole world so much about what you do. Two, yes, the stock price, which it's very difficult to not create a connection between that number and how much you're worth as an individual.

7:21Like, are we good at our jobs? So keeping it impersonal, which is necessary to stay sane and effective, is not easy, I think. Not for me, at least. Although I think we've done well enough, but it's tricky. And then the third part of it, and perhaps the one that makes me most uncomfortable, is all of a sudden there is a level of attention, scrutiny, almost obsession about you as a company that wasn't there before. Because before, people were curious about, say, Bandit Spoons, about what you do. Maybe there's something to learn. Maybe you built a technology that's interesting. Maybe you do something that's controversial.

7:56But it ends there. Now, all of a sudden, people can make or lose money off what you do. And so every little piece of information becomes a tool to determine whether to buy or sell the stock. And so the level of attention goes into the stratosphere. I don't cherish the attention. I think very few of my colleagues do. So if we could do what we do in relative obscurity, we'd prefer it that way. But, you know, it is what it is. We feel very privileged overall, so it's fine. The other thing I wanted to ask you about this is you will know as an Italian how much emphasis there is at the moment on trying to nurture and stimulate European tech and the focus on AI sovereignty and building a tech stack here in Europe.

8:41You listed in the US. Did you feel any pressure at all to go public in Europe, to have a foot in Europe as well? Or was it something you even considered? So we did consider the different stock exchanges, including London, Amsterdam, Milan, and ultimately it was a pretty easy decision to list on NASDAQ. I think that the only real alternative for us would have been the New York stock exchange. The valuations and liquidity are just on another level, typically on these two American exchanges. And so I don't think any responsible management team would have made a different decision. I don't think it's all that bad for Europe, really.

9:19I think what matters for Europe is that companies invest in hiring people in Europe, creating competencies in Europe. That's really what drives economic prosperity. What stock exchange you list on is vastly relevant. Ultimately, European investors and households can buy stock on NASDAQ. Americans can buy stock on our exchanges. At this point, it's kind of globalized anyway. And we have invested heavily in Europe. We had an opportunity to build a company elsewhere, including the US. We decided to build it in Europe. Very early on, it was a decision we made quite consciously at the beginning. And one of the reasons why we did this was that we wanted to prove that you can build a world-beating technology company with roots in unlikely places, in our case, Italy, Milan.

10:05And we thought that would be a good thing overall. I could elaborate on why, but I think the world is a better place if knowledge, wealth, opportunities are a little bit better distributed. I'd love to hear you elaborate on why. I was sitting next to an investor the other day who said that their investment thesis at the moment was Italy. They felt there were some great companies there and people were just ignoring it as a place to put money. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Italy, by the way, has improved dramatically over the past decade. For us, it was probably primarily we wanted to prove that you can do it there.

10:36And the reason why I think that's important is if you have a massive concentration of knowledge, wealth opportunity in one location, ultimately that's not a sustainable world. History teaches us that when some people are having a hard time while other people are having a great time, that doesn't last long. that ultimately hurts also the people who are having a great time i think it's uh it's perfectly fine and maybe even desirable that one or two places are on another level like you know the silicon valleys of the world it's really optimal to have one or two hubs like that where you know the concentration of talent capital is greater i think you probably in some cases need that for certain very big things to happen which ultimately benefit the entire world but you need a reasonable level of distribution of opportunity knowledge.

11:26And government can do something about it, but I think ultimately economic activity stemming from investors and entrepreneurs is at least as critical. We also had the highly selfish reasons for starting the company in Italy. And Italy had a lot of talent, 60 million people, approximately very good education, but not a lot of alternative employment for people who were ambitious and wanted to work in technology. And so we thought, okay, with the ambition we have, the vision we have, what we're trying to build, it's an exciting project, we should be able to attract a lot of great talent who otherwise would have had to settle for inferior employment or leave their families behind.

12:00And that turned out to be true. We've been able to build amazing teams, I believe. And now we attract people all over the world, including the US. But when we were unknown, I think we would have been difficult to achieve the same level of success in building talent density had we started, say, in California, for example. The number of people who apply to Bending Spoons is absolutely astonishing. I mean, you probably have the numbers in your head. There's some in your prospectus. Last year, it was 800 ,000 Java applications. I think unique human beings, it's more like half a million. So some people apply to us, but anyway.

12:35And the ones who are successful? We hired 286, if I remember correctly. So approximately one in 2000 or 3000. and we go to great pains to build amazing teams. We're firm believers that once you have a strategy that makes sense, almost all that matters to achieve success is the quality of the teams. Part of that is talent, raw talent, and part of that is culture, which is the rules of engagement, how we work together, how we make decisions, how we operate. And if those two things are in place, amazing talent and a good culture, then if the strategy is right, you're pretty much almost guaranteed to do really well.

13:12So that's where you are today. Let's go back to where you started. I don't often say this to people, but I really enjoyed reading your IPO prospectus. It was very human. It didn't feel like it was written by a group of bankers and lawyers. And you start with this story about you and your co-founders backpacking in Indonesia, having just graduated in engineering, kind of casting around for your first business idea. Yeah, so that's even before Bending Spoons. We were backpacking in Indonesia and were climbing a volcano with insufficient security measures in hindsight. But thankfully, nothing happened.

13:51Nothing too bad, at least. So we realized that we all wanted to record our memories. That was such an incredible experience. And so we decided to create a startup to use AI. This is 2010, by the way, to write diaries automatically for people. and we did launch that startup it was called evertail it ran between 2010 and 2013 it was an utter failure from almost any measurable perspective but we did learn a lesson so we we strengthened a lot of skills that became important later for benniespoons we certainly strengthened our relationship we're very very close friends almost indistinguishable from you know being siblings for just how much we've gone through and i think the level of intimacy and trust that we have established between each other.

14:35And from the ashes of that startup, with the roughly$40 ,000 that were left over from the approximately 1 million we had raised from VCs, we just started Bending Spoons. And we have to thank that startup and, of course, that Indonesian trip for some of the key insights, the capital, the seed capital, in a way, directly from the leftovers from the previous startup, and also a lot of the skills that were foundational to building Bending Spoons. Bending Spoons having one of the best names in the tech industry, I think, alongside hugging face. Hugging face is pretty good, yeah. People at the newspaper going, what?

15:13Bending Spoons? It is weird, yeah. Tell us a story. You know, actually, we have a LAC integration. We use LAC for internal communication. We built a bot that will post mentions of Bending Spoons online on Reddit and elsewhere so that we can monitor and learn what people think and maybe hopefully improve, sometimes respond. But something we're still struggling to fully separate is people mentioning spoon bending, like meaning telekinesis. And so I read so many posts at this point of people talking about there's an entire world out there. It's weird. There used to be a TV show. People very seriously talking about telekinesis.

15:46So anyway, so that's off topic. But yes, we love the name. One of my co-founders, Matteo, is a big fan of the movie The Matrix. you know and there is a little kid at some point bending a spoon with his mind through telekinesis presumably and so mateo there were brainstorming names brings up the name and we like it we liked a lot for a few reasons one it just captures the idea that the mind is powerful it can do it can do a lot more perhaps that you intuitively think it can and then that power is unlocked through planning a practice perseverance you know hard work and those are things you know call them values or ideas that resonate with us.

16:25And also we thought the name was kind of a little bit funny. We like the idea of not taking ourselves too seriously. And so, yeah, we went for it. It's also memorable. I've learned in hindsight, people remember it easily because it's so unusual. So we don't regret that choice. It was a good choice, I think. And was the idea always to do what you do now, which, you know, buying up interesting tech companies and zhuzhing them up is how I always describe it to people? I mean, the short answer is yes. The idea was, broadly speaking, was there after that Evertail failure. We decided that we should be able to, over time, become world-class at the skills that you need to run digital businesses really well.

17:08So software engineering, product design, product management, monetization marketing, AI research, and that we should be able to find digital businesses out there which weren't being managed optimally. And so we should be able to offer very good prices to people, prices they would find appealing, but still deliver high returns for ourselves, our shareholders. And we hadn't fully realized the advantage of having a centralized team of engineers, designers, who we could redeploy flexibly across our different businesses on a short notice to offer opportunities to develop new functionality. But equally, we throw those resources the moment that a particular product was not interesting, so we could keep costs very efficient at all times.

17:50Those were, I think, levels of sophistication that came with time. But the broader idea that we should be able to compound capital efficiently for a very long time through acquisitions. If we are exceptional at operating these businesses, that idea was there pretty much immediately, let's say.

18:12Today's episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow. ServiceNow describes itself as an AI control tower for business reinvention. connecting people, systems, data, and AI so workflows more smoothly across an organization. The platform integrates with different clouds, models, and data sources, bringing them together in one place to help your team. To learn more about how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

18:43Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most advanced heart rate sensing in an Apple Watch. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, could tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. For general wellness purposes only, not intended for clinical use or to detect, diagnose, monitor, or treat medical conditions, requires iPhone 11 or later. Mod.com is changing the way people battle excessive fatigue.

19:17Ever hit a wall in the middle of the day and a third coffee just doesn't do it anymore? Here's what's actually happening. Coffee only briefly blocks adenosine, the chemical that tires you out. When it stops working, your system is flooded and you crash. Modafinil is a prescription treatment that works in a completely different way. Modafinil works by stimulating multiple receptors in the brain associated with wakefulness, including dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, histamine, glutamate, and orexin. It's a more complete solution that gives you 10 to 12 hours of steady focus and energy. To learn more, go to mod.com.

19:59Fill out your intake form, meet with a licensed provider, and if approved, Mod Alert ships straight to your door. Go to mod.com to get started. That's mod.com.

20:20Can you give us an example of one of the companies you've taken over and how you've changed it and what it looks like now? One that's... Lots to choose from. Yeah, one that's quite suitable, I think, because we've owned it at this point for almost four years and it's big enough and people know about it, is Evernote. It's a productivity tool, basically, mostly note-taking, but it does a lot more than that these days. So when we bought it, it had a team of roughly 350 people. We rebuilt that team pretty much completely to achieve very high levels of talent density. We got rid of a lot of management layers, built roles that are way more kind of T-shaped, so people have now much broader mandates.

20:58After a year, roughly 60 people worked on Evernote. Today, it's 20, 25 people. At the same time, we rebuilt the technological foundation pretty much completely. So we re-architected the cloud infrastructure, achieving much better scalability, performance, fewer bugs, better maintainability, just a more modern, more secure infrastructure. We rebuilt the modules that make sure that once you take a note, say on your laptop, it's properly synchronized on your phone and vice versa, or with other people or using the same note or workspace with you. We rewrote most of the code base to make the app faster.

21:31we have launched a gigantic number of new features got rid of features nobody was using but we're getting in the way of making the product intuitive redesigned the ui rebranded the product i mean it's still called evernote and it's still an elephant the logo but it's now a little bit i think we think more modern and nicer we have completely rebuilt the monetization changing prices what's available for free what's premium completely changed marketing and now the product is generates It's a lot more revenue, way more profits, and every other important metric, the trajectory of all the other important metrics is either the same or improved relative to before.

22:07So it's been a massive undertaking, but also very rewarding from every perspective in our view. So you're changing the team, changing the tech, and kind of wholesale looking at the business model. Exactly. And your teams around the world then work on all of your businesses. Yeah, at any point in time, there is a team who wake up in the morning and all they think about is Evernote. But next month, we could take half of those people and move them to Airtable, and we could deploy new people to Evernote. So there's great fluidity and everybody's allegiance is ultimately at the Bennispoons level. This is very important for us.

22:45We believe it breeds massive efficiency and ability to, again, go after big opportunities. If someone comes up with an exciting idea for Airtable or for AOL, we could put 100 great people. We don't have to hire, coach, have them understand the culture because the entire technological foundation for each of our businesses is the same. It's the same operating system so they don't have to relearn the tools. They go there and they work pretty much in the same way as they were on whatever previous business they were working on. And I think you've described that as the perfect operating machine. That's the aspiration.

23:19We're far from perfect. But yes, we're trying to build, basically, you could say, the most important product we work on is none of the customer facing products, but these under the hood engine or machine that helps us operate all these businesses, these products really well. Our creativity and efforts go first and foremost into that underlying layer that's a little bit hidden, but so important. And then after we feel we've done the best we could there, then any leftovers go to everything else. And the reason is, if that machine is amazing, then we're almost guaranteed to make sure that each of the businesses is as good as it can be.

23:55If the machine is lackluster, then we lose our edge, our ability to buy things and make sure they're more successful with us than with everybody else. and then the entire thing doesn't work any longer, you know. Do you ever get under the hood of one of these businesses you buy and go, oh no, this was a big mistake or there are some nasty surprises there or you think this can't be part of the perfect operating machine? I mean, there are always surprises, some good, some bad. More bad than good because a lot of most sellers we find are honest. It's not black or white. People tend to lean toward painting the rosier picture.

24:29Like selling a house. Exactly. Big, big lies rarely. But things that are a little bit worse than that being presented to you, it happens somewhat often. But we've never found something that we're like, holy shit, this is a problem. It's mostly somewhat disappointing, but not too big. Now, when it comes to a business being highly imperfect, that's mostly good news for us, as long as we know when we set the price. Because our very valid proposition is that we as a company are generally able to make businesses a lot better. So when there are imperfections or even serious flaws, if they're fixable, so if the problem is there are no customers, well, you know, we need customers.

25:10Or the product is not solving a real problem, we're not interested. But if the product solves a real problem, there are plenty of customers, users, retention is robust. But maybe the technology is dated, the product is buggy, customers need a set of features that's not there yet. Maybe the team could be improved. Monetization is suboptimal. All of these things are good news for us because it means we should be able to offer a great price to current owners while still having enough headroom that we can deliver high returns for ourselves. So we are actually quite attracted to businesses that fundamentally they're good, but there are elements of them that could be greatly improved.

25:48And when it comes to that returns point, when do you get to the point of selling some of these companies? We never sell any companies, so we are a perennial owner. So it makes you very different to a traditional private equity. Oh, yeah, completely. I think the only... The people have compared us to private equity before. I think they superficially understand private equity is generally their funds. They buy companies through a fund and then they need to wind down the fund. They sell the companies. They return money to limited partners. And they've done a good job. They've made money and everybody's happy.

26:14We buy off our balance sheet. Everything is integrated super deeply in the same operating system. We don't sell. We make money because these businesses produce free cash flows. We can then, you know, hopefully those amount to more than we paid for the business in time. And then we can redeploy those cash flows toward new acquisitions and also making that engine, that platform better. And also unlike private equities, just to kind of underline this difference, generally precisely because private equities need to sell these businesses down the line, they need to keep them separate. Otherwise you can't sell them.

26:42We do the exact opposite, which is complete integration technologically, so we couldn't really sell them. Or I mean, I guess we could, but it would be incredibly difficult. And also the team is so centralized that we either sell the business without a team, which would greatly narrow the set of possible buyers for obvious reasons, or we would have to sell the team with it. But that would break that bond of trust. Team members come on board, believing they're part of Bending Spoons as a whole, not necessarily Evernote, although they pour their hearts and minds into making Evernote as good as possible while they're working it.

27:13And so we couldn't do that. We couldn't sell a team off with the business, I think. Along those lines, then, another criticism that often gets leveled at private equity is they take on too much debt. I think, Bending Spoons, I saw a number from S &P, you're going to have almost$6 billion of debt by the end of this year. When does that become too much, do you think? So I think it's not so much the absolute number of dollars. What matters is how much that you have relative to your projected free cash flows. And we think we have kept very prudent levels of debt. Our guiding principle there is that we want to be in a position to pay back all of our debt before it matures.

27:52So we have kept a leverage ratio between two and three times run rate profitability. In fact, if I have to look at what we hear from investors, by far, investors have suggested that we should raise more debt, not less debt. And of course, they don't want us to go bankrupt for obvious reasons. So we have tried to keep a prudent level of debt, but using no debt whatsoever would be suboptimal because with debt, you can grow faster. So it's always a trade-off between how much risk are you willing to take, hopefully very little, but more than zero, no doubt, in exchange for faster growth. But they can never be zero.

28:31The moment you have$1 in debt, there's a little bit of risk if you don't pay enough. Before we finish, I'm really interested in going back to how you got into the tech world in the first place. Because you grew up in a small village outside Verona. Your parents were hairdressers. They're not techie people. You didn't come from a family of very academic people, and yet here you find yourself running a US-listed billion-dollar firm. What do you think pulled you into the world of tech and engineering? That's very difficult to know. And they must be very proud of you. I hope so. I don't know. I mean, I'm certainly proud of them.

29:07I owe them a lot. I think having supported parents must be quite important. I always loved the idea of building something ambitious. that's very clear to me especially in hindsight when i look back at me as a kid when i was very little probably six or seven i spent several months basically coming up and codifying an imaginary country shaped like australia i had hundreds at least hundreds of pages filled with drawings and text describing institutions infrastructure even sports leagues striving for perfection. I really enjoyed the idea of making things really as good as they could be. But obviously, yes, growing up in the countryside, you know, farmers, plumbers, truck drivers, I didn't even know what being an entrepreneur meant, really.

29:55So you sometimes lack the tools, the mental models to understand how to make that passion or ambition concrete. Later, when I went to university, I got some scholarships and whatnot. And I met people, including one of my co-founders who had much broader horizons than I did. And I remember that at some point, one of these people mentioned something that read on TechCrunch, you know, this tech blog. And I went online and I spent an hour just reading through a bunch of articles. And it was love at first sight, not with TechCrunch, but with the stories that we're telling. I thought, okay, this may be my path, you know.

30:32It was eye-opening. And then it was kind of natural from there, this determination to build something we could be proud of and through which we could learn a lot in the process. And then as I studied engineering in general, I love the problem solving, let's say the logical analytical process, which is necessary to build great technology, but in general to solve business problems. I'm more of an abstract thinker, I think, than the typical tinkerer. So reading those TechCrunch stories of people who built businesses and created something. Yeah, exactly. So it really clicked for me. I had this ambition of building something exciting, ambitious, that would teach me a lot, but I didn't really know what that would look like.

31:14So it gave me a very concrete avenue to implement those ambitions. And I think I had it before. But once I saw it, it clicked immediately. Again, love at first sight, pretty much. Thank you. Thanks so much for coming in today. Thank you for having me. That was a really enjoyable conversation. i'm sold on on bending spoons i'm gonna i'm gonna start because of the name what do you think hugging face or bending spoons what's your favorite that's a close run thing i'm just trying to think of what other old school internet companies that like i could maybe you know as you say he says there are so many i mean their prospectus says there are at least at least a thousand that they could get their mitts on and they're not flogging them i love that which is interesting isn't it and they're expanding massively they've taken a huge space in london's king's cross which is the new tech hub here they've taken space for a thousand people so they're expanding at a rate of knots um and as he said in the interview they just get so many people applying and and uh and wanting to work for them and i thought it was fascinating that he talked about italy as a fantastic place to start a company because they are really the biggest player just in terms of finding talent i was gonna say to the us yeah you've got a really captive market.

32:29Amazing. This is why you tune into the pod to get these really interesting conversations. And you know, this one, it's completely out of left field. But then you listen, you're like, okay, that makes sense. I do like thinking about how the bankers must have felt when when trying to sell this company for bending spoons. They've got a sense of humor, these guys. I love it. Well, that is it. So please do follow us on whatever channel where wherever you get your podcast on YouTube so that you never miss an episode. And we'll be back next Friday with all of the latest tech news. We shall indeed. I will see you next week.

33:03See you next week. Have a good week. Bye bye. Bye bye.

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