And directly from the Nasdaq, where Bending Spoons listed on July 1st, we have the pleasure of having here with us its CEO and co-founder, Luca Ferrari. Welcome, as they say.
So, we find ourselves the day after an IPO that started particularly well, but first let me remind you what Bending Spoons is: a Milan-based company that came to New York to list, and among its brands you all know them: Vimeo, WeTransfer, Evernote, and many others. Its model is to acquire digital assets and then basically relaunch them. Let's start with the listing. A rise of almost 40% right off the bat. Not bad, did you expect it? Is it just IPO euphoria or is the market starting to correctly value your group?
I don't know, I don't know, and to tell the truth, clearly, being able to choose, it's better that the price goes up rather than down, but it's not something I personally care too much about, and we don't think in a timeframe of more than 10 years, not one day, so the price will be what it will be. I believe that over time, if we work well, execute well, and aren't too unlucky, well, the price the market gives us will be the right one. So...
You are valued more or less like major tech groups that everyone knows, Meta, Alphabet, Google. What is the right way to value you? What did you tell investors in the roadshow?
Well, actually there was no need to say anything, in the sense that almost all investors reasoned more or less the same way, at least those who told us how they saw things. You make an assumption about the pace at which we can make further acquisitions, and so you look a bit at your expectations for the next few years, and based on that you can then apply a multiple. Nothing extraordinary. Clearly, Bending Spoons is not a company one should consider if you don't assume there will be other acquisitions, because that's the engine. The thing we've built that I believe is distinctive and valuable is this platform: talent, a performance-oriented corporate culture, a scientific approach to managing companies, more than 50 proprietary technologies, almost an operating system for businesses, and a lot of data we've collected over time through thousands of experiments in product, marketing, and monetization. The value is that platform and its ability to take valid companies with significant value but also highly improvable aspects, reinvent those parts that are improvable, make them worth more, and reinvest the proceeds in other acquisitions. So if someone doesn't believe we will make other acquisitions, I advise against buying the stock.
Why the Nasdaq and not Piazza Affari? Is it just a matter of liquidity, but also market depth, access to investors, to analysts? Why?
Well, we evaluated all the main markets, and in the end, Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange seemed clearly the most attractive for liquidity, for average valuations. In my opinion, if a company is already large or believes and thinks it will become very large today, especially in technology, but not only, it's hard to justify not listing here based on what we've seen.
So, even if the Italian system had done something for you, you would have still looked overseas. In other words, could Piazza Affari have done something for you?
It's difficult, it's difficult to talk about, I don't know what you're referring to, but let's say that the historical data tells us that the rational thing to do was this. Then, we didn't receive any particular proposal, so I wouldn't know how to comment on these things.
They've called you the Berkshire Hathaway of beloved but forgotten brands. Do you like that definition? It's a bit narrow. Do you want to become the Warren Buffett of the digital world?
Well, I consider it a definitely inaccurate definition, but obviously flattering, in the sense that Berkshire is undoubtedly one of the greatest success stories in history, right? Now they might be in a slightly less explosive phase, but for decades, exactly, for decades they made history. The similarity we have with them is that, like Berkshire Hathaway, we have grown a lot through acquisitions, they also through minority stakes, but also many acquisitions, and in this we are very similar, with a great focus on efficient capital allocation. The big differences are that, one, we integrate the companies we acquire completely. Imagine it almost like we buy a company and it becomes an app installed on a common operating system. Proprietary technologies, a central team, what we call the 'Spooners', who move fluidly from one product to another, from one business to another that we own. And Berkshire, at least based on what they've always said, keeps them completely autonomous, and there are pros and cons, naturally, in the two models. Another difference is that we are, in fact, a technology company. If you look at this team of 700 people, the majority are software engineers, AI researchers, product designers, and so the bulk of the work we do is technology, product. Berkshire's corporate part is more of a financial machine. And then the last big difference is that the companies we acquire, we rethink, we turn upside down, sometimes completely and drastically. We have rebuilt entire organizations, we have rebuilt many times, rewritten almost the entire codebase, the code, we have re-architected the cloud infrastructure, completely changed the monetization, the marketing, while Berkshire has always described itself as a much more passive acquirer, so they found companies that Berkshire liked as they were, with a management team they liked as it was, and for the most part they let them work. So on all other dimensions we are almost opposites, but on the acquisition part we are very similar, and like Berkshire, we never sell. That's the other similarity, we have never sold a significant business, I don't think we ever will. Well, never say never, but it's absolutely not in the plans, and so perhaps that's also a similarity.
So is there a tech company model you look up to, because it doesn't seem like you have many competitors?
No, we have competitors, in the sense that every time we want to acquire a company...
In that sense, but not in the sense of your business model.
No, business model, honestly we've thought about it a lot because it would have been easier in some ways in the roadshow for the IPO to say, look, we're like these guys with these small differences, but neither we nor our underwriters, our advisors, found anyone who does something reasonably close to what we do. I think the companies that come closest are in other sectors. I would say Broadcom in semiconductors, not today's Broadcom, but the first 20-25 years of Broadcom, a bit TransDigm in aerospace, and a bit Danaher in industrials, but also them the first 20 years, especially now they're a bit different, but anyway these companies are not integrated like us, they don't have a central base of proprietary technologies, they modify the businesses they acquire in a deeper way. So they are similar, but no, there isn't a Bending Spoons 2 or one if we are the two.
The problem with Berkshire Hathaway, however, was that they collected a lot of cash, billions in cash that in the end the good Buffett was never able to use to make a big acquisition, at least recently, and that could be your big problem. But you have identified about a thousand potential target companies. The prospectus says that at the moment there is no binding agreement. When can we expect something?
Well, apart from the fact that arriving at having accumulated 100-200 billion in cash, let's say, is a nice problem to have. It means one has done something good, surely. Consider that at the current valuation we are worth, let's say, 20-30 billion, so it's still a multiple of what we want now. So, congratulations to Buffett and the Berkshire team for arriving at having that problem of not knowing where to put the money. Well, I don't think that's a problem we'll realistically have in the next few years. That's a problem they arrived at because they are at such a scale, where they can't find things big enough to move the needle at prices that are clearly also acceptable for them. We have found many companies, as you say, that we think are plausible acquisition targets in the next few years. We are constantly in dialogue with many, we have more or less 4 billion in capital ready to be invested, including about the billion we raised with the listing, and so we are not in that... but any company has saturation problems, even a company that doesn't grow through acquisitions can't grow organically forever, right? At a certain point growth tends to slow down.
And on this point I wonder, if your core business and your identity is built on inorganic growth, will there be a point where you have to demonstrate organic growth on what you've already acquired?
Well, we have shared the organic growth rates for the last 3 years, which are all positive, and even in the years before that, which we didn't quantify in the prospectus, they were anyway positive. We don't optimize for that. We optimize to maximize the value we create for shareholders from here to 10 or 20 years. If we think the most efficient way to create value is to invest more in acquisitions rather than in marketing, because then one could grow more organically by spending more on marketing, a dollar here, a dollar there, it's always a dollar. We try to be highly mathematical and rational and put that dollar where we think the results are more favorable. We have found to date that they are more favorable for us when we do it in acquisitions, mainly because we have this platform that allows us to significantly improve the acquired companies, so we can offer a price that is very attractive to the seller and still generate very high returns for our shareholders because what we buy, we improve a lot. If we ever find ourselves in a situation where for some reason investing more aggressively in marketing or in the development of a business we have is the most efficient way to create value, we will do so. Anyway, we have invested a lot in our products, there is practically none that we have owned for at least a year and a half that hasn't been drastically improved. Again, looking at the Spooner team, these 700 people, the vast majority are product, software engineers, AI researchers, product designers, meaning what they do is develop product, so the bulk of what we do in the end is that.
In your prospectus you say you discovered AI before it was cool, which is rather true given that in 2010...
Not discovered, we worked on it, let's say.
True, given that you launched in 2010 an app attempt that was quite prophetic for the future...
Failing miserably, though.
But creating the foundations for what you've become today. How much do you rely on the big AI groups, like OpenAI, Anthropic?
Well, I'd say we know them well, we are in close contact, we are I think one of their main partners, certainly in Europe, but we make sure not to depend on any of them, for obvious reasons.
You stole my next question.
[Laughs] We have built many models in-house that we use for specific use cases. For example, if you go on Meetup, the events we suggest to the user, there is an AI that decides which ones are better to suggest. We built that one ourselves. Is it better than Claude in general? No, obviously not, not even close, but in that very specific thing it does about as well, maybe even better, and it's very cheap because clearly we don't have to pay Anthropic the huge markup to recoup the capital they had to invest to develop that frontier model. We also use Claude, we use Gemini from Google, various OpenAI models, but we try to develop our own proprietary models for all very frequent and very niche vertical use cases, so that we save, we use open-source models, and we have built proprietary orchestration technologies that allow us to switch from one model to another very dynamically. And this has two advantages: one, it allows us, if one of these suppliers wanted to push more on price, to have more negotiating leverage; the other, to choose from this roster of third-party and proprietary models the ones that are optimal considering both the quality of the result and the cost. And this has allowed us to use AI a lot. We are at this point at more than 90% of the code written by AI, which is one of the highest levels from this point of view. I think Google had spoken of 70-75%, so we are even higher, and we use it for almost all our data analysis. It helps us a lot in recruiting, a lot in customer support, and we have very low costs thanks to this system.
So very, let's say, it's practically automated.
Very automated and very distributed so as not to depend on a single supplier.
You have about 600 Spooners, you said...
And a total of employees of 2200, more or less.
2000, yes. At the same perimeter, let's say in 2030, where will that number take you, because it's the big debate.
Well, it will depend a lot on how many companies we are managing at that time. Obviously, the more we manage, the more people will be needed.
Look, the productivity that AI has helped us achieve, to surpass, as I was telling you, to do a startup with AI in 2010, you have to be passionate, right? Because not many people were talking about it at the time. So it's something I've been passionate about for many years. And in general, AI is clearly one of the most fascinating and powerful technologies, especially in perspective. I must say that despite that, it has surprised me how much we have managed to increase productivity in the last year and a half. Think that in 2023 we were generating about a million dollars in revenue per Spooner, and if you take the first quarter of 2026 and annualize it, so multiply it by 4, we are at about 4 million dollars. AI is not the only reason for that increase of about four times in about 3 years, which is a lot naturally, but it is probably the single strongest cause. I believe this trend will continue at a very, very fast pace, so I believe that in a few years we will really be able to do even more with even smaller teams. But we'll see, I don't think anyone can give you a precise estimate in this.
Some historical shareholders have decided to monetize. I'm thinking of Tamburi, who however said he thinks you will do well. You don't sell, I'm talking about the co-founders. What signal should the market read? Normal profit-taking, I'm talking about some of the shareholders who sold, or a change of phase in the company's trajectory?
Well, I think you should ask each shareholder, because, let's say, everyone chooses for themselves. Tamburi, however, monetized a very small part of their shares, I think about 10%, so I mean, I believe if they had thought we were at the end of the road, they would have sold much more than 10%. Moreover, we did everything we could to convince shareholders to sell during the IPO process, and we had a significant problem because we didn't have enough shares to distribute to new investors, so we couldn't convince many shareholders to sell. [Laughs] Well, not bad, come on. No, no, indeed it's a good problem to have for the most part, but it was problematic to generate enough liquidity, let's say, so that the stock could function properly, mechanically, on the stock market. So, I think it can be said without fear of contradiction that the shareholders who have been with us for many years have given an extreme sign of confidence. Even Baillie Gifford, who invested a lot, sold very little of their shares, I'm talking about the private funds. And it's unusual if you look at IPOs, very often shareholders who held shares for a long time sell much more significant slices at the IPO. Sometimes all their shares.
Ah, dividends, you exclude them for many years to come, shareholders must be content with the stock's performance?
Well, nothing is excluded, it depends on the surrounding conditions, but yes, I wouldn't expect it because again, the added value of Bending Spoons is investing in acquisitions, improving these companies, and obtaining the famous compounding of capital through this mechanism. Distributing a dividend would mean that we don't know where to put that capital in high-return acquisitions, which would be, in my opinion, more negative news than positive. So I would say very probably no, never say never, and if someone wants dividends, there are plenty of options out there of much more mature, saturated companies that pay dividends.
