YouSaid · the spoken record

Luca Ferrari

lines on the record: 96
first: 2025-11-04
most recent: 2025-11-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Actually, I'd never felt more grateful in my life because it's very difficult if you think about it for someone 10 years old to actually implement that request from a teacher, to go with the uncool guy, go through this log of months where the guy barely talks, inviting him after classes to go to his place to play video games. They literally changed my life. It's probably the single thing that ever happened to me that I'm most grateful for”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Socializes, I just didn't know how. And they keep investing in this relationship for a long time. And they were 10 or 11, so little kids, until months later, I felt confident in myself and I had turned into a reasonably effective social person. Not the most social, not the most outgoing, but you wouldn't tell that I had been almost pathologically shy to the point that my mom brought me to a doctor. And I owed it to those two. And what I learned during the third and last year of middle school was that one of them got mad at me for something stupid like a girl, I don't know, kissed me, not him. It's a stupid thing, 12 years old. And it lasted five minutes. But in those five minutes, it was furious and he told me, you remember two years ago when Alberto and I did this and that and helped you and involved you and got you out of your shell. We didn't do it because we thought you were cool, but because this teacher told us that you needed help. And he did it to hurt me to say that.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a little kid, I was almost pathologically shy to the point that I was, let's say diagnosed with autism. I think the diagnosis was not necessarily particularly scientific, but that's to say I was so introverted and shy. I spent years in elementary school talking to nobody pretty much. So I got to middle school in Italy where middle school between the age of 10 and 13, I think. The first school year goes by and I've talked to essentially nobody in my class. Literally. And we're late in the year, I think it's probably May, we're on a school trip in the hills just taking a stroll with our teacher and probably seeing some ruins or some Roman thing pretty common thing to do in Italy. Plenty of ruins. And all of a sudden two classmates of mine come over, just hug me. And they just talk. And they were the two outgoing, popular guys in the class. It's just talking to me and on the bus, they just dragged me with them in the back and we start singing. And I'm terrified and happy at the same time because I did want to.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Proliferation, out of proliferation of wannabes somewhat proved to be great, some will be great out of luck. And so, again, you have more competition. But trying to build a venue spoons is, if you understand what you're doing, which is a prerequisite to even have a chance, it's dauntingly painful many years from the ground up cultivating the little garden, there is no shortcut to it. So I think it's just not a model that when people see it, a lot of people have known about it for years as a talk to investors. And I've seen nobody try because they just understand it's just too painful.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even if someone said, Oh, I trust you'll do super well, here's a billion dollars to get to where we are now, say 12 years after the foundation of Benin Spruce, it would take me maybe not 12 years, but easily seven or eight. Like it's a huge slug. You hire two people, you spend a year coaching them, and then you hire four and they coach them and you help you and you build the technology slowly takes time to write software and polish it. Presumably more will try. I would say that's to be expected. I also think there are some things that are harder to do than other things. It's being painful. Again, private equity is very difficult. But if you're bright, you understand business. Finding someone who will give you not $100 billion. That's the best of the best over decades, but enough that you can have a business and it's worth trying is not that difficult. There are so many private equity firms. And ultimately, you just need to do well enough that you don't look bad, like you're around average, and many will die, but some, even statistically, will do well enough. The various two entry are low.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over. Knowing all I do, which someone else typically wouldn't at all, also because what I say here, yeah, it's the tip of the iceberg. But then from there to actual day to day work. But even if I started over with all I know,”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's always a first. Private equity wasn't a thing until it was a thing. And today you have trillions of dollars in private equity. You could have done private equity before KKR did private equity. Nothing prevented you from doing private equity in the 1930s. To my knowledge, nobody was doing private equity. So at some point, someone come up with an idea. It makes sense. It's efficient. It works. Others flock to compete. Sometimes that ruins the opportunity regardless you have a market. This may be the case. We'll see. I think we have far superior competitive advantages than a private equity because essentially a private equity, every acquisition is almost a, we start afresh in a way. In our case, we do well because of the platform and the structure. It would take many years for someone to build the employer brand, the talent pool, the culture, the technologies to get to really compete. So I'm actually not, which is also one of the reasons why you see me being pretty transparent about some of the principles. I thought about it and I figured if I started”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough, but it's part of it. We believe that it pays dividends in terms of again willingness to sacrifice, to be honest, about problems, to do your best.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My jaw is painful because I laugh too much. It's just fun. We organize all sorts of almost cabaret things. So it's a great tradition and it just helps us be proud of the things we do. Remember not to take ourselves too seriously. We're not saving lives. You meet and learn about colleagues you maybe hadn't necessarily been close to before. Another one we do is a yearly retreat where we bring everybody to a remote, exciting, typically exotic destination for seven, eight, nine days on the company's time and dime. It's just a vacation by colleagues. The last one, so I don't remember in which order, but we went to Seychelles, Mauritius, the Dominican Republic. In the past we went to Japan, Australia. And everybody's there being together, making friends. It's expensive naturally, but we think it helps establish a level of trust bonds with colleagues and ultimately a company as people. So if you bond with colleagues, you're bonding with the abstract concept of the company to an extent. It's not the same thing.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think ultimately the most important thing is to be very clear on what kind of company you want to be your principles, your values, and then hire people who embrace those and then you yourself as a person who's maybe more visible than others try as hard as you can to be the best paragon of those values as you can be. That's more important than any manifesto or initiative or proclamation. There are certainly things you can do that on the margins help foster those values a little bit further. Personally, a few things we do that I think are unusual we love are one is called state of the spoon. It's twice a year. We have somewhat the equivalent of an Apple keynote, but it's just internal and most of our teams take turns on stage presenting their most proud achievement and also failures and lessons learned of the past six months, what they're planning for the future. There is an element of comedy and self-deprecation, which makes it, I think, quite entertaining. You laugh a lot. It's three, four hours, and at the end of it, I've”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get to a point where you can replicate that and with the same guarantee of performance, very difficult by getting to something that works the same 95% of the time, we're super far from it. But that's an infinitely easier challenge than something that works essentially 100% of the time. Infinitely easier. But also you need to be able to guide it to build it the way you want. And as long as software is ultimately a relatively small share of wallet, if you think about it, it's not an expense people will optimize first. It's not like a car that literally you plan your finances around. Before that truly eats into the overall size of the market, I think we are talking a lot of stars need to align. I think it's probably many years out.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we as a society and investment community will be able to start seeing things and update our model of reality and predictions based on that. Now, can it be disruptive for many SaaS businesses? Absolutely. I think the time where we open up ChatGPT and we tell it, okay, build me JIRA as far away. It's not months away. It's not even a couple of years away. AI today can't do a lot for you beyond say research, copyrighting, and maybe some basic content production, but it'll do more and fast. We were working with AI in 2010, so we're very early. I'm a big believer in AI, very big. However, even if it could build JIRA today, it's not that easy to explain to it what you want when it's so complex. So I wouldn't underestimate the inability of the user to get out of it what they need. These products being honed to customer needs for a long time, you're already using them, there is no investment in them in terms of data. So not only does the tool need to”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI is an accelerator of both quality and efficiency if used properly, but it doesn't do it by itself. Maybe it will in 10 years, but today we've seen it clearly as we have invested internally in excellence through AI in our operations. A lot of it is custom integrations, proprietary technology, a lot of culture work on getting people to use it the right way. Like with every innovation in the past, we'll see a small percentage of companies being at the forefront of leveraging that. Most companies being laggards. And I'm pretty confident Benny Spoon will be at the very cutting edge of using it. So we're already making strides there that if anything, the gap in ability between us and most companies will widen for years. But again, I think it's likely to mostly benefit an aggregator and consolidator like Benny Spoons, assuming we stay disciplined with pricing while being very disruptive for certain verticals and some will be disrupted much earlier.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a complex discussion, and I think you're asking maybe a time frame of five years because AI changes the very fabric of our society 50 years out or something like a long timeframe in ways that are both exciting and scary. But in the medium term, I think for Benny Spoon specifically, I think it's mostly a good thing because we don't care too much about within reason the risk to each individual piece of our business. Basically, most of our business units are 20% of our revenue less dramatic decrease in one of them is still Yeah, we've been growing at 75% a year. I'd rather none of them decline, but some do, some will. Maybe one or two will decline fast. It's undesirable, but not existential. So for our model, it's highly diversified. Lastly, a lot of what we do is being better, functionally better at running this company, meaning having a higher quality output at a lower cost.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the point of view of a lender and syndicate it out is super standardized by now you create a deck you record a presentation you show up for one hour maybe three times with batches of lenders like it's super super standardized very efficient”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capital, and typically some of these capital is basically it's with that lender, it will stay with you until maturity five or seven years down the line. Some of this capital you may want to syndicate, the lender tells you, okay, I'll give you a billion dollars, but we agree that in the short term, we'll be going out to sell away essentially this billion dollar to many providers each with 10 50 million each, and they'll hold it for five years or seven years, but I'm just giving you a bridge to that moment. You need the money now, you're doing M&A, for example, and we don't have time to talk to 20 parties plus it would certainly leak that you're buying that target. So I help you get there, but then we agree contractually that we'll be transferring that credit from me to these other lenders. So that phase is also interesting and it's quite optimized because the debt markets are huge, it's gigantic and vastly more efficient probably than the actually much smaller say VC capital markets. And so the process of how you take that credit.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enjoyed my conversations with lenders at least as much as those with equity investors, perhaps because they have this, they have to be so paranoid about the downside, this breeds them a thoroughness, a thoughtfulness that's not always the case with equity investors, for whom maybe that intuition of all this team, this thing could go far is more important, like catching the big wins is more important that, and so they can be wrong more often. So there may be a little bit more quicker in their judgment, a bit more. But I think lenders are quite an interesting type of investor to talk to. And generally it works that you talk to a couple of anchor lenders, some of the biggest banks, typically those with a strong investment banking arm too. They help you figure out not kind of shape their own, they commit some of the money immediately so you know you've got some of it covered and you know where you're going and then you start bringing under the tent more players with other important roles and then lesser roles and at some point it's quote unquote just provide”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mindset is quite different because an equity investor tolerates the risk of losing money vastly better because they have an upside that's essentially uncapped within reason. A lender is almost entirely intolerant to the possibility of losing because their upside is that 3% spread, 5% spread, depending on the exact financial instrument, it's still a limited and generally fixed upside they have. It's all about not losing it. So a lot of the questions are more oriented toward understanding the potential worst case scenario and the risks equity investors are more oriented toward the TAM. How big could this be? How quickly could we get there? The surprising part is a lot of banks, a lot of lenders are actually quite visionary. I heard people say, oh, they're probably more boring because they actually know. A lot of them are brilliant and visionary. So they're quite curious about the model and how far it could go and understand very quickly why it works.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Help with talent density, I help trying to push for being demanding. So that's probably 50% of my time, 50% of my time is on average in time probably financing an external relations, I would say. 50% of my time is these transformations of companies we newly acquire. And 50% of my time would be other, call it long tail platform work, which is probably where I would put that thinking creatively about how to improve the strategy and that work all the time. So I probably work as two FTs like I think most people in my position would. But it's probably these four categories are comparable in investment on average in time.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Varies by period a lot. So, for example, if when we close a large transaction often there with a task force in the trenches meeting the new team and for weeks or even months sometimes that would take up 50% of my time or 70% of my time if we're working on a big fundraise which has raised the largest that round of any private company in Italy in history and like we said we raised $700 million at an $11 billion valuation in equity these two initiatives certainly took a substantial part of my time when we're not in fundraising mode that goes down to trickle maybe have some calls with investors but much less so it varies but I would say probably a first plate would be 50% of my time talent I check each candidate before we extend an offer I extend the offer I talk to many of the new hires”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we regulate it away, but we make life much worse for everybody else 99% of the time. This frustrates me because I think we're just shooting ourselves in the foot of society, essentially.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“free and open a playground as you can we keep adding rules elon musk once said something that i thought was brilliant and i fully subscribe to it he said we should have a rule that every new law is automatically removed say three years later unless someone can make a really good case that's created a lot of value so we wouldn't have 10 000 1000 page long civil codes or whatever where it's basically trying to prevent rare corner cases unpleasant sometimes tragic corner cases while making 99.99 of the normal cases less efficient more painful some utterly impossible but because they're not as newsworthy because they're typically widespread and normal those inefficiencies are not as interesting to talk about in aggregate there are just a massive tragedy a much bigger tragedy than the one individual tragedy of one corner case ultimately when it comes to regulation the corner case”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We feel very privileged of getting a ton of great applications. Like I said, a huge number. I think we should be getting more better. We should be better at identifying the raw talent. I know we're rejecting a lot of great applicants who are actually better of some of the people we hire because we're just not good enough at spotting that talent in someone who has such a short track record, maybe students, you graduate. That's an area of massive frustration in a way. At the same time, very proud of what the team has done there and frustrated we can't yet do better. And I know that's one of the keys to growing fast and achieving what we have to achieve. So that's certainly a major area. I'm always frustrated with our societies. There's too much regulation. We're really working on the wrong stuff at the institutional level. People try to create economic growth and prosperity through more rules just telling you, yeah, if we tell them exactly where to go with lots of rules, surely we'll be prosperous. They don't understand that it's quite the opposite. You got to get out of the way and create as”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm that kind of person, by the way. I'm perennially unhappy, which I think sounds awful because in a way I feel very fortunate. Interestingly, I feel very fortunate. Am I perennially unhappy? For some reason. Discontent, which is a huge superpower and a curse at the same time. You could imagine. What is not good or at least not as good as you could be? One of the things that is critical for our growth is hiring and coaching. I'm absolutely positive we offer literally one-of-a-kind level jobs, some of the best on the planet, absolutely certain. Incredible talent density you learn faster than anyone else anywhere else. You get an opportunity to take on responsibility. That's crazy. Most of our gentle managers run businesses on average 50, 100 million in revenues. If they were a scale up, they would be considered a large scale up. Many of these people like 27, 28. Most of them are, I think very few are above 30. Unique opportunities, excellent financial opportunities too, whether it's very good salaries and investment opportunity in a company that's”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resistant to that feeling. And so I'm sure it could be done better, but we chose the simple way, which is treat people respectfully and just get rid of all that stuff and assume you'll do the best you can.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through observation in time, if you're great at your job, you'll probably get more, do more. I think that sometimes when you set typical incentive plans with KPIs and whatnot, first of all, it's very costly. It takes a lot of time. For that to be ROI positive, it's not enough that it adds value. You need to add more value than the cost that's implied. It's absolutely guaranteed to create at least some perverse incentives because nobody can set perfect incentives. The world is too complicated. It changes too fast for sure. So even if you are a genius, whatever you set as incentives will be imperfect. So there is an additional inefficiency that whatever extra efficiency it needs to overcome before even into black territories opposed to red territory. I think also those kind of incentives tend to hinder relationships. They tend to make things more transactional. It's more difficult to have a proper problem solving session where all we're thinking about is how do we win together? I think most people will have it in the back of their minds. Okay, how do I get the better bonus? It's difficult to be entirely.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if this will disappoint you, but we don't. Everybody is paid a fixed salary, no variable pay, no stock grants, nothing. They can choose to invest part of their cash pay at a discount, not a crazy but a pretty generous discount at the top core level, and that's it. The way we maximize alignment of effort is by hiring people who believe our high integrity have great professional pride and then just treating them with the utmost respect. And I think most people will try to do what's right and do what's right for the business along the lines of the mandate you gave them. So if you say ultimately your optimizer for men's pools, not Evernote, nine out of ten people, if you're hired well and the culture is right, will take it to heart and do that. In fact, I believe sometimes setting financial incentives, of course, if people do well, they're likely to get more responsibility, higher salaries. Certainly there's that, but it's not as immediately tied to a results next quarter or something very measurable.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sevens from the sixes from the fives, but the eight and a half, the ninth, the tens for them look like the same, like a big batch of, oh, they're so smart. And so to be able to distinguish the tens from the ninths and the eighths, you need to be probably close to a ten yourself. Of course, experience and other elements too, which make it very difficult. They're not just brilliant from a point of view of logic and analysis, but also rationality. Trying to really ignore this person is really pleasant or charismatic. Yes, park it. What's really beneath that? It's difficult. We as humans have been evolutionists made us animals of gut, of emotion, but emotion investing, they're not good friends, I think, or at least good investing.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Despisos. And so a model he believed had legs coupled with a person he thought was a brilliant leader, a very bright problem solver. That alone said that opportunity apart from a lot of other stuff. Yes, it would be difficult to have wide margins for a long time, but he was confident that the company would be much better than at least it was priced at the time. So I think understanding people and their cognitive abilities is quite difficult. It requires in and of itself great cognitive abilities. I find that If someone is eight out of 10 smart, they can only discern”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the best are really good at understanding people, at discerning who's really smart and not promotional from those who are not so smart but very good promoters. And so when you see a business as a strong track record and someone explains to you in a way that makes sense, it's not just a good story, but it makes logical sense. That's a huge indication that probably there's something there. First of all, you now know why things have worked out and you can determine whether they're likely to continue working out. And secondly, if you're investing in someone who's made good decisions for the right reasons, not just out of luck. They're just more likely to navigate the future variables that will be thrown at them better than most. I know investors who invested, for example, in Amazon in the early days who told me one particularly, who told me that the main reason why he did and he made a big bet on it and it was a huge success, he did believe in the e-commerce model and all that, but he believed that very few people he had ever met had the clarity of thought, the rationality of”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could tell they're good, but if everybody, or even quite a lot of people think they're good, probably the price embeds that goodness and it's not a great deal. It is what it is. It's like a lot of companies today in AI, again, I'm not going to name names, but some probably deserve their valuation, some Easter will prove we're even cheap. But most, even the good ones are probably too expensive simply because everybody wants to invest. So in a way, it's the same thing. The truly outstanding investors will be able to find something that's really good, but few people think is good. And the only way to do that is not to apply pattern because by definition, if it fit a pattern, then it's either by the pattern or good by the pattern everybody is on board. It has to not fit the pattern and you have to find ways of determining it's good. It's very difficult intellectually. You need creativity, imagination, logic, rationality. It cognitively is next level.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understand almost the laws of physics to make a metaphor that makes so that the apple falls. And that gives them certainly a lot of confidence, but also the ability to see what others don't. Because ultimately a lot of the time, good investment is not.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say most good investors recognize patterns, so I've seen a certain business model work, and I use that to select their investments. If done right, this is a very successful way of investing. And then there are the bad investors and the amazing investors, none of which is a pattern recognizer. So they actually assess each business in an ad hoc manner on its own deep fundamental merits, but it's much more difficult. That's what divides the truly outlier investors from the bad ones. Those in the middle, maybe even leaning toward good, are pattern recognizers, but in the truly incredible ones, you sit with them, they're not saying, oh, you are the Uber of”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, I think a lot of entrepreneurs take money from investors and have a level of entitlement that they should never be asked to provide a return. Oh, but why do you ask me to sell now? It's only been four years, five years. I think that's either naive or intellectually dishonest, regardless of the particular bylaws that investor is subjected to where maybe they could stay forever. Ultimately, an investor is trying to achieve some form of IRR with some time frame. You should remain very respectful of the fact that when you take anybody's money, if you ask me about certain institutional money, you can't find it shocking or disappointing or then bitch about it in the entrepreneurial circles that they're asking, putting some level pressure with you to sell.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do prefer a permanent capital, and it's not so much because even permanent capital could ask you to liquidate. It's just that you don't have to. And I think the fact that they don't have to reduces the probability that you'll find yourself in a situation where it's just an unnatural, complicated moment, incentives can become a little bit perverse. We haven't experienced that before, but I know stories of others having done that. But I think there's an evergreen source of capital, I think you're less likely to find yourself in that unpleasant situation. I will add, I cite more with investors on distant entrepreneurs, although in a way I'm...”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that matters better. Evernote today has a lower cost base than before, but I promise you, if you take 10 users at random, power customers, power users, nine will tell you that it's actually higher performance, more resilient, the better feature set. And part of it is we've really focused on what these customers painfully needed. That helps you do more with less.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that it's necessarily common because not all companies do that, but we have seen it, and it's quite true. I thought it was a contrarian view, but now that I know your friend thinks the same, maybe it's not as contrary as I thought it was. But yes, I think people in general overestimate the value of R&D. Let me qualify. They think that generously pouring money into building stuff pays off. It's really not true at all. What we find is that there's a very small number of things that pay off handsomely and most things are a waste of money. And while there is an element of you don't know before you do it. So for sure, a lot of it you do. For example, if you start from what your customers need, really focus on that rather than maybe what your engineers think is cool or fancy visions that have very little to do with the core problems you're solving. They're probably actually already taking big strides in a direction of greater efficiency. And by the way, it's not just about keeping costs more under control, but it's also doing...”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very good business that will be even better, I hope. That's the intent as we pour our hearts and souls into improving every facet of it.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is something, it's a pretty competitive category. So, is it Gmail? No. If Google ever wants to divest it, I'll be happy to take a look.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People think, oh, it's probably a legacy old, it's probably worth nothing. But actually, it's a wonderful business. And in fact, again, I won't name names for a lot of our companies in the broader messaging or email industry segment. And if you just read the news, you would think are doing super well and they're much larger. But actually, if you had access to user count, P&L, including in-time looking at trends, they are just not nearly as good. It doesn't even begin to compare. AOL is actually the fifth most used email inbox in the Western world.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So people know AOL as the way to connect to the internet back in the day, in the 90s, even the 80s, I think, actually, I think they started, pioneers. At some point, AOL was what Google was in the 2000s, was the hot new thing. So they had this outside unit seems like a failed merger, Time Warner and whatnot. And then they had different homes. It's especially a very good business. It lost all the customers that they had to lose over the decades. And today it's an email inbox and a web portal with the aggregator of news and other content. It's a very good business with tens of millions of active users, very loyal users. Again, there's a lot of selection bias. People would want to Gmail have decades to go for. People who really love that particular experience. They have lots of stuff there. And at the same time, we think, although the team has done a pretty good job, I think, at managing this business, there's a next level to be unlocked in terms of polishing the product, optimizing the offering, optimizing monetization. It's just a very good business that I think superficial.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was a failure. We worked. Took us about nine months. My main thing and the main thing for several colleagues. At a time we were very small. We had an M&A team of one person. So it really paused our growth had we bought it, it would have been an incredible acceleration afterward. But it taught us to be very careful to put all our eggs in one basket. And so in hindsight, I think we could have still tried to get it, but maybe not obsessed so much over it considering how unlikely it was to make it happen and try to place another few bets that year. If you look at our growth those couple of years, it's way slower than almost any other year, and that's the key reason. Like we put all we had into making that one thing happen, it didn't happen. We hadn't done anything else. I had done something, so nothing that really moved the needle. So it taught us to be, I think more in terms of probabilities. Now that we weren't before, but I'd say we've gotten almost obsessive of seeing the world in terms of statistics.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And make sure that these drivers are things we can predict. For example, we know we can make pretty accurate predictions of word of mouth rate under normal circumstances, but not under sudden viral moments. We don't feel very confident making predictions of future rates of user acquisitions through paid advertising, for example. So that was a big lesson learned. Another one we learned, we actually went after Grindr, the LGBTQ plus dating app in 2019. So the app was owned by a Chinese firm and CFUS was forcing it to sell. So a long story short, it was a big bite for us at the time. We're much smaller. It would have quadrupled the company. We didn't have an equally substantial track record as we do today. We went above and beyond to raise the capital, almost won the deal. Ultimately, we lost it because someone else offered a bit more and we would have offered more.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was one time where let's say we bought a product at the peak of, let's call it a viral moment. This is really not applicable to the type of businesses we buy today, but at the time it was a thing. It's many years ago now. And then as soon as we bought it, basically that viral wave was reaching and had reached the peak. And that completely changed. We thought we had been conservative, but it completely changed our assumptions and led to drastically inferior returns versus what we expected. And that taught us to be absolutely paranoid when it comes to the sources of user acquisition. So basically, either we buy businesses where almost all the value lies in existing customers or users, like people, okay, these have been acquired. It's just about now managing them as well as possible. Or if a lot of the value is predicated on substantial additional user acquisition or customer acquisition, then we need to really clearly understand the drivers of that expected acquisition.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's never any liquidity. So we started organizing secondary transaction every 18 months, one year, two years. We've had maybe five, four probably since 2019. And so mostly equity has been raised to finance those transactions, but occasionally the first capital increase of any significance was in 2022, I think. So yes, we have dilution from capital increases very modest off the top of my head, I'd say maybe 10%. We could also not have done any of those at all. We still did them because we figured in a couple of cases it helped us get over the hump to close deal we couldn't without that little extra with that we were maxed out. But also we figured if we bring in a little bit more in terms of high quality international investors, that would be helpful. Credibility, firepower if we need to go after a huge acquisition quickly, just optionality, but we're generally very cautious when it comes to dilution. I think if you really believe in what you're doing, you should be painful.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In short, the more sophisticated version is completely true what you just said for the first five years. Then we started using that. Pretty basic debt from commercial banks. Not very high leverage ratios, 3.5 times CB down a good day, generally lower. Trailing EBITDA in the last 12 months. That helped accelerate before we couldn't use that because you need to have an established track track or before they take you through your code. Since that, it's been essentially that reinvested earnings and that we have raised a bunch of equity, but mostly to fuel a secondary transactions. Because if you're in business for a long time, you start to get into good scale. People are saying, okay, I've invested in this company. And I'm talking really just team members because from the beginning, we enabled people. We pay just cash, no variable pay of any kind. And people can choose to receive some of their cash pay in equity at a discount. It's very unusual, by the way. So in time, people have accumulated positions and that equity is worth nothing.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I think some level of failure rate would indicate a more optimal strategy. I guess you fail, you learn, you get better”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Need to define this because we look at actually thousands of businesses each year. We don't make an offer to thousands of businesses. I'd say we probably make an offer to twice as many as we buy. You know what? We have never lost a bit before. There has never been a business we made an offer for and someone else got it. Those we didn't buy were ultimately the seller just chose not to sell to anybody. So that tells me our offers are typically super competitive. He also tells me we're probably not very good at negotiating.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably got a better deal in the moment if you started lower, then we don't want to establish a reputation for people you can push around and get more out of. We're more like the Warren Buffett model of I'll give you what I think is actually a very good offer. And I'm okay if I hear no, but don't think you can get 25% more out of me just asking. And then you've got to be disciplined when they ask for more than you're willing to pay. You absolutely need to not have fallen in love with that particular business and say, okay, you know what? That's not to be. We'll move on to the next walk.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“future when you find yourself in a similar situation again so the assumption setting is critical for us we have many assumptions each as a probability distribution and we debate assumptions extensively without ever looking at what the model will spit out as a consequence as forbidden because we think that if you see the P&L basically the business plan as you do it there are all sorts of biases it doesn't look good enough and you're like oh maybe this is conservative and people we do not look at the output only at the inputs we debate analyze dig for more data once we're happy that's the best we can do at this stage we run a Monte Carlo simulation and then we look at the distribution of IRR MPV and that's the truth nobody can say now that I see it I think maybe we were a bit pessimistic with the assumptions no too late this is not the truth this is what will guide our negotiation so that's phase one and then you make an offer as i said we try to make an offer that sometimes the maximum world to pay or close to it because we think although we”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source