Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons CEO: The $40K Origin Story, Buying Product-Market Fit & Why Private Equity Can't Compete

(0:00) Luca Ferrari joins the Besties! (1:56) Crashing an AI startup, the $40,000 restart & buying product market fit (4:59) The in-house tech stack, shrinking the teams & the 10 out of 10 standard (9:55) Debt as an accelerant, what happens if rates rise & who else is bidding (14:58) Inside the deal desk: what gets acquired, why they don't build & the founder question (20:22) Building a tech giant out of Milan, Europe's talent pool & the outsider advantage Thanks to our partners for making this possible! IREN is a vertically integrated AI Cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute and software for AI training and inference. https://iren.com/ Oracle connects the data, applications, and infrastructure that turn AI into business outcomes—with the flexibility, choice, and control to optimize as AI evolves. http://oracle.com/ai EY helps tech innovators scale from startup to exit to megacap. You build the future. We'll handle the rest. http://www.ey.com Meta believes the future is for everyone. We're focused on giving every person the tools to reach their full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to all. http://www.meta.com Keel Infrastructure owns the power, land, and connectivity that HPC and AI run on - backed by secured energy assets and established grid interconnections across North America. https://keelinfra.com/ Airwallex - Agentic Global Business Accounts. Open local accounts in 70+ countries to accept payments, earn yield, pay globally, and manage spend. http://airwallex.com PayPal has been revolutionizing commerce globally for more than 25 years. Creating innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, PayPal empowers consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy. For more information, visit https://www.paypal.com Google for Startups connects founders with the right people, products, and best practices to help startups build faster and go further. https://startup.google.com/ Explore ideas, industries, and technologies worth understanding with Chamath every week on Learn with Me: https://research.socialcapital.com/allin Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@allin Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg #allin #tech #news

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You are the reason that has that exists. They went from zero to $1 billion in revenue in just 10 years.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari.

• 0:09Speaker 02

  We have never lost a bid before.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Well, AOL has a new parent again. Milan-based tech company Bending Spoons announced it will buy ticketing platform Eventbrite. Bending Spoons is stirring up the market. They go from fixing one zombie app to reviving 20 of them.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  Half a billion people use our products. We're trying to build a generational company.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  Please welcome Luca Ferrari.

• 0:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hey, here he is. Nice to see you. Ciao Luca. You got fans. All right, Luca.

• 0:50Jason Calacanis?

  Andiamo Luca.

• 0:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have a great company. Don't make fun of Luca Ferrari. I'm not, I'm just... This is a great Italian entrepreneur, so shut the [bleep] up. Absolutely, absolutely. Luca, I asked...

• 1:01Jason Calacanis?

  I got somebody yelling like his Super Mario Brothers in the audience.

• 1:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We could have another presidential moment here at the All in Podcast. So if she picks it, if she calls you, then just run the phone over.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Got my phone here.

• 1:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, just in case.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's ready.

• 1:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, there's a lot of us that have actually been tracking you for a while. I originally heard about you because you were in Milano, where, you know, my wife's family is from. And you had this incredibly progressive, methodical approach to growth. You did this fantastic podcast with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, which was great. I encourage all of you to listen to it. And you explained the arc of Bending Spoons. And I'd love for you to explain to folks the first few years and just all the misery and failure, the nadir of the company, and then the beginning of the ascent.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the, you know, most of the, I mean, the pain, there's been plenty of pain throughout for most entrepreneurs, I think. But the biggest failures were in the previous startup. So with my co-founders, we launched an AI company in 2010, very early, too early, clearly. Crashed and burned. Three years later, we're left with about $40,000 in capital we had raised from the VC. And clearly, there wasn't a lot to salvage other than our relationship being stronger. And that money that the VC pretty much gifted to us,

• 2:38Speaker 02

  as they didn't want to go through the liquidation process, too much illegal fees and too many headaches. They had seen us work pretty hard. And so they told us, you guys, keep it, we'll sell our shares to you for $1, like nominal value, and you go and get a nice vacation. We're clearly a little bit sick in the head. And so we took the money and enthusiastically turned it into seed financing for Bending Spoons. And we, you know, we came up with...

• 3:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You started with $40,000.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  $40,000, exactly, in 2013. And we had this strategy, which has remained pretty much the same. Obviously, you get smarter, you refine it in time. The idea was, we are not very good at finding product-market fit. Or maybe, you know, luck plays a big role, probably both things are true. But we have become pretty good at engineering, design, monetization, marketing, in just three years of hard work. And so we should be able to be among the best in the world at that. And we should be able to buy product-market fit from people. And, you know, they get a good price, we get a good asset, we can make more valuable. And then we deploy more capital into making our platform more...

• 3:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What was the first acquisition? And how much did you pay? And how did you get the deal then?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  So the first acquisition was, we paid $10,000, give or take. And it was a mobile app for iPhones specifically that you used to personalize your keyboard. Very simple. One man, kind of developer, sold it to us. Obviously, a very amateurish operation. Not that difficult at the time to make it better and more successful.

• 4:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What were you buying? Like, you're buying one times revenue? You were buying the revenue? You were buying the app?

• 4:20Speaker 02

  That one specifically, I think, had negligible revenue. It wasn't even really monetized.

• 4:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Which of course is never the case for scaled businesses.

• 4:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But it had users.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  It had users. So what we bought at the time was an app with a bunch of users and good positioning on the app stores. So it would get an influx of new users. And that's, you know, remained broadly speaking similar over time. And, you know, we keep looking for great brands, user and customer bases, where we can, you know, improve everything ideally and make those assets even more valuable over time. We just do it at a much bigger scale these days, but the underlying concepts have not changed.

• 4:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did you rebuild that app? Did you take over the code base and redo it? Just help us understand technically what's going on in the organization from that business through to some of the bigger ones today.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is it a code business? Are you doing engineering, product, design, marketing, all of the above?

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, mostly what we do is engineering and product. We have a core team of, at this point, about 800 people. And I would say probably three-quarters of them are other engineers or AI researchers or product designers, product managers. Most of what we do is actually improving technologies and products. And of course, you know, that, yes, that app, we wrote it completely. And but it's very early days. Today, we're much more sophisticated. We, what we do is we bring in a, call it an operating system of 50-plus proprietary technologies. We've built kind of an engine to run technology businesses very effectively and efficiently. And really, our core product. We swap out the technological foundation of the businesses we buy with that one.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  So we can run it much better. And also, the people we transition across are various businesses, always play by the same rules. They're more efficient because they find the same tool.

• 6:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so these tools cut across, what, like HR, finance, tech ops, dev ops?

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Pretty much everything, yeah. I mean, orchestration of AI models, check. Recruiting tools, check. AB testing platforms, check.

• 6:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then do you bring all of the technology spend up to the topco? So that you're doing one deal with AWS, all the licensing becomes scaled across one entity?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a lever for quality creation. I'd say that's a relatively small one. It probably adds, I don't know, one, two percentage points in EBITDA margins. The, you know, the more important aspects are being able to drive revenue increases through better product tech and monetization, sometimes marketing, cost reduction through leaner teams, more talent-dense teams. And but yes, vendor optimization is helpful.

• 6:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You were doing the Elon X playbook before he did it. I mean, like, there's some stories that were written about how you right-sized Vimeo's workforce, you right-sized Bright...

• 7:03Speaker 02

  He called me before doing the X... No, I'm joking.

• 7:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, he did? Oh, no, okay. Advice. But explain, explain, how do I cut all the people?

• 7:11Speaker 02

  No, no, he didn't do that. I don't know Elon, so...

• 7:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Luca, how did you figure out that you could cut 80% of a team and it still works? How do you figure that out? Is that accidental, where you're just pushing to a threshold?

• 7:22Speaker 02

  I think it's something we learned partially. Because early days, where we were acquiring smaller businesses, typically, these people would sell us the asset, say, the product, but not the team. Because for them, it was very small teams. They, you know, wanted to move on to whatever other project they had. And so we didn't really know any better. We were establishing teams internally to carry on the work. And the number of FTEs was much smaller than...

• 7:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In the original footprint?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  No, no, no, well, also that. But then, when we ended up buying businesses with established teams, we had perhaps naively built teams to run comparable businesses that were much smaller. And so we couldn't explain why you necessarily needed more people. Partly, yes, through experimentation, we have found, call it the sweet spot. Obviously, it's never perfect, but we, well, overall, let's say, the key thing for us is we want our businesses to be, you know, run at a 10 out of 10 level. And we find that generally, you're more likely to get that level of performance if you have very, very small teams, super high bar for talent and sensible owners.

• 8:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You have a 40-odd-billion-dollar market cap-ish right now, I think, plus or minus?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  I don't know, actually. I haven't checked the ticker since we IPO'd.

• 8:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's roughly in that zone, which is incredible from starting with a $10,000 acquisition. When did you transition from scaling on cash flow to then using debt and using more sophisticated financial engineering so you can go after these bigger fish? And how is that?

• 8:50Speaker 02

  So historically, we started using debt in 2017, I believe, either 2017 or 2018. Very basic bank loans, TLAs. And then as we, so free cash flow, the reinvestment of free cash flow had always been a thing for us. We deployed pretty much 100% of our free cash flow toward acquisitions since the beginning. Debt from 2017, and it was rescaled, we got more credible, a little bit wiser and more sophisticated. We went for, you know, TLBs and maybe in the future there'll be bond issuances and other more complex instruments. We haven't used a whole lot of equity. Actually, when we IPOed, we had only, quote unquote, only raised about half a billion

• 9:35Speaker 02

  dollar in primary equity and we were at roughly 20 billion in valuation. And even that half a billion dollar, we had raised pretty much all of it in the previous six months or so. So almost all of our track record we've achieved through reinvestment of free cash flows and debt. But going forward, I think particularly as a public company, using equity tactically here and there could be a good idea.

• 9:54Jason Calacanis?

  So with that equity, you're taking loans, I guess, five, six points over LIBOR, so 10%, 12% loans, and then you buy a business like Airtable. But that, that means you have to pay 100 million dollars in debt payments per year. If interest rates go up, and it's a 90 some odd chance they're going to start going up, what does that do with the business? Does it throttle it a bit? And then my second question, people have been pretty enamored by the progress you're making, and I think you're now facing some bending spoons competitors. So maybe you could talk, are you seeing more people show up at these auctions and it's not just you and like two other players?

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so debt is an accelerant to our growth. We would still grow pretty fast if we only use free cash flows, but, our free cash flows, but definitely being able to use that is a good thing, prudent levels of debt. And I would say, I will give you like two parts. First, the risk with the existing indebtedness. All of our debt currently, the average cost, the blended cost is about 9%. If we're taking it fully hedged, so increases in interest rates would not impact our cost of debt. It matures in 2031, so we are in a position to pay it back completely before maturity. We're currently at two and a half times leverage approximately.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Now, if interest rates were to go up substantially, then new debt would be, would be more expensive. I think that would be, under most scenarios, a net positive for us for a couple of reasons. Our returns unlevered historically have been pretty high, consistently about 25% again unlevered. So whether we pay 9% or 12%, of course I'd rather pay 9, but it's not, it doesn't break the model. And, you know, and the second aspect is typically when interest rates go up, the value of assets goes down. And so as a serial acquirer, I think we're more likely to benefit more from the lower valuations than the higher debt. Now, that depends, I'm generalizing and simplifying a bit, but overall, we feel we are fairly

• 12:02Speaker 02

  well protected and, you know, robust when it comes to indebtedness. When it comes to competition for acquisitions, we have all of the processes, we have participated and have had other, other buyers or almost all of them. I'm sure competition will intensify, or I'm sure it may intensify, who knows? It could also get weaker. We're seeing private equities, we have historically down software, actually raised less capital to do the same. And so on balance, we may be better off. It's also, I think, important to note that it's, it's really painful and time consuming to replicate what we've built, because a lot of it is based on, you know, those technologies which you can't build overnight. You don't even know what to build really if you haven't gone through many years of painful

• 12:45Speaker 02

  experimentation mistakes, try and repeat. A lot of the value we create is thanks to those 800 odd people. We have painstakingly selected over time, the culture of high performance and a scientific approach to business we have developed. Those things are, there's no shortcut. I still remember hiring the first one person and then two people and then four people. You could probably do it in five years rather than 13, but not in two months. So I think we will face competition, but I'm pretty optimistic about it.

• 13:11Jason Calacanis?

  I just want to follow up if I may. In our industry, the venture capital industry, and even going into public markets, we covet the founder. And if a company loses its founder and the founder authority they have, like Elon to say, hey, we're not going to make the Model X, we're not going to make the Model S, we're going to convert those to Optimus, those kind of bold bets only made by founders. You have a slightly different philosophy here. You don't want founders inside the company. You're not looking for that founder authority in each of these brands, based on what I've heard you say. So what is the expectation for your brands? Do you want to create cutting edge, you know, version twos of Eventbrite and Vimeo? Or do you just want them to grow at a predictable rate and throw off that cash flow? So talk about the founder role.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think if you can have a founder with that, you know, level of passion and that mentality is, you know, nine times out of 10 will be a major net positive. Generally, when we end up acquiring companies, these are businesses that have been around for 10, 20 years, even more than 20 years in some cases. And for the founders, if they're still on board, sometimes they aren't on board, for them, it's really a moment of, okay, this is a chapter on closing, I want to move on. So the, the real question there, for us, we win if that business does better with us than it would have under previous ownership. Obviously, if we could have exceptional founders stay on board and pour their hearts into it, it would be even better.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  But we can still do well by being a better home for that business than that business staying with the same ownership group and maybe losing the founder anyway. So it's not that we don't want founders, but once, you know, companies are sold, the people are generally looking to move on.

• 14:57Jason Calacanis?

  Can you bring us into the M&A deal desk? So like in the room, walk us through your screening process. Are we, how do we, how are we doing this? What are we looking for? Are we looking for synergy and integration with the assets that we've bought before? Are we looking purely at cash flow? How do we stack rank these things? Just walk us through the deal desk.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think there's a qualitative criteria we use to slim down the long list of businesses that would be interesting targets. One is scale. We, that process of very deep integration and profound transformation takes a lot of operational effort, so we can do a million of these. And by the way, the amount of time and effort it takes to transform a business we have found, it doesn't really scale linearly with revenue, so we're much better off acquiring relatively few sizable companies than a million small ones. So we like, we look for scale, we look for predictability in earnings, and it's a big topic in and of itself, but we like businesses where we are pretty confident we can project at least, you know, the next five or six years directionally.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  And then we look for businesses where we can create a lot of value. It could be technology, org, product, monetization, marketing, ideally most of these.

• 16:07Jason Calacanis?

  Does value include the integration with these other assets that you have? Or value just means economic value operating?

• 16:12David Friedberg?

  Well, let me just ask a detailed point of that. Like, if you own AOL, you could put ads for Vimeo or Eventbrite or Miro on AOL. If you own Vimeo, you could probably have a sales team that's selling ads on AOL that you can use. How much synergistic effect is there? And if there is synergistic effect, and you've got all this capacity to do design, build, product management, agentic orchestration, testing, A/B testing, why not also build organically at the same time and leverage the network effects of the existing businesses?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  So historically, we have created almost no value from, let's say, customer facing synergies, what you described. Plenty of behind the scenes synergies, like I said, it's all built on the same technological foundations and there's this large core team of people, we move around fluidly. Going forward, and by the way, the reason why we haven't unlocked a lot of value through customer facing synergies is being that we, I think the portfolio wasn't necessarily large enough for good overlaps to materialize, but as it grows more and more, for example, now Airtable and Miro are both quite appealing to a lot of enterprises. I think what you are describing could become an additional value creation dimension.

• 17:27David Friedberg?

  You haven't tried or you've tried and it hasn't worked?

• 17:29Speaker 02

  No, we've tried and it's worked, but marginally. So maybe it's helped 3%, but now like the bulk of it has been bringing 10 out of 10 excellence in operations, product, monetization, technology.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  On an individual business basis.

• 17:44David Friedberg?

  And then why not build organically products?

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the first of all, you can't do everything. I mean, Elon can. My colleagues and I, we don't think we can. Maybe we should be more ambitious with ourselves.

• 18:00David Friedberg?

  You've got a lot on your plate.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:01David Friedberg?

  There's so many different kinds of products already.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  We launched a lot of new things on top of existing brands. But it's not like completely radical innovation. We don't do a lot of that. We try to stay focused on one thing, to try to be the very best in the world at it. Also, at the scale we are at at this point, we're, you know, on a pro forma with Miro, close to a run rate of $4 billion in revenue. It's difficult. Like, if you look at the percentage of new startups or products being launched that would move the needle, it's very, very small. So what's the, you know, we would have to deploy a lot of our resources and very unlikely to work.

• 18:36David Friedberg?

  Sorry, let me just talk about the thing. You and I talked about this point on the talent exodus that happens in Silicon Valley companies when they start to stall out. And that the talent maybe that's working on the business isn't the quality of the talent that you've built in your core platform. How much of that is assessed in that M and A process that Chamath was mentioning?

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Well, it's, I mean, it's difficult to assess from the outside in, but you can form first principles opinions. Businesses that, again, are more in a saturation phase, they tend not to be as appealing to some of the most entrepreneurial engineers or designers. And so you can assume that the level of talent will be maybe good, but perhaps not, you know, anthropic would have. I'm not saying anything shocking here.

• 19:23David Friedberg?

  They have a very unique kind of talent, but we'll talk about that another time.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. We have a big advantage in attracting talent because if you work at Ben & Stone's, it may be one of the very few places in the world where you can spend, say, one year rebuilding the email infrastructure for AOL and then seven months helping rethink subscriptions on Vimeo and then build a platform technology to manage payments, all with the same employer, mostly the same colleagues, same culture.

• 19:49David Friedberg?

  You get broad technical scope.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Exactly. So career opportunities, just staying motivated because it's fun and new. Very high talent density begets high talent density. So there is an element of virtuous cycle. So we have been able to attract a ton of people. Last year, 800,000 applications, we hired fewer than 300 people.

• 20:04David Friedberg?

  Are they all in Milan? Where are they?

• 20:05Speaker 02

  No, no, we are fully, you know, very international as a company. Milan, for historical reasons, remains like the biggest pool of talent. But London, for example, is coming up faster. Madrid, we'll be hiring people, plenty of people in the States, I think, starting next year.

• 20:21Jason Calacanis?

  Brings up an interesting question. Europe as a tech center isn't exactly something that venture capitalists, even late-stage investors are pursuing. They kind of look at the market there as maybe slower and maybe just not as good of an opportunity is, I think, their decision. Rather be in Silicon Valley or American companies or perhaps Asia. So what's it like being the most aggressive, successful company then in Europe or one of them? Is there?

• 20:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you're right. No, I think it is the.

• 20:55Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, Spotify, obviously, is much better. Klarna, you're in the top 10 probably, or clearly in the top 10. So what's the talent pool like there? How is it different, specifically Italy? I noticed when Chamath goes to Italy, maybe there's a little bit less working going on.

• 21:11David Friedberg?

  An extra button. He goes from three on buttons to four.

• 21:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the buttons go down and the number of hours in front of a laptop goes down as well.

• 21:19David Friedberg?

  Like Italy changes Chamath, we see it.

• 21:20Jason Calacanis?

  How do you keep these Italians working? How do you, what's the secret? No, but tell us about the talent pool and running a company in Europe.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  So I think, I think Europe has a lot of problems, but I think there's a pretty good talent. Half a billion people live in, let's say, the main part of Europe. So it's a lot of people with pretty good education. It's not Stanford, but it's solid. And a lot of these people have a chip on their shoulder to prove we're not necessarily less smart or capable. So you do find a lot of good people. I do think there is a, the fact that Italians don't work hard is mostly a false stereotype.

• 21:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  I, we find that, I mean, my wife, she doesn't work with me. She works in another company. She works a lot, long hours. At our company, we work pretty hard. We generally find that when we acquire companies and we work with existing teams, more often than not, the team we bring in works substantially harder. So I don't know, we just try to hire people who are intrinsically motivated, very ambitious, just hungry, entrepreneurial, and then give them, you know, good reason to do their best work because they see that they can have a unique career.

• 22:29Jason Calacanis?

  Have you thought of having headquarters anywhere other than Milan and that it might be an accelerant for the business? New York City, where the banking capital is, Silicon Valley, the tech capital? Have you thought about moving the headquarters?

• 22:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why? Luca's totally right. You get like these people, the problem with people in, like, you go to these typical places, typical schools, they think they're geniuses. And it's like, when you actually, like, just look, even just look at AI, who are the major contributors? These are not, like, they're not from MIT, Stanford per se, you know? They were at U of T, they were at McGill, they're at CMU, Waterloo.

• 22:59David Friedberg?

  Well, it could be an advantage.

• 23:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, well, that's sort of what I'm getting at.

• 23:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's a huge advantage.

• 23:03David Friedberg?

  I mean, when I, when I interviewed Charles Koch, you and I talked about this, what I found so fascinating is he built that business, probably the most extraordinary wholly-owned business on earth, from nothing, effectively, in Wichita, Kansas. And I'd say it's like the Wichita mindset because he basically kind of ignored everything that was conventional and he was able to do things his own way. I don't know anyone that thinks and does things the way you do them that are based in Silicon Valley, and that might be the reason because you're in Milan and you're not kind of indoctrinated into cultural thinking.

• 23:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, look, I'll just say, what I find so incredibly interesting about your company and what you're building is, in all of our generations, we've seen this, these incredible examples of companies that have run your playbook but in traditional industries. Amphenol, Roper, Danaher, Berkshire. And we've never seen a successful implementation of it in tech. And I think you're the best scaled example. I mean, Expedia tried, Barry tried, I think it was a little complicated. So it's really exciting to see that this thing can work because the structural issue is always, how do you underwrite these cash flows? And I think you're proving that they're underwritable, that these things can go out for seven, eight, nine years. And especially now, if you look at PE, the PE guys are basically like, we don't know

• 24:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  what the [bleep] is going on, right? Yet you're still able to go and transact and you're announcing deals at a pace where these, you know, a lot of the PE folks are, so how do you, how do you manage this risk? Like, clearly it's not a risk, you think it's a tailwind for you.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the, you know, the private equity is completely different because they keep these companies separate for the most part to sell them. And so they could never have that technological foundation because once you plug it in in a company, what do you do when you solicit to your private equity competitor? Do you license it to them? So that's, you know, remove that. They can't have a pooled team of engineers, designers, because if they put them on the, on a business and then they sell it, what do they do? They take the team out and that it's, the business is almost worthless? Or do they sell the team with it? So it's just the model is completely different. And I believe these structural differences are a big reason why we have been, I'd like to say, successful. So it will never work with the traditional private equity, which has other advantages.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  You can deploy maybe a lot more capital because it's a little bit more, you know, hands-off. But, but you can never achieve the returns, I think, we have.

• 25:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Luca, I want to say thank you. An incredible business you're building. Congratulations.

• 25:23David Friedberg?

  Well done.

• 25:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Luca Ferrari, everybody.