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

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“Return as a function of price curve, you've got to be very sophisticated at knowing what you're doing, having first-party data for benchmarking, asking the right questions, having good models. But the output of the model is only as good as the assumptions you put in it. And we certainly have very sophisticated cohorted models and whatnot, but main advantages in being able to run these businesses is a lot better. We don't win because we're good at predictions. We win because we can run them better so we can offer a good price. But it's really marginally important to making good predictions. And so you want to 12 years of experience. running many businesses from the trenches in the details of private equity i think teaches you a lot more so you understand why things went a certain way with certain business you're wiser when you set the assumptions for your next acquisition in a way that i think if you stay on the financial layer or kind of oh i talk to management every week you think you understand i don't think you really do there is a cost to pay it takes time but then on the bright side you're basically smarter and then predicting”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is how do you determine your returns as a function of price? The second one is how do we stay disciplined so we will really not pay more than we believe is right based on our expected returns, opportunity cost. What else we could be doing with that capital and what returns? So the first one is a matter of sophistication and the second one is a matter of psychology really I think discipline patience and the third one is how well do we negotiate how efficient are we at positioning the ultimate price on that curve. The fastest but stupidest approach would be to immediately offer the very most you can pay the opposite of offering a ridiculous low price is probably equally stupid so you want to find the right balance interestingly actually are much closer to the former we believe it's better to have a reputation for someone who offers a very fair price immediately but who's not going to be very willing to negotiate much so the first one how do we determine that”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plus, it was a unique name. We hadn't heard of any company called Benin Spoons, and so we figured it's probably memorable. Let's go for it.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it got five stars out of five, but we picked Benny Spoon. And the reason why we liked it was it connected to two principles or values. They're still very dear to us. One is call it the power of the mind. The idea of bending spoons somehow, at least to me, inspires this vision of a powerful mind that can do things that appear impossible. And we're big believers that the human brain has incredible potential if you work on it and add it and try to really give it the tools. And the second reason why we loved it was that even if you have that brain, again, it just intuitively feels to get to the point where you can bend spoons, you've probably worked really hard at your craft. And we like the idea of almost anything in life that has value. You got to work at it. I think it's true with a family, romantic relationships. Your craft as a professional, your abilities as an athlete. I think almost anything that will really give you satisfaction requires work.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Told us why don't we call it bending spoons? What's the movie and there is this little bold guy who bends a spoon with his mind and I think it's cool. Initially we didn't like it. I still have a spreadsheet with different names I think we gave it like four out of five stars. There were a couple adders that got more stars. The one I remembered in hindsight, thank God we didn't pick an appeal. We were doing only apps initially. Now we do all sorts of technology software appeal. I think it's awful for some reason The Luca from 2013 thought it was brilliant. Yeah.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when we started, we knew that we weren't going to be a one product company. We still wanted the name to connect to something for us. A lot of companies are named after somehow after the problem they're trying to solve their product, all of them, but or the product they're trying to deliver. Of course, that wasn't an option for us. We figured, okay, why don't we look for a name that's more connects to some principles or values that we find inspiring? One of my co-founders, Matteo, is a big fan of the metrics. Watched the movie the night before. I'm not sure. But anyway.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether that translates into higher prices or lower prices or same prices, I don't know. It certainly translates into a very different overall approach to monetization.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really depends on each case. I'll give you another case that's quite different from Evernote, and that would be Meetup. So Meetup, historically, you could only use it as an organizer. You could only use it if you paid for it. And since we acquired it, we introduced a free tier, so you could organize. We actually do quite a lot for free, kind of qualifies as a price decrease in a way. Like we gave away more for free. And we actually increased the price for the more advanced use cases for the truly dedicated based on my observation there's room for being more sophisticated about pricing, which is different from increasing prices, being better at segmentation, what's paid, what's given away for free, personalization, communications, experiences that ultimately all blend into monetization and maximization of user LTV. Our direct experience is that there's a wide range of levels of sophistication in the market. I'd like to think Benin Spoon's being at the very top of that sophistication spectrum.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And having to maybe be ready to sell within a few years. And again, we can do it 100 companies each year, but we could do three or five or six.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super fast, you would not tell the difference at all compared to the products you probably consider the best in the broader productivity. Like maybe you think Notion is top notch in the broader productivity. I think you tried Evernote today, you would consider they do different things, but the quality of the experience you consider probably on par. So we had to close a big gap there. Retention is at an all-time high. Despite prices being higher, because now Vernon is substantially more, it varies by country and it's probably on average, say, 60% more expensive. So it's substantially more expensive than before, but actually retention is better because, yeah, we did lose 10% of customers who were already not so sure and once the price goes up, okay, I'm out of here. But all the more engaged loyal customers are still on board and customer satisfaction by any quantitative metric is better than it's ever been before. But it was a very time-consuming effort, not something I think completely beyond what, say, a private equity could do.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think in two and a half years, we have released probably about 250 significant product improvements. It's difficult to be 100% quantitative of product improvements because there's no perfect definition, but in my estimation, we have been improving and innovating probably three to five times faster than before. We've been able to do this with a smaller team, really working on keeping all the positions that were critical, getting rid of projects and initiatives that we thought were tangential and really not adding a lot of value, working on talent density, the culture of impact orientation and rationality really trying to make sure that what we do moves the needle. And it's a million things you bring in as a business with our platform, but we rebuilt almost entirely code base, the cloud infrastructure. There's almost nothing, at least nothing of the core components. It's now far higher performance nodes sync up in less than 10% of the time, in some cases 1% of the time.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strong brand, an important use case a lot of customers with thousands or tens of thousands of notes using Evernote to run their lives really. So that means potentially good retention. The product had not probably kept up with the times as well as you as a customer would have loved to see. Of course you can only realize that fully once you're on the inside and really open the hood and you get a sense of that as a user. I was a user actually before I acquired it. I've been a user since 2014, I believe. And so we bid we want it. We began our usual transformation process on a different scale, but essentially had a team of some of our best experts, functional experts, growth product, design, and engineering. Go in, we met everybody. We spent a lot of time with everybody on the team and worked on projects and really got acquainted with the nitty-gritty details of the business broadly speaking. And then developed a roadmap for how to make Evernote more successful and got to work. It's a completely different business today.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think Evernot was the first such company clearly within that definition. And it was very successful, and so it gave us, and so was it for the settlers, by the way. I think it was a great deal for both parties. My guess is that we paid 50% more than the next best offer. So it was really a win-win. Any good strategy needs to be somewhat win-win, otherwise it will not go far. We were invited to that process. At the time, it wasn't something we took for granted because we were not so well known. So many times we missed out on process and sales processes that happened. took a lot of it. I think we were very fast in making a what turned out to be the winning bid. And we just saw a very good brand, although certainly slightly tarnished, but still a quarter of a billion people had used Evernote. You can't say that of a lot of products.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mentioned earlier at the beginning we would call asset deals, individual apps and whatnot. And then we had a period of maybe three, four years where we saw that very basic small scale model work was going to saturate at some point in the not too distant future. And we figured we should do this at a bigger scale with structured companies, with management teams and large teams of professionals and institutional investors. But will we be able to do as well or at least enough there? And we were quite, I think we lacked confidence to take the leap immediately. And so we started losing a bit of focus and looking at alternative strategies while taking tentative baby steps into that next level of the same thing, really, but just, I guess it's a bit like I've played locally now when I do an international tennis tournament to go back to the tennis. Will I be able to compete? And probably yes, if you're doing super well locally, of course you'll not be the best at that yet. But I think you can empathize with there being a little bit of hesitation.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then being okay, this is perfect by. Probably they wouldn't sell it to us for that price. These are the criteria and they have remained the same, but the level of sophistication, our understanding of this criteria over time, it's incomparable.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With revenue. So for us to do an acquisition that will bring in half a billion in revenues, not five times as time consuming as one that will bring 100 million. Maybe it's on average a little bit more time consuming because it tends to be more complicated, but nowhere near linearly. And so we want to do fewer acquisitions, but bigger. So first criterion is scale. And again, at the time, 10K looked like a big bet. How do we feel like today we're actually hoping to invest easily a billion plus, but conceptually the same thing. The second thing is we need to be able to predict the future performance of that business. Otherwise, There's no way we can make a confident investment. We've gotten very sophisticated in times with statistical models and lots of assumptions and probability distributions, but at the essence of it, we need to buy stuff where we know where it's going. At least with sufficient confidence. And the last one is we need to believe we can make meaningful substantial improvements to that business. Now that it's necessity, but it's difficult for us to imagine being able to make an offer that's super exciting for the seller.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always been the same things on a high level, and that would be so far we've always focused on digital technology. We haven't bought supermarket chains, nor do we plan to. I feel they want to stay reasonably within your circle of competence. Ideally, here and there you want to take a step outside of it. You need to keep pushing the boundaries because that will keep your TAM expanding as you expand within the TAM, but I don't think it would be wise, especially as long as the model works well, it's efficient to take massive leaps outside of the circular competence just because so digital technology scale, scale is relative, but because our approach is so hands-on, so time consuming, I mentioned we can, sometimes we radically rethink a business or at least several components of it. We will do maybe five positions a year, could be one, could be 10 max, and if it's really a stretch, and each some more than others will really go super deep and rethink the details. The time investment and the effort does not scale linearly.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In parallel, we also launched a handful of products from scratch, learn things, because if you don't acquire almost anything because you've got no money, you're also not learning. So we're trying to learn, hopefully, make some revenue. We had a couple of mild successes enough that extended our runway. So many small things like that, and we kept adding and compounding, but slowly but steadily 10k turns into 20k and 40 and 80 and we've been compounding at pretty fast rates. If you look at our per share revenue or EBITDA growth over the past four years where we are a decent scale is about 1.3 billion this year, it's still about 75% per year. We're still compounding pretty fast. 10 years go by and you look back and you're like, oh, wow, I remember we were making half a million a year. Now we're making a billion.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beginning again, we had those 40,000 euros. So we were trying to do some consulting, like I said, which never worked. Basically, broad-normal revenue, pretty much. The first acquisition, I think we closed it within the year, so pretty quickly. And we paid $10,000 for it. I don't remember what it was called. It was an iOS app to personalize your keyboard, ultimately made $20,000 off it. Very good return in a short period of time at a tiny scale. And then that 20 went into a couple other acquisitions and maybe turned into 40. But again, similar nature, so small product amateurishly built, certainly no institutional investors, no investors of any sort, definitely no professional management teams, typically one person. Yeah, exactly.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unwarranted and didn't bring any good to anybody. So I felt pain and others benefited as a consequence. And instead, when you have a clear idea, you believe that's the right approach. And of course, you have listened to input, intellectual honesty, openness, so it's not a matter of pride, just a matter of intellectual conviction. Then I think being able to just accept disagreement, pissing some people off and just going very straight toward that goal is a superpower. Not perfect at that for sure, but I'm much better today than I was when I started. But at least the first seven or eight years, I think I was absolutely terrible at it. Thankfully, Addis on the team were better. And so as usual, in a team, you complement each other. I think a lot of management teams are too worried about having a percentage, for example, of their team disagreeing with them, criticizing them. Instead, I think they should really try to, if they believe they've got the solution, the path ahead, they should be uncompromising in that regard.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing I've learned has cost me a lot of sanity and caused me some sleepless nights is that consensus is overrated and even dangerous at least when you're trying to achieve something. I don't like the model of the bright brilliant asshole or anything like that. I think you can not be a consensus seeker while being a perfectly respectful nice human being. I think that's the model I would espouse. But in general, if you're striving to stand out in your field, If you're very concerned about aligning everybody around that particular vision approach, not causing anybody to dislike you criticize you, I think you're absolutely doomed to fail. Unfortunately, I'm naturally wired to enjoy consensus. I quite struggle with friction and criticism by nature. And I think, at least personally and certainly my capacity as a company that slowed me down, caused me some pain that in hindsight”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difficult to tell, I suspect though it's a common trait of a lot of people who have achieved greatness in their vertical, I'm thinking, for some reason tennis comes to mind. And when I look at Novak Djokovic, Rafanadal, I don't know them personally. They both strike me as people who are absolutely turned down by the idea of testing their limits and pushing against those limits. I don't think they wanted to win for the sake of saying, oh, I want 23 grand slime tournaments. They love the idea that I was supposed to be impossible. And you know what? I'm going to prove it's not. It's one of the ways some humans are wired. But the truth is a lot of humans is wired that way, and those humans are those who tend to have breakthroughs, excel in their fields, whether it's academia, sports, or business. And so if you feel that way yourself, if you want to win and excel in an area like we want to do with our approach, that's the kind of person I think you want to surround yourself with.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difficult conversations and our moments of stress, but overall it's a clear positive, yes, it's a more intense, challenging workplace, but for people who want to be the best version of themselves professionally as quickly as possible, it's almost a unique opportunity. So that's our customer. That's the person we want to surround ourselves with.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By far tall in density. We think about the jobs we offer as our most important product. So we need to know where your customer is, what you're offering, how you're differentiated, and have the courage of really focusing on that sharply. I find a lot of companies are almost afraid of someone not liking them, some team member getting offended by some practices, and they are, I think they are unappealing in general because they're too vanilla, too boring. They're nothing in a way. They're everything and nothing. Certainly they're not appealing for the most brilliant and driven people who want very clear, exciting opportunity. So we have focused pretty much from the beginning of getting better over time at it on being the ideal place for incredibly talented and hungry determined professionals. We make a promise to them to surround them with incredibly high talent density. I just mentioned how selective we are at the entry point. We continue to be selective throughout. That certainly forces us to have”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Access to many of the best helps, but like 19 of companies cannot say that. We're better off this year alone. This 2025, it's almost at the end of the year, we'll be receiving about 800,000 unique job applications. We'll be hiring 250 people. That's one in 300, 4,000. It's super selective. And it's not because I'm smart or anything. It's just inherent advantages of the Benin Spruce mod. And of course, an employer brand built over a decade of investment and people work here saying it's amazing, Talon S is great. So you can't shortcut it. It takes forever, but you couldn't as a standalone company, even if you had the patience.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you know that you can test your skills and fine tune and expand your skill set across a variety of challenges and businesses and technologies. It's more and in a way from the talent attraction perspective much better than an Evernote standalone. So all has been equal, we can attract stronger talent. Layer on top of that the ability to make massive investments in processes, the knowledge and the tools required to attract and predict talent. We have a massive investment in AI applied to predict future performance based on CVs, cover letters, test results. It's a very expensive investment to make. It's difficult to justify for a company that maybe only hires 20 people a year, smaller. And we can build on top of that inherent advantage by doing even better on basically we have access to better talent plus we'll be better at selecting within that talent pool than most companies would. So that gives us a major talent edge. That's just not a company for I'm sure again OpenAI probably has”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can pool at least part of our RD resources and we really work on hiring people who are super flexible, adaptable. There is a whole batch of things you need to do for this to be feasible. We can move them very quickly and attack these opportunities and withdraw as the opportunities are not there any longer. This makes us super efficient both on the offensive and on the defensive. Another major advantage of our model take Evernote. It's a very nice business, nice product, beloved product. Most people would consider the prospect of working at Evernote just average appealing. Like it's a nice probably nice company, but it's not as excited as I would be thinking about OpenAI or the next big thing. So on average, a business like Evernote, no matter how charismatic, intelligent its leaders are, will attract somewhat average talent. There will be a Gaussian function and some people better than others. Venus Plus is a model that's very appealing to people. First of all, it's growing fast, so it feels like we're going places. You have variety.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That actually yields substantial returns. But hiring people, coaching people, training people, organizing people is very slow. So you really have two choices. Either you do, you make it happen in a few months, but you're going to do massive damage to your team, your culture, talent density. It's going to be low. If you're going to do right, it's going to take years. At the same time, as you go after an REDD opportunity, you basically build the features. Every business has a kind of a saturation point where there's nothing more, at least nothing more very substantial to build. But then you are stuck with a larger team and of course it's costly, emotionally taxing for all involved to shrink that team. It's difficult. Because of all these factors, in my estimation, most companies are ears behind in terms of the optimal staff. They're actually ears behind what they should be. Could they control the people factor perfectly instantaneously? So management teams are better than others. It's really just an inherent inefficiency of a single product model.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you an obvious one and two not so obvious ones. The obvious one is, of course, you get to negotiate with a vendor for cloud infrastructure, advertising partner better. So that adds probably a couple of percentage points in your Bitcoin margins. It's good. It's useful. It's not transformative. Or you can make an R&D investment in a general purpose technology that many businesses can then leverage. And although that investment would be prohibitively expensive, irrational to make any one of those businesses individually, it's actually very appealing if you can deploy it across. The two more important ones are at least equally important, but I think more important ones are one, we can move R&D and also marketing resources fluidly across businesses. In my experience, the R&D opportunity when you run a business is quite fleeting. It changes quite rapidly over time. So maybe your new certain field or that field evolves and there is an opening to expand the feature set, upgrade your technology. In time, that's going to be table stakes. There's a window.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Phase of it, we should be able to find situations where it's a great deal for both parties because of these factors. That turned out to be true, and now in hindsight, 12 years later, there is a lot more to it. There are structural advantages in integrating different businesses under the same roof, but at the time we didn't have that insight, which today is probably more important than what I just described. But what we had identified”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not aligned for you anyway. Whereas at the same time, we also found that our skills at all the functional things like software engineering, AI at the time for what it's worth, product design, product management marketing, although they were still pretty crude three years later, they were night and day relative to when we started, we were on a clear path to, I'd like to think excellence. And so we thought being really good at the functional knowledge and skills necessary to run a digital business as probably a matter of if you're assuming you are reasonably talented, it's a matter of perseverance, effort, discipline, we can bet on that. We don't want to bet our entrepreneurial lives on getting lucky. So why don't we try to be excellent at the functional things and then buy businesses from people who maybe got lucky or they're very good, but they also the passions changed between going from zero to one to two to ten. Like it's a different job and so maybe there are very talented people who have gotten far. They're just a little bit fed up with it. They're not interested in running the next.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Evertail was your startup by the book, meaning this idea that probably won't work, but if it works, could be huge and very innovative, like nobody had attempted, as far as we could tell, anything like that before. And so we worked super hard on that project for about three years. And naturally, as you are a startupper or when you do something, I think you tend to network with people in a similar situation for a bunch of reasons. And so over time, we got to observe probably a couple dozen teams go through similar journeys as we did. And through that observation, we saw that, of course, most failed, which you would expect, and maybe three or four had levels of success. And we saw almost no correlation between the teams we considered more talented and more hardworking and those who came out on top. And so we concluded it's not a huge sample, but probably to go from zero to one, luck plays a huge role. There are so many factors and variables that even if you're a genius and you work your ass off, the stars will”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was no contract, nothing 100% trust. I don't know. I just think that a good way to live life. Sometimes you get some sour moments because of it, but... It makes 99% of it so much more enjoyable if you don't have to be too transactional.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resign enjoying full time, and then we go and conquer the world. So we all look for a job and I get an offer from McKinsey, which was by our standards at the time very lucrative. And so I said, okay, this is perfect. I'll be the one paying for rent and food. I'm capable of not being transparent, let alone lying. So I had to tell the partner at McKinsey that I would be working on this startup on the side. I thought it was unwise in many ways because I was absolutely certain they would withdraw the offer, but I'm like, I just can't. It feels dishonest. Actually, it was enthusiastic and he encouraged me and said, absolutely, we'd love to have you. And if and when the startup takes off, we should the best. And thank you. I was very grateful. I still have a very fond memory of McKinsey for that reason, like a lot of gratitude and worked there for about a year. Then we managed to raise initially half a million euros, then another half a million later from a VC, and I completed my project and I resigned.”
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 cool store. At least I think it's cool. So we graduate two friends of mine, Francesco Mateo, who happen to be co-founders at Benin Splums 2. And we have this idea of building this evertail company. The idea was to create a self-rising diary of a user's life with AI. This is 2010, so AI was, nobody was talking about AI in 2010. And interestingly, we were very early on AI, too early, in fact, because the product just didn't work well because you didn't have machine learning, at least not the way that you could scale for users. We had no money whatsoever because all of us essentially come from pretty low class families, whatever you want to call it. We don't have a lot of money. And as much as we didn't have an idea for a business that would require a billion dollars in CapEx, like a lot of startups today, we certainly needed some money at least to eat and pay for rent. And so we decided, okay, the three of us were going to look for a job. Whoever gets the most lucrative offer goes to work and pays for rent and food for the other two. Once we raise seed capital, VC money somehow, then this person would...”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I cried. I had a moment where I cried at that point. I remember I left the office. I just had to cry because I was like, goodness, it's been like three and a half, almost four years where we've been working like 100 hours a week and we have nothing to show for it. So that was a massive challenge to my resilience. And I owe it to one of my co-founders who I think is naturally more optimistic and has better perseverance than I do. And he comforted me and we said, okay, at least we're in this together and just keep going. So we did. And of course, I'm happy we did. That was a pretty low point.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially a co founder and I spent a good three, four months, 12, 16 hours a day just emailing anyone on the planet and cold calling people. We offered discounts, we're like, just hire us to do something. I swear to God, we couldn't get anybody. Not a single soul hired us to do anything. The only contract we got was for about 10,000 euros from essentially a friend of one of my co-founders who I think took PT&S and said, yeah, we need an app for our small chain of burger places. We'll give you 10,000 euros to build it. So that was an after failure. And remember the stress levels with after working our ass off for three years on the startup which failed. Having this little money to try to make the dream come true and failing miserably at this sales effort, I had a real breakdown. I remember I don't cry much. I cry maybe once a decade.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever we could. And that was a seed capital for bending spoons 2013. It wasn't a lot of money. All of us lived in the same apartment. Very low burn rate. Very low, as low as it gets still. 40,000 euros, you don't do much, particularly as our vision was to acquire companies, CapEx intensive, particularly at beginnings. While you can use that because you are nobody and you have a track record and a cash flow. And so we figured we need a source of cash to kickstart our acquisitive strategy. We figured certainly the easiest way is to just write software, build products for third parties. We are decent at programming and design. We should be able to do that. It seems like an easy business to start, maybe not to scale to gigantic cash.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That happened constantly. At the very beginning, we actually had another startup called Evertail, and that was a failure. We learned a lot and actually the strategy for bending spoons we came up with through the failure of Abertail. At the time with Evertail, we raised about a million euros all in all, and VC money. And ultimately was about to go bankrupt. We had about 40,000 euros left. That money belonged to the VC because of liquidation preferences, but it was too little for the size of that fund. And they told us, look, it's just too much hassle and legal cost for us to go through this administrative process of liquidation. You guys worked. We're honest, worked as hard as anyone could demand of you. You keep the money. We'll sell our shares to you for a nominal one euro. And you probably get something after taxes from it. And just go and get a nice vacation. We're seeking the brain. And so rather than going on vacation, we took.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difficult when you talk about the sense of purpose, what inspires you. I think we can try to rationalize it, but there's something that comes from the gut. We just felt that there was a mission there that was worth pursuing and that turned on our drive, our passion. And ultimately, we figured we love to build a business because we love learning, we love challenge, and I think the business arena is arguably the most competitive field in which you can test yourself of any field, even more than sports, academia. So we liked it to start with. Whether we fail in Italy, Denmark, Canada, the US, nobody cares. But if we build something remarkable from a country that doesn't see as many successes, that means something extra. It can be an inspiration, like I just said, it can help local businesses aim a little bit higher, raise their standards. It can create competencies locally that can have a positive effect. And so we just chose to do it that way. We don't regret it. There were very good arguments for us to maybe start in California for sure.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a gap, I think, and if we had more virtuous examples of people who have built incredible businesses, again with AD in Europe, I think more people would not default to that and think, oh, I could actually build such a business from France or Portugal or Italy.”
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 the main reason is a matter of default. Why does California has had so much success over the decades? One of the reasons is you have seen incredible companies being created and grown in California. You just assume that's where you go and do it, especially as a founder. You don't know much like you are ultimately, at least I was, I think that's true of many founders, you are a passionate, determined, maybe talented idiot, essentially. You don't know the world enough to actually determine what the ideal location will be. If you even think about it, because typically, how many times have you heard of funders doing a locational study? Where should I start my company? It tends to be momentum. I happen to study here. I know people are there. I should probably just do it. And so a lot of talented Europeans, many of the most talented Europeans who have an entrepreneurial streak, I think they just default to building in the US, which has been fantastic for the US, of course.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the company five or ten years out, I think, will still be a conglomerate of very interesting digital technology businesses, hopefully much more, and generally the company would be bigger. And I hope we can be much stronger at everything we do and have even higher levels of talent density and hopefully inspire others to try to raise the bar in how they run their businesses. And by the way, we started in Europe. We like the idea that Europe, it's fascinating that if you think about most of the very large super successful companies globally, you think about almost entirely US or Chinese companies. Historically, US, now China has more. Europe has very little to offer in that regard, but it's 700 million person continent. Very good education. I'm not saying we should have $10 trillion companies, but we don't have a single one pretty much, I think, last time I checked. We hope we can be part of that movement showing that you can actually build such a company. We're international company with operations in the US too, but the deeper roots, the original roots can be here too.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We felt inspired at the prospect of building the company being our product, building an institution, Berkshire Hataway, that sort of company that people look at and think was a defining company of its generation. And so to do that, scale is important. I think it's unlikely that you can be in that conversation unless the company is large and dominant, but also there needs to be some level of excellence along certain dimensions where the company really stands out vis- ⁇-vis the others. And for us, it's always been besides being absolutely exceptional at the functional things, like being incredible at running these businesses, one part that we really want to be awesome at is spotting some of the best inexperienced talent in the world and being the ideal place for that talent to just skyrocket toward the maximum realization of their potential as quickly as possible. We want to be the ultimate testing and training ground for incredibly talented and motivated people.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Radical work. And if we do it right, that creates a lot of value. We can reinvest in making our platform more powerful so build better proprietary technologies, better access to talent, more knowledge, and go after new, bigger acquisitions.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are a pretty unusual beast. Unique almost, I think, as far as I can tell. I think a good representation would be 25% private equity, 75% tech company, meaning we acquire companies as a key engine of growth, 100% acquisitions, no minorities. And then unlike a private equity, which would typically look to sell them three, five, seven years down the line, we buy off our balance sheet to own and operate forever. And unlike a private equity, which typically would make relatively shallow interventions, maybe change the management team. We actually rethink the entire company, try to come up with a vision for the most successful version of that company, and work as hard as we can to close the gap between the Circuit and that vision. And it could be rewrite the software, re-architect the cloud infrastructure, launch lots of features, redesign the UI, optimize monetization and marketing, rebuild big chunks. Sometimes the entirety of the organization. So it's very extensive, deep, time-consuming work.”
2025-11-04 · Invest Like the Best · Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source