We're trying to build a generational company. We're trying to win the World Cup, not simply say, oh it's great, we qualify. I really thought that IQ was 80% of the game. And now I think it's still important. It has to be high enough, but once it's high enough, almost all that matters is how badly you want to be great. Betting on growing primarily through acquisitions where everybody was telling us you got to focus on one product and try to grow that organically. You have no idea how many times I've heard that. And then pretty much every single company that I've seen do that, they have done much worse than we have. It's very difficult, at least in business, to find something that works. I think 99% of the time, you'll be better off maximizing that than questioning every little thing that could in theory be better.
I was a bending spoon IPO and I wanted to give you a quick recap while everything is still fresh. I am working on a proper mini documentary about the whole experience, but there was no way I could wait before sharing what it was like. I'm not going to explain from scratch who Benny Spoons is or what they do. I've already made at least three videos about them. But the short version is that they buy software companies, make them better, and they don't sell those companies. In the last 10 years, they created a very strong platform made by their own technology and amazing people. They went from zero to $1 billion in revenue in just 10 years. And they closed their first day of trading on NASDAQ already close to $30 billion of market capitalization. 2 weeks before the IPO, they decided to fly the entire company from Milan to New York on a charter flight so everyone in the company could be there for the listing and somehow they left MAG alone. The people at NASDAQ told us they never seen anything like it.
You are the reason that NASDAQ exists.
But honestly, that's a classic bending spoon smoke.
They put the team first. Every employee can choose to take part of their compensation in stock. And this IPO created a lot of millionaires and even some multi-millionaires. So let's begin. Bus from Milan to the airport, check in for the flight, 8 hours in the sky, hotel ride in Time Square, 3 hours of sleep, and then I was ready to follow the CEO Luca Ferrari around for the whole day. First stop, 7:00 a.m. in the morning, CNBC. Then over to the NASDAQ to meet the Spooners, catch up with everyone and sit through a bunch of meetings. And after a series of speeches and some really cool team moments,
it was finally time to ring the bell.
Co-founder Mat Danieli gave an incredible speech.
This moment is yours. Enjoy it.
Then the celebration officially kicked off.
Time Square was completely covered with Bending Spoons billboards. And after that, I followed Luca to JP Morgan to watch the stocks for trade. Then it was back to NASDAQ for a long series of interviews with the press from Bloomberg to TBPN. When the day was finally over, it was time to celebrate. Benny Spoons rented out for the night the entire Edge observation deck for an insane party.
Welcome to the Olympics. After all our efforts, we finally earned our place.
Luca gave a speech that got everyone fired up. It was honestly one of the most incredible days of my life. Like I said, I'm putting together a full mini documentary about the whole experience. But today, I just wanted to share the conversation I had with Luca. After watching him do interview after interview, I wanted to ask him the question nobody else was asking: would you consider an acceptable scenario in 5 years from now?
5 years. I think now that we're a publicly traded company, I'm not allowed to make specific predictions, but I will say we hope to keep doing what we have historically, but a lot more and a lot better of it. So, you know, in five years we have to have acquired a lot more companies and much bigger companies, and hopefully that will drive our growth. Hopefully we can be an even better place to work, attract even more outstanding people. I think there's a lot to do there, and we're very excited about using AI to reinvent how a business should be run. Automation, better products, more efficient monetization. I think we're only scratching the surface in that regard. We're investing heavily. So in 5 years, it should be much, much better if we've done our job correctly.
What are the top three KPIs that you always check?
I'm mostly focused on the quality of our team. So I review applications. I review every single profile we consider extending an offer to. I believe we have a strategy that works and is likely to keep working, and that the main determinant of whether we can do well is if we can keep hiring great people and they work well together. So it's really where I focus most of my time. I look at all the numbers. I'm pretty obsessive about it. But it's not as important. And then of course I review financials, revenue.
Is there any quantitative way to measure the quality of the team?
We do run assessments internally at least once a year, and we try to make those as scientifically sound as possible. We look at that and over time we try to check whether the average quality of the talent is maintained or improved, and it seems it has historically. But you know, humans are not entirely measurable. We are wonderful and complicated. But that's our best proxy to get a sense of where we're trending in the right direction.
How much do you think is the quality of the person the baseline that you get, and how much do you think is how much you can help that person grow thanks to motivation, learnings, everything?
It's difficult to quantify, but I will say the latter is absolutely massive. I think a good culture, a good environment is such that everybody plays above their level. It's like in sports where there are some teams where everybody looks like a champion when they're in that team, and then they transfer to another team and they're not as good. It's because the environment, the coach, the strategy, the motivation, team play such that everybody looks better than they are. So we try to hire the best people we can, because you're always going to be better off with better talent, but then be that system where everybody punches above their weight.
What's the biggest opportunity for the years to come, but also the biggest threat?
I mean, AI is certainly a huge opportunity for us. It will change everything, and it's not going to happen by itself, certainly not in the next five or six years. It'll take a lot of effort to take advantage of that. So we're investing heavily in that area. I think big risks: there's always complacency. As you feel you're a little bit successful, then you may become arrogant, and then you're dead literally. So that's one. Scale can dilute the quality of a culture. We are adding roughly 30% to our team size each year. And obviously AI... I think it's mostly an opportunity, but it would be imprudent not to recognize that every time something changes quickly, you can also lose because the rules of the game are changing. It's certainly also a risk, let's put it that way.
So you just made a bunch of interviews with the press, and some of them were looking for weaknesses in the business. What did you tell them?
I think like all businesses, plenty of weaknesses. I would say one is when we acquire companies, we rethink them often from the ground up, really try to change a lot of things: parts of the team, the technology, user experience, monetization. That takes a lot of time and effort, and it places a bottleneck to growth. As you go after bigger companies or more complex, larger teams, more customers, it becomes increasingly challenging. I think another one is because our growth is primarily driven by acquisitions. On the one hand, I think the ceiling is much higher if you can acquire a vast array of companies. In theory, you can grow a lot more. However, it's a lot less predictable. There could be a period of time where you find good deals, maybe valuations are a little bit lower, and you grow tremendously. Then maybe there is a period of time where valuations are really high, you don't find as many opportunities. So that probably will make our growth very choppy, and I think many investors like smoothness, predictability. So that will be challenging for people psychologically to ride those waves.
Yeah, makes sense. Like once there is a big opportunity, you buy a bunch of companies, and then maybe you don't do that for a while if the price is too high. In this 13 years of business, what are the most important things you learned?
One of the lessons we've learned is that complicated things are rarely effective or successful. You need simplicity. In most cases, the best things, whether again they're solutions to problems, ideas, can be reduced to relatively simple principles. And I find that some of the most successful people are very good at identifying the few things that matter and really focusing on getting those couple of things right with simple elegant solutions, as opposed to covering every corner case. But as I observe, it's very difficult to implement. We humans have a tendency toward complication. By the way, it's the same way we got to the crazy complex regulations we have today. I'm sure that every time someone was adding a new law, they really thought it was a good thing. But then we were failing to account for the increasing level of complexity and the glue that adds to the system. I'm sure that a lot of laws, if they didn't exist, basically nothing would happen. You maybe occasionally some smaller issues, but we would be all more agile because there are fewer rules. People generally are well-intentioned and they add because they think they're incrementally solving minor problems on the margins, and then it's impossible.
Bene is a simple organization.
I believe we are. We try to be as simple as possible. We're willing to accept not covering certain corner cases. It means we can keep things a lot simpler. We have determined that it's much better to hire very good people and trust them with a lot of responsibility. We could probably prevent some mistakes and embarrassments if we put in place more controls and processes. But I think the net effect of that would be extremely detrimental by reducing speed and sense of ownership. So it's tempting to say, oh we had this little fuck-up here had we had a process. But there is a cost to solving that concrete problem. It's less of a cost to just keep the mistakes sometimes.
Exactly.
So simplicity is one thing. Other things you learn or principles you go by.
I firmly believe now, when I started trying to build companies at this point roughly 15 years ago, at the time I really thought that IQ was 80% of the game. And now I think it's still important. It has to be high enough. But once it's high enough, almost all that matters is how badly you want to be great. The rough and dull ingredient. You got to be good enough talent-wise or you just don't have it. But then at a certain level, it's much better to have more obsession, more desire to learn, improve, refine, expand. That will drive you to great heights, or at least improve the chances that you do. And being a little bit smarter but not as hungry, you're not going to. And I think it's very similar with academics.
What about sources? So all these learnings you learn them by mistakes. Any books, mentors, inspirations that you had during the journey?
Yeah, I read a lot of books. It's unusual to find a very specific lesson you take away. But I believe that absorbing a lot of interesting information, and it has to be deliberate, you have to think about it over time, stimulating the mind with a lot of information, process it, think, it really makes your machinery a little bit better, and then you will connect the dots in real life. You try to surround yourself with really good people, ideally better than you are. Read a lot. I like books, but I think any source of high quality information. Try to be active, challenge, question, think about it, and then constantly analyze your life, what's happening, why.
