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We've got Luca Ferrari, the co-founder, CEO, and chair of Bending Spoons. Joining us from the NASDAQ. Also with us, Bailey Lip Schultz, Bloomberg News IPO reporter, who joins us here in the studio. Look, I want us to just start with what exactly the portfolio is and sort of how you want to communicate to investors what you're going to do with assets that many people remember from the world of web 1.0.
Thank you for having me. First of all, let me explain how we operate because it's quite unusual, perhaps unique. We've spent the last 13 years building what I consider an exceptional platform of very high talent density, a culture of high performance and rationality, 50 plus proprietary technologies and an operating system for running digital businesses as effectively and as efficiently as possible, and a lot of data that helps us make better decisions at the stage of acquisition and then operations. And then what we do with this engine is we go and acquire digital businesses with unexpressed potential and we integrate them very deeply onto this platform in a way that I haven't seen anybody do before. They share entirely the same technological layer. We have a core team that moves fluidly across all our businesses. And we transform them deeply. We rebuild the org, technology, the monetization. We accelerate innovation, launch new features. So, it's a pretty unique model. And as you were describing, we have established over time a portfolio of brands, some of which are very well-known and some of which are more dated. We also have bought more up-and-coming companies, but there's a bit of both. We win, we do well not necessarily when the company we buy is young or old, growing fast or more stagnating, but when we can make that trajectory a lot better. So that's where we try to excel.
Luca, we were talking earlier about this and I'm just interested if you can explain for viewers kind of the path to better monetization. Again, you have about a half a billion monthly active users, but only a small fraction of that are actually deriving value from that. What does that mean for the company going forward and how do you grow that?
Yeah, exactly. Half a billion people use our products. Quote unquote only 9 million people, so roughly 2% pay for them. Which obviously is an opportunity. We also believe that it's important to provide excellent value to our customers. So, we're not looking to monetize as much as possible and we're happy to have a vast population of users who use our products without paying and they bring value through word of mouth and that will probably continue to be the case. But yes, we have an opportunity to monetize better and we have a history of doing that I think quite successfully. So yes, going forward hopefully we can improve the percentage of our users who choose to pay for our products.
Luca. No, just thinking through though: kind of what changes when companies go public now you have to answer to public investors and obviously that draws the potential towards partnering with AI companies, letting them train their LLMs off their data. How are you guys thinking about the potential partnership opportunities? Again, it's no longer a company where you and your friends are running it. Now you have to answer to the public investors. Is there any sense of pressure from them that you would need to better monetize and therefore partner with say an OpenAI or Anthropic?
I think Bending Spoons hasn't been a company run by friends like that in a long time. We feel we are a highly professional organization. We've had blue chip investors on board for many years. You know, Bailey G for Durable Capital have been with us for many years at this point. So we have operated as rigorously and as seriously as it gets for as long as I can remember. Obviously the constituents will be a little bit different as a public company, but we are, I don't think we're going to change our views. We're trying to maximize value 10 or 20 years out and we'll continue doing that. In terms of data, we have never sold any data. We've never enabled any third party to train their models on our data. We don't have any plans to do that. And, you know, I'll let you know if that changes, but right now that's our stand.
Luca, I'm trying to understand though a little bit more too about the business model. You guys have identified more than a thousand digital businesses in Europe and North America that could be attractive acquisitions over the next few years. That's according to your listing document. It feels like are you just buying your way to growth and masking perhaps a slowdown in retention? Is that the strategy?
I mean, yes, we are buying as a key engine of growth. I think there's no difference in putting dollars against marketing driven growth or R&D driven growth or M&A driven growth. They're just different levers you can pull. We found that with our platform, M&A has been by far the most efficient. We have doubled the company roughly speaking every year for as long as I can remember. So not too shabby and we've barely raised any equity in the past. Certainly much more efficient than we would have achieved through more conventional means. And having said that, almost every time the companies we have owned we have improved the retention, monetization, organic growth. So we're managing these assets for the long run. We have never sold a company we bought nor do we plan to. We try to be excellent stewards of these businesses again with a 10-20 year view. As long as we can project out. But yes, we do anticipate that the vast majority of our growth will come from acquisitions and as long as that's where the highest returns come, we'll take it. We like it a lot.
Oh, sorry. Luca. The next acquisition. Look, tell us what it'll be. If you can, feel free. If you don't, I'm going to give you a gimme. Or are you going to give me a gimme? I guess, what's the theme? And the theme that you're looking for?
