Welcome to the stage, Luca. So, Bending Spoons. Everyone is talking today in particular, but we are not talking about that. Today is potentially the first decacorn in Italian history. So, not just a unicorn, but 10 times a unicorn. When you were starting Bending Spoons, were you already dreaming for this goal, or what was the dream at that period?
Much bigger. Actually, when we started on a high level, the idea was to build the most successful company of all time, which we knew would never happen, to be clear, but that was the scale of our ambition. So relative to that ambition, we are still very, very small. Again, it doesn't mean I thought we would be here necessarily, but we didn't want to limit the scale of what we were going to build. So, just go big.
So we'll come back to Bending Spoons later on, but let's start from before. You were already founding another company, Evertale in Denmark. Very similar team. Most of the people are also the founding team today of Bending Spoons. What made it not successful in that case, and what makes successful this case, and why did coming out of a failure help you build a success?
Well, luck plays a big role in life in general. I think
Milan way better than Copenhagen.
I think Italy was quite helpful from a bunch of reasons. Primarily that we found a lot of talented, passionate people who wanted to be part of this project. At the time, especially, there was a bigger gap between the talent available and the opportunities to do something truly challenging, ambitious, interesting. And so I think moving the company here was a good decision, and a decision we made on purpose. It wasn't out of luck. And the other reason why we moved the company to Italy was that we wanted to prove that you can build a global juggernaut, a super successful dominant company from unlikely places as well. Not that Denmark has a lot of gigantic corporations, but relative to its size, it's a very successful economy. I think Italy, and I could say the same of Greece, Portugal, France, different levels, but none of these countries has lived up to its potential relative to the talent it has. So we figured if we fail, whether in Denmark or Italy or anywhere, nobody will care. But if we do succeed, maybe the impact can be greater if we do it from these other places. So we moved the company and haven't looked back. It's been great. Now it's an international company with a thousand people in 20 countries, but you have to start somewhere, and I think starting here was a good idea.
But let's come back to Evertale. Why at one point you decided it was no longer the right choice, and why today you're doubling down on Bending Spoons even more, with potential 100 times higher?
Well, it wasn't really our choice to shut down Evertale. I wish we had made that decision because that would sound a lot smarter, but truth is we raised a million euros, were burning cash, and never generated any significant revenues. At some point, we were expecting to receive about 250,000 euros back from the Danish government through a tax refund program. Then the government emailed us, saying because of certain administrative issues, they were postponing the payment by six months. So we found ourselves with no money, we were tight on budget, and had to shut it down. We had about 40,000 euros left, barely enough to liquidate quickly, and that became the seed capital for Bending Spoons, which we started immediately afterward. But I think it was good that we shut down Evertale. It was a failure, but sometimes when it's your baby, it's difficult to acknowledge it and act accordingly.
Let's arrive at today's Bending Spoons. The company valuation is near 10 billion. You have hundreds of millions of downloads, 1,000 people or more. Everyone knows Bending Spoons, but can we go inside some numbers, the main KPIs? The fact that it was fully bootstrapped, the first real capital increase arrived at more than one billion. From zero to the revenue and EBITDA you have today, when is the right choice to raise capital, and when and why is it better to avoid it?
So, I think downloads is not a great metric for us. It's a bit of a vanity metric. Not all downloads are created equal. These days, about 60 or even 65% of our customers and revenue are not in mobile. But you were asking for P&L KPIs. This year, we should be at about $1.25 billion in revenue, about $700 million in adjusted EBITDA, 300 million monthly active users, and 11 million customers. So we've grown a lot from zero, which is where we started
Exactly. You get there in steps, one at a time. We raised equity for the first time in 2022. Aggregate dilution from capital increases has been about 10% throughout our history. That's not a lot; we've diluted more through secondary transactions and team investments. I think there's a general answer: equity financing is a tool, a variable in the equation. You should pick the optimal option for your objectives and constraints. In our case, we were profitable from early on, almost from the beginning. We were confident, but equity investors weren't, so equity would have been incredibly expensive because the valuation would be low relative to what we thought it was worth. Equity is inherently more expensive, and if you're not valued fairly, it's even more expensive. Interestingly, banks understood Bending Spoons before equity investors did; we started raising debt in 2017. That's been great because we were profitable and could raise it. If your startup isn't profitable, that's not an option. But if you're profitable and believe you'll only go up, debt tends to be cheaper. I'd default to debt at prudent levels and use equity only when necessary, ensuring incremental returns exceed the cost of equity. But there's nothing wrong with raising equity; many incredible companies like Tesla have been built with it. It works if your model is optimized for equity.
But let me underline the risk that capital increase becomes a vanity metric. It's common among startups: 'If we're not raising, it's not cool.' So let's just announce a new round and not focus on building EBITDA. How have you balanced that?
If I can interject, I've noticed that the better the company, the less that phenomenon is real. If you truly believe what you're building has legs and the fundamentals are right, every time you raise equity it should be like being stabbed in the heart, really painful. If you seek to raise as much as possible, it probably means you're not confident you can raise more at better valuations later. There's nothing immoral about it, but I'm skeptical when people are eager to raise as much as possible as quickly as possible.
Fully agree. Let's come back to another KPI: the number of applications you receive. I think around 150,000 applications to work for Bending Spoons, but maybe way more. Please give me an updated number.
