Inside Bending Spoons: Buying Airtable, AOL, Vimeo & Eventbrite

Bending Spoons buys companies and never sells them. Since listing in July it has spent roughly $2.6B, and the pipeline has never been fuller. Bending Spoons (NASDAQ BSP) is a Milan-based technology company that acquires digital businesses, rebuilds them on its own platform, and holds them permanently. It owns AOL, Airtable, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Evernote, WeTransfer, Brightcove, Tractive, Remini, komoot, Harvest, StreamYard and Meetup, with more than 500 million monthly active users and over 9 million paying customers. It listed on the Nasdaq on July 1, 2026 at $29 a share. Sourcery visited the Milan headquarters for a walkthrough with: › Luca Ferrari, Co-Founder & CEO Followed by sit-downs with: › Francesco Patarnello, Co-Founder & Head of M&A › Matteo Danieli, Co-Founder & VP of Product › Valentina Jerusalmi, General Manager of AOL We cover deal selection across 1,000 targets, how the debt and equity stack was built from a $2M bank loan to US term loans, the Grindr process that collapsed in 2020, the decision to drop vesting entirely, why Danieli stepped down as CPO, and the AOL carve-out from Yahoo. This is Part I of a II-Part Series, Full Sit-down Interview with CEO Luca Ferrari next.. Luca Ferrari: https://x.com/luke10ferrari Francesco Patarnello: https://x.com/frapatarnello Matteo Danieli: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matteodanieli https://www.linkedin.com/in/matteodanieli/ Valentina Jerusalmi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentina-jerusalmi https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentina-jerusalmi/ Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: https://youtu.be/3IUnY8btQQo 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Zone https://zonefrontier.com/—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com https://zonefrontier.com/ • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery • VCX https://fundrise.com/vcx—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com http://getvcx.com • Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Bending Spoons has announced a buy Miro deal worth $1.3 billion. Vent bride in a deal worth $500 million.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Airtable for $1.25 billion.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  AOL for $1.5 billion.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  We don't sell the companies we buy. So they know that with us, the company has a private home. And they've seen how much we can invest in the product.

• 0:18Speaker 03

  Private equity comes in and buys a business. Generally, that means that the founder needs to be involved for the next three, four, five years. And with Bending Spoons, we can take care of it from closing date. Within our portfolio, we have plenty of products. People that come into Bending Spoons, they don't need to come in because they want to work specifically on B mill or retransfer or AOL. They can actually be exposed to a lot of different products.

• 0:43Speaker 04

  AOL was a pretty healthy business when we acquired it. And it's still as of today. It has like millions and millions of users who are still very active and still very engaged.

• 0:52Molly O'Shea?

  I'm so excited to see what you acquire next. Airtable broke the internet in a lot of people's brains. So I'm excited to see what happens.

• 1:11Molly O'Shea?

  All right, we are here at Bending Spoons in Milan, Italy with CEO Luca Ferrari. We're going to go for a little walk around the office. And then later, we're going to speak to the co-founders as well as Valley, the GM of AOL. So Luca, you want to take it away?

• 1:28Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:28Molly O'Shea?

  So how many offices do you have now?

• 1:31Speaker 02

  For the core team, we have Milan. Then we have London, Madrid in Spain and Warsaw in Poland. And then with the acquired companies, many others in the States, in Tokyo, all over the place.

• 1:46Molly O'Shea?

  All right, so you have this office here. When did you open this one?

• 1:50Speaker 02

  About three years ago.

• 1:51Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  And we're working on opening another one next door. It will be way bigger. So we're looking forward to that, maybe next year.

• 1:58Molly O'Shea?

  How many, how many floors does that one?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Nine, I think. It's way bigger. It's good for 500 to 1,000 people, something like that.

• 2:07Molly O'Shea?

  And so are all the offices set up like this with open desks? Do you guys have a specific office or are you?

• 2:13Speaker 02

  No, everybody, you know, can pick their desk. They're all up for booking and everybody is the same in that regard. There are no private offices. We have meeting rooms, of course, but no private offices.

• 2:24Molly O'Shea?

  I know we're recording this in reverse order, but I have spoken with everyone already. And one of the main takeaways is the density of talent that you have here. The extreme ownership culture and I guess the quality overall. So what are the traits that you look for when hiring in employees?

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Well, it boils down to looking for people who are smart and who care. No, smart means people who can learn quickly. Even if they don't have the knowledge, they'll pick it up rapidly and they'll be able to develop the skills they need to succeed. And then who care means, and that's the extreme ownership trait you just referenced. It means they care tremendously about being amazing in what they do, delivering the greatest possible impact through the team and the company. So that's sort of firing the belly to, to be awesome at work.

• 3:16Molly O'Shea?

  I have to ask you, I forgot to ask this in our sit down. But what is the biggest lesson you've learned from all the acquisitions?

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Oh my goodness, that's a, it's a pretty huge question. But I'd say, I guess we have confirmed, we've confirmed just how incredibly powerful it can be. So there was multiple people who are very high caliber and who have almost complete autonomy and leeway in being ambitious and executing. Going from a much larger company where people don't feel as much sense of ownership, they're not as accountable. There's more process, more bureaucracy to that small team. Magic happens almost every single time. So we've, you know, we've now come to, to believe in that formula fully. And it's really a trademark of our way of operating.

• 4:09Molly O'Shea?

  And what's the key to negotiation?

• 4:12Speaker 02

  To acquire a company?

• 4:14Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  A price.

• 4:15Molly O'Shea?

  Price?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  I've never seen a transaction where the highest price didn't win.

• 4:20Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically. I mean, I think in our case, what we bring to the table, that's, that's very convincing. And typically we have offered the highest price. And the reason why we've been able to do that is we, as an operator, are so effective through the integration by bringing our platform, our technologies, our people at generating value from businesses that were typically capable of offering a better price than everybody else while delivering high returns for our shareholders. So that's certainly, you know, number one. But as a close second, I think something that especially founders have appreciated, not so much institutional investors, but founders is that we don't sell the companies we buy. So they know that with us, the company has a, probably a forever home.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  And, and they've seen how much we can invest in the product and make the product better. And many founders feel a sense of attachment, even legacy connected with the, with the products they helped develop. And so knowing that they're selling their business, including the products to someone who's passionate about developing digital products as an engineering mindset pays attention to detail and, and takes pride in the craft when it comes to user experience. You know, that, that makes the decision of selling easier. So those are the two main things, I believe.

• 5:37Molly O'Shea?

  So you recently had a big milestone. Bending Spoons went public. I heard that you did something a little unconventional. You actually weren't the one ringing the bell. You were down in Times Square and you gave a fairly unusual speech as well. So what happened there?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we, we thought that generally, I think founders and executives more broadly, you know, tend to, to enjoy the spotlight more than they deserve. I think there is a, the world likes simple stories. And so they tend to have one or two faces at most they associate with, in this case, a company. But generally those people, yes, they maybe they play an outsized role in the company's success. But many others have, you know, extremely important roles to play, sometimes even more important roles to play.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  And so we figured that it'll be a nice gesture if I didn't take one, take, take up one spot in, you know, at NASDAQ on the stage, so to say. But rather enjoyed the, the moment with the hundreds of colleagues from the street. You know, I'm pretty privileged in the amount of exposure I get. And so that was a very small gesture, really just a symbolic thing. And yes, the, the person ringing the bell is Laura, one of our colleagues from finance. One of the people who put in the greatest amount of effort toward achieving the APO. And so we thought she deserved to, to be there and being, you know, the one pressing the red button.

• 7:13Molly O'Shea?

  That's amazing story. Well, Luca, thank you so much. We're about to have a couple of interviews coming out next with the two other co-founders and Valley. Like I mentioned earlier. And then later this week, as a part two, we have a full sit down with Luca. That's pretty good. So watch out for that. Thank you so much.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 7:37Molly O'Shea?

  Francesco, thank you so much for joining us. We're on a wild run here at Bending Spoons.

• 7:44Speaker 06

  Thank you, thank you for having a talk with me.

• 7:47Molly O'Shea?

  Of course, so you're head of M and A, you're also a co-founder. You've been here for 13 years from the very beginning. I have to ask you, what is the one that got away?

• 7:56Speaker 06

  Well, the one that we remember the most is probably when we tried to acquire Grindr in 2019. It was a long process, actually. I still remember the day we started discussing about that. It was actually only me and Luca here at the office, or actually it was the older office. Because most of the team was on the retreat and I had a young kid, so I decided to stay home. And so it was just basically me and Luca in the office. And he heard about the Grindr sale from, from a friend. And the moment he heard about it, he thought, hey, this must be a great opportunity. Because we've been looking at, at that space in the past.

• 8:39Speaker 06

  We've been looking at a dating space in the past and we've been looking at Grindr. And we saw that despite being a product with very high retention, it was a really bad product. It was just like, everyone was complaining about the app crushing all the time and this problem and that problem. So we thought it was, it would have been a great opportunity. So we started really getting into that. But it was everyone we talked about, I thought we were crazy because it would, it would have been a massive acquisition for us at the time. The equivalent would be today doing a $20 billion acquisition.

• 9:17Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my God.

• 9:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, that would have been very transformational. And also at that time, we had very limited experience with raising that amount of money on the debt side, that amount of money also on the equity side. So we had basically to learn everything from scratch. And it was a very long process. We started looking at that in spring 2019. And then the whole thing blew up at the beginning of 2020. After, we actually managed to put together a fully financed acquisition offer. But by the time it was too late because it was someone else that came in with a slightly better proposal.

• 10:02Speaker 06

  And so once we thought, okay, we're going to get this because until like a few months before, basically we were the only one looking at that. And then, no, we're not going to get that anymore because they went into exclusivity to someone else. And that's it, it just blew up. And yeah, you know, at the beginning, it felt really annoying and bad and sad. Because I mean, you just work so much. I mean, basically, half of the company was fully focused on that due diligence for almost a year, right? And so that felt like, okay, we're going to get this. This is like so important. But eventually.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  In the hindsight, probably I'm happier that we didn't acquire it because given the fact it would be so big for Benny Spoons, then Benny Spoons would have been Grindr because we would have probably fully focused on that and we would not have developed Benny Spoons into what Benny Spoons is today. And also on top of that, while being a failure because we didn't acquire it, I think we had so much compressed learning into those nine months because, I mean, basically we raised half a billion dollar, we're actually raising it, but it was fully committed.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  And so that was very valuable for what then came the need in terms of like raising debt, raising equity and talking with investors, talking with banks. So it was, eventually it was very valuable.

• 11:38Molly O'Shea?

  How has financing the acquisitions changed over time and how will that change now that you're public?

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Well, so historically, we have relied primarily on debt and we started, I think our first loan was in end of 2017, so very early in Benny Spoons' history. And it was, I think we raised like one, two million dollars. And the evolution of the debt financing for Benny Spoons was gradual because, you know, it was developing relationship with banks and lending slightly more every time and paying back the debt because it was fully amortized and showing the banks that we deliver on

• 12:30Speaker 03

  the promises and then raising a little bit more and then paying back and showing again. And so there was a gradual path. The big unlock was moving from just simple bank loans to term loan agreements with US lenders and that happened at the beginning of 2025. And that had to go through, you know, rating agencies, giving you a rating and that's something new, as well as talking with different lenders that never actually worked with you. And so you didn't have, you know, that relationship of delivering against your promises, paying

• 13:11Speaker 03

  back, raising more, that, you know, allow you to, you know, build a very strong track record and so allow you to raise faster at better terms. So we kind of had to start almost from the beginning with lenders at that time. And equity was slightly different because we basically never raised primary equity all the way to 2023. That was our very first big institutional round. We raised a little bit, it was more secondary rounds with smaller investors, primarily from Italy in previous years. But 2023 was the first big round with Billy G for coming in, Cox Enterprises and Durable.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  And so that was, again, something new, starting from scratch, having to educate investors about what we do. And our story, almost, I mean, by construction, is a counterintuitive story. You need to, you need to learn and study Benny Spoons a little bit before really understanding the way it works. And so also for equity investors, it was a little bit of kind of showing them and teaching them before fully making them understand the way it worked. And so there was, I think there was an important moment.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  And then becoming public, it was a kind of a continuation of that, also because many of the investors, the big institutional investors that are part of Benny Spoons' comfortable today, either were already part of that as previous institutional rounds, or were investors that we talked to many times in the past and we show them, okay, we think we're gonna do this, then we show them after six months, we've done that better, and then we show them again our plan for the following six, 12 months. And so they had already learned about Benny Spoons, so it wasn't something new for them. And so it wasn't, you know, starting from scratch, it felt like a natural continuation of where we were before as a private company.

• 15:20Molly O'Shea?

  On the acquisition side, you have a thousand potential targets?

• 15:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:25Molly O'Shea?

  And you're doing five to 10 a year?

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:27Molly O'Shea?

  How do you think about the categories that you want and the ones you will not touch?

• 15:33Speaker 03

  We've always been very agnostic to the vertical and the category. We try to, we try to do things in different, different worlds and constantly expand the capabilities of the things that we can do. Obviously, there was a gradual process. At the very beginning, when we started Benny Spoons, we were much more, I would say, we had a lot more knowledge on how to manage, let's say, a mobile B2C product and then we time that expanded into broader B2B, B2C ecosystem and then to the B2B world, the

• 16:18Speaker 03

  first self-serve and then more recently enterprise. We're attractive, we have done our first acquisition of a hardware-enabled digital business. So this to say that we don't want to focus on one specific vertical, we want to keep our scope relatively broad. Within this broad scope, the focus is to look for businesses that have a lot of potential to be unlocked. So we want to see our platform to be able to unlock a lot of value if applied to that business. That can mean different things. Sometimes it's our ability to attract talent, sometimes it's ability to process data and

• 16:59Speaker 03

  get insights, sometimes it's our ability to attract new users. Every time we look at a business and we think, how is our platform going to unlock value if applied to that business? The second thing is we want to see a big revenue scale. Every transformation almost has a fixed cost that is independent of the revenue size. And so we want to do few acquisitions every year of bigger and bigger size because we don't want to, you know, invest a team of 50 spooners into transforming a $20 million revenue business because now that wouldn't move the needle. And so the size continuously grow with Benny Spoons' growth.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  And then the last thing is we want predictability. That doesn't necessarily mean a specific growth rate. We have seen predictability in businesses that were growing 20% year-over-year, as well as businesses that were flat, as well as businesses that were shrinking 5% year-over-year. We will judge predictability based on the data that we have about the company, based on the data that we have about other businesses that we own. We have a very data-driven process, but then, once we see predictability, we value that a lot. We build a model around that to predict how the business will evolve with Benny Spoons' platform behind its back.

• 18:27Molly O'Shea?

  And why are you an attractive acquirer for the seller?

• 18:31Speaker 03

  We are a very peculiar company and we offer something that many acquirers are not able to. First of all, if you are a founder and you decided to sell your company, often it means that you want to do something else. You want to start a new project, spend more time with your family. And, you know, if a private equity comes in and buys a business, generally that means that the founder needs to be involved for the next three, four, or five years. And with Benny Spoons, we can take care of it from closing date.

• 19:14Speaker 03

  And that's very valued by the founders because they know that once they sell, then they can move on to the next project. And the second thing is they know that their product legacy will be preserved with Benny Spoons because of our ability to, you know, reignite innovation, put all the spooners behind the development of the product, the technology. And we started receiving more and more feedback from founders about this specifically and coming to us almost proactively saying, okay, look, now I'd like to entertain a discussion with you and I'm doing it only with you because I know that you can take care of this aspect that otherwise I wouldn't know how it wouldn't be handled by a private equity.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  And also we are fast, we're very straightforward. I think we start being, building a reputation of being very transparent, so you know what you get. We're just very open and transparent about the whole process.

• 20:10Molly O'Shea?

  What was the best question someone asked you during the roadshow?

• 20:15Speaker 03

  I wouldn't, I don't know if, it's not specifically a question, but it's a topic. I think most of the people have been focusing on the standard, you know, what's your organic growth, what's your retention, how you do this and how you do that. And very, very few fully understood the, the fact that the really secret sauce of Benny Spoons is the talent and triple dig into that. And I remember this specific investor that almost spent like a hour and a half only focusing on that and really like asked thoughtful questions about our hiring process, how

• 20:59Speaker 03

  we retain talent, what the culture is, how we develop the culture, why is it different? And it wasn't a specific question, but it was like a topic that made me understand he understood really, really well why Benny Spoons works the way it works. And so it's, I would say probably it was the only time that happened and so that made me think about, very highly of that specific investor because they probably understood well.

• 21:29Speaker 06

  How we work.

• 21:30Molly O'Shea?

  We were talking about talent a lot with Luca, with Valley, with Matt. It's ever-present. We talked about it at lunch. And one of the peculiar things that I came across was that you've been running tenders. You're public now, but you'd been running tenders for many years, every year for your your Spooners. So why did you make that decision? And also, why did they get vested on day one?

• 21:55Speaker 06

  Dropping the vesting, it was something that we introduced more recently. I'll get to that in a second. The reason why we started offering the secondary transaction for team members to sell some of their share if they wanted to was to really show the value of their ownership of Bending Spoons. Also showing that that they were now locked into that until a specific event in the far future that they didn't know when and how it would have unlocked. And and so that really allowed them to fully understand the power of being part of Bending Spoons as a shareholder and then make better decisions when it comes to how to convert

• 22:40Speaker 06

  their compensation into equity versus cash. And that links well into how we actually do compensation. That is, you get specific yearly compensation fixed, now variable components, and then you decide how much to convert into equity and how much to convert into cash. And also, that specific decision is very linked to the fact that we want to show you that your equity component has a specific value. At that point in time, you actually can decide to get it all in cash if you wanted to. So you know that at that point in time, it's precisely that, the value that you're unlocking. So that plus the fact that you can then, let's say, within a year, a year and a half, convert that back into cash and showing the appreciation of that.

• 23:22Speaker 06

  Because every year, year and a half, when the new round was coming, then you could see that your ownership increased in value. That allowed to, you know, create a sense of ownership almost as a public company while being private. And I think that was very important and allowed us to then become a public company without that big of a, you know, step change and maybe private company feel because everyone is super invested and everyone feels, oh, now I'm going to be become, I'm going to be able to then sell my shares. That was already like possible before. So there wasn't that big of a change.

• 24:02Speaker 06

  Same thing with not creating a vesting structure that created like some weird kind of incentives. Similar to not creating variable components, we want everything to be simple and straightforward. I mean, you created a value within a certain year and you're going to be rewarded for that. And then if you leave the day after, I mean, you're still being rewarded because of the work you've done before. So that's the reason for for dropping the vesting. And that have no impact on retention. We still have like less than 1% churn on a yearly basis. And I think this speaks highly of how people perceive ownership of Bending Spoons.

• 24:43Molly O'Shea?

  I remember I said this would create an absolute bloodbath in San Francisco.

• 24:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, of course, we are also in in a different context. I mean, being in Italy or in Europe more broadly is different than being in San Francisco, as well as probably San Francisco is different than being in New York versus Miami. I think San Francisco is a very specific context. But yeah, I think the reason why we have this churn, despite the fact that we have no red, no vesting, is also the very strong culture we developed, the fact that we hire young talent that then develops within Bending Spoons. And and so the reason less of our, you know, if I hire only people that have already 15

• 25:33Speaker 06

  years of experience, they don't have that like feeling of being part of this family, this culture, this company. And it's going to be a lot easier for them to, you know, flip to the next company afterwards. With Bending Spoons, it's different.

• 25:49Molly O'Shea?

  So as we close out, what are you most looking forward to in the next six, 12 months?

• 25:55Speaker 06

  Well, previous six months were kind of out of the ordinary, given the fact that we had the leasing process that was unique, that happens only once. So it was, I was a lot more detached from the daily operations. We have a ton of things we're working on, on the M and A front. And our pipeline has never been so rich right now, so we have a lot of prioritization to make. So yeah, I really look forward to finding the best opportunities to to focus our firepower on. And I think that's going to be very important because when you have a lot of things to choose, then picking the best is is quite important.

• 26:40Molly O'Shea?

  Well, I'm so excited to see what you acquire next. Airtable broke the internet in a lot of people's brains, so I'm excited to see what what happens. Thank you so much.

• 26:50Speaker 06

  Thank you. Thank you, Molly.

• 26:52Molly O'Shea?

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• 28:20Molly O'Shea?

  It needs power, land, and infrastructure. Zone develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers, and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Zone is building the foundation of the AI frontier. Visit zonefrontier.com to learn more. That's zonefrontier.com to learn more. Matt, thank you for joining us. We are on a wild tour of Bending Spoons, and now we're with you, your VP of Product, your co-founder. You've been with the company since the very beginning, 13 years. Thank you for joining us.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  Thank you for being here.

• 28:59Molly O'Shea?

  Well, one very particularly interesting part of your story and what we were talking before the camera started rolling was how how much the culture thrives on meritocracy. And one of the best examples, I think, is, you know, your story of stepping down as CPO so someone else could take.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  So what happened is that some months ago, I was Chief Product Officer at Bending Spoons at that time. And it became evident that one of our product managers, quite an incredible career and joined some years later, some years before, had matured into a professional that was definitely able to create more value in the position I was in than than I was. And when I had that realization, I decided to go through the painful step of stepping down so that he could fill fill that role.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  And I'm actually proud of what he's doing in that role. I think it was a very good decision. But, you know, beside the personal experience, I think that this example ties to, as you as you were saying, the concept of meritocracy and how much we care about meritocracy here. We we try to operate when possible by first principles. And, you know, I think that I'm not going to say anything controversial if I say that if you look at an organization and and you hope to achieve the highest possible level

• 30:45Speaker 03

  of of effectiveness of that organization, given a certain set of people that are part of it. You need to make sure that every position will be filled by the person that's the best fit in that position, you know. Everybody will agree with me when it comes to this statement. But then you need to take the principle and derive what it implies. And what it implies is that especially at a company like ours, where we are constantly raising the bar of the quality and the talent of the people that we attract and we hire. You know, we become a better-known company.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  We acquire better-known products. So our employer brand grows, so we attract better people. And at the same time, you know, we care a lot about the selection process and making sure that we feed whatever signal from the success that people are having in the company back into the way we test people. So the natural consequence of that is that through time, you'll have better and better hires. And it's going to be more and more likely that people will grow in the organization to the point that they're actually more capable than their leads. And at that point, you'll get into the situations where it becomes apparent

• 32:13Speaker 03

  that a lead will be better stepping down so that somebody else, who would be better in that role, could take on that role. Now, it sounds linear, sounds rational. But if you want to make that happen, as a manager, you need to have some of the toughest professional conversations that you'll ever be exposed to. Because going to a lead, to a professional, and telling them, "Look, some of the people in the organization grew so much and showed such an impressive trajectory that we believe that it's best for you to step down." That's one of the toughest things you can tell someone.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  But again, it's a necessary ingredient of this idea of meritocracy if you want to take it to the extreme consequences and live by it, right? In my role previously, it happened a few times that I had to deal with this type of situations. It's always been extremely tough. But what they have in common is that I was always very proud and sure that that was absolutely the best thing to do. I believe that it's one of the highest ROI things that you could do in terms of optimizing an organization, so one of the toughest, but was also one of the highest ROI. And that's both because you get someone filling a high-leverage role that's more effective at that role.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  But it's not just the immediate result. It's also the positive externalities. You're basically communicating to everyone in the company that every position is up for grabs, that there's no position that if they work hard enough and if they're talented enough, they won't be able to fill. And this is a very powerful message. You know, one quick off-topic is that something I'm very proud of is that if you take a look at some of our business units, some of our products, some of our function, you'll find that some of the people filling those very high-leverage positions are not even thirty, or maybe they've just turned thirties.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  So especially in Italy, where you have a culture whereby people that have been in a job for a long time, they will be entrenched in those positions. But I would say even just worldwide, knowing that, you know, a person who's in their early thirties are managing companies and products worth billions of dollars, that's really insane. And again, that's made possible by the openness of giving everyone a chance. And so this is something that happened before with other leads that I personally asked to step down. And at some point, it happened with me as well.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  I realized that Lorenzo, this guy that we promoted, had one took. And I'm proud of, you know, walking the talk. And I'm even more proud because even though we made it a point since the very early days, never to look at the founder figure as something different from anybody else. We don't want to idolize it in any possible way. There might be anyway an expectation that no matter how meritocratic you are, there might be limits to that meritocracy. For example, if that meritocracy conflicts with a founder, you know, you'll stop applying it.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  And I think that one of the reasons why I'm proud of what I did was because since I'm a founder, that signal, that positive externality is even more powerful. And again, it's an even stronger message for everyone that any job is up for grabs, even the CEO job.

• 36:14Molly O'Shea?

  Luca also likes to live by this quite well. And every December, he puts out a Google form?

• 36:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. He puts out a form where he asks people he trusts whether they believe that somebody else could take his role, that, you know, would be better positioned to lead the company, whether, you know, anyone is dissatisfied with his performance. And, you know, it might look like some sort of a performative act from outside. Like, you know, nobody will really tell you that you're doing a poor job. But he actually means it.

• 36:56Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  And I think even more, even if it didn't, even if the feedback or the signal didn't come through that Google form and that process, if he realized, or if anyone realized that somebody at the company could do a better job than he could in that role, he would be the first one to say, "There needs to be a change here." I'm absolutely sure of it, which is why I'm saying that, again, anyone, if they work intensely enough, if they're talented enough, could aspire even to that position.

• 37:30Molly O'Shea?

  Well, I definitely believe that because when we did our long-form sit-down with Luca, you know, he said a lot of the mission of the company is to become an ultimate truth-seeker. And so I could definitely see him wanting all those data points around his performance and execution and how to make the organization better.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, the ultimate act of truth-seeking, right?

• 37:52Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. And then it's really interesting to your point earlier of even if they're young, if you have younger folks, you know, twenties, thirties, doesn't matter, if they're skilled, they will excel to the top. We're having Vali on. And I would say she's quite humble, but she's so impressive, leading ninety products and is the GM of AOL. Like, it's so cool to see that kind of rise, in a sense, so fast within five years.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, we love her. And in general, I think it's an intoxicating feeling that you get in here, that, you know, nothing is precluded, that this is a place where you can really grow as quickly as possible. There's many components to a person growing professionally. And one component is absolutely experience. And, you know, the way we try to give people the ability, the possibility of gain that experience is by offering the chance to work on different products, even products that are very different from each other, all of them very relevant within the same company, which is quite rare.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  Growing professionally also, you know, goes through being surrounded by highly talented people, which is something that we try to ensure through the selectivity of our hiring process. But those ingredients are not sufficient unless there's a will to recognize that if a person proves themselves, there's no limit to how quickly they can grow. So again, all this package is necessary for everyone here to get that feeling of, you know, everything is possible. There's no limit to how fast I can grow. And, you know, one of the dream that we had when we founded Bending Spoons, for sure, was to create the best company in the world.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  Now, anyone will attach different meanings to what the best company in the world means. But for sure, one of the meaning that's very dear to us is being a company where people can really fulfill their potential in the quickest, in the most relevant way.

• 40:10Molly O'Shea?

  One of the things that you talk a lot about is startup mode. So what does that mean inside Bending Spoons?

• 40:16Speaker 03

  Right, so the expression startup mode was born out of the necessity to counter some of the most frequent criticism that we get when we acquire companies, which is that, given that the acquisition and the integration often entails a decrease in headcount, a profound restructuring of teams, you know, an external observer that's not privy to what happens in here will see that the number of people working on a product decreases as a consequence of us taking over.

• 40:56Speaker 03

  And reasonably, will determine, will argue that we don't care about making the product better. We don't care about evolving the product. And that necessarily what will happen is that that product will deteriorate. The quality will go down and customers and users will not be served in the same way as they were before. And of course, this hinges on the fact that there must be a correlation between the size of a team and the quality of the work that's done on a specific product. Our argument is that that correlation is mild at best. And there are examples of the opposite. And startup mode is a very good shortcut for this idea.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  Like, anyone, like, a lot of people might have experienced themselves.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  That what happens in a company during the startup phase in the early years is very different to what happens when it grows into more of a corporate beast.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  Typically, people will associate to the startup phase as a period where, you know, there's a smaller team often out of necessity. You don't have the resources to fund a larger operation. But then it's going to be all hands on deck. It's going to be a lot of fluidity in the roles and people feeling that basically, everything could be their responsibility. A sense of ownership that involves each and everyone. Intensity in the work, you know, hard work, ambition. And, you know, what happens naturally is that,

• 42:42Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm not claiming that this is what happens with all companies. Matter of fact, there's a lot of companies that are able to scale and retain the startup vibe, even when they grow up and, you know, we try to be a prime example of that phenomenon. But what typically happens is that, you know, as a product becomes more successful, both founders and investors will feel it's actually the best thing to do to actually add people, to increase the team, because naturally you'll think more people, you'll be able to pursue more opportunities, more objectives.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  You'll be able to do more, you know, customers and users want to have more. You'll be able to evolve the product. There are so many things to do, you know, it makes a lot of sense. But if you don't navigate that growth in the right way, and that's a super complicated things to do, what naturally happens is that if you have a product and you add people, in order to operate it, you'll need to create a lot of sub-teams. You're going to have to split up responsibility. Different parts of the product will be managed by different teams. And so you'll lose that sort of holistic approach to operating a product

• 44:07Speaker 03

  that you breathe so often when you see what happens in startups. Responsibility will fragment a little bit.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  Even people that have bright ideas and, you know, are hungry for impact, they'll feel like they'll need to involve some other teams for something to happen. So everything kind of slows down. What used to take days takes weeks, takes months. You need to add layers of management to handle the complexity and the increase in the communication complexity. And then you start seeing some misaligned incentives as well. Because, you know, if, like during the startup days, especially if employees are involved in the ownership of the company. Everybody knows that what's best for the company is best for themselves as well. But when the organization grows larger,

• 45:04Speaker 03

  you start getting people that start optimizing for their own career at the detriment of what's good for the company. And so, you know, one thing that starts happening is that if I'm the manager, I understand and I feel that if I want my role to grow in importance, I'll have to grow the number of people in my team and so on and so forth. But sometimes, you know, that growth might not be necessary. So you have all sorts of misaligned incentives. And ultimately, long story short, is that you end up with a company whose promise was we'll have more people, we'll do more things. But then everything kind of slows down and that doesn't happen. And it's not because people are not talented.

• 45:49Speaker 03

  It's just the consequence of, you know, incentives being placed wrongly or, you know, organization growth and stuff like that. So this is all to say that what we really try to do when we acquire a company, we go in and we allocate a team, is we try to bring back this startup mode. We try to bring back the sense of ownership. We try to make sure that whenever somebody has an idea, that idea can be pursued very quickly without having to involve, you know, four different teams. And as a consequence of that, you see, you know, the frequency with which we ship improvements increasing.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  And, you know, you even have fewer intermediaries between users and customers and the product itself. Often, when we acquire products that are mostly sales-led in terms of their growth, we'll have one product manager that will be responsible for managing the product and at the same time managing the relationship with customers. So they get an unfiltered view of what's necessary and they have all the knowledge to be able to talk to a customer, knowing what's going to be easy to implement, what makes sense to prioritize, et cetera, et cetera. So there are plenty of advantages that come down to simply undo

• 47:14Speaker 03

  some of that corporatification, if you can say that, of companies that happen through time. But to that, we add a lot of other things. So for once, for one, talent, talent density. You know, even if you believe that all other things being equal,

• 47:35Speaker 03

  the companies we acquire are equally attractive to talent than we are. We do have an advantage that's very hard to replicate, which is that, and we were talking about this before,

• 47:46Speaker 03

  within our portfolio, we have plenty of products. So people that come into Benning Spoons, they don't need to come in because they want to work specifically on V-mail or WeTransfer or AOL. But they need to be in love with the idea of being at Benning Spoons and they can actually be exposed to a lot of different products, which has the nice consequence that they can have the same CV that they would get by jumping from one company to the next every couple of years, but without the need to go through another hiring process, learning the culture in a company and learning how the company operate, proving themselves to demonstrate that they deserve certain positions or certain roles.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  So, you know, we actually offer this insane combination of variety, but within the same culture, within the same organization. And at the same time, of course, we're better known because we are larger, we have scale. We're better known that every single product we acquire. So even that contributes to be more attractive. So through that mechanism, we're actually able to attract and retain talent that contributes to our talent density being higher typically. And so if you have fewer people that are, where talent density is higher, the typical result is that you can do much more with less. And then on top of that, you know, you also add the fact

• 49:14Speaker 03

  that by having experienced working on so many different products in different verticals, we've just learned a lot of lessons. You know, we failed a bunch of times to the point that we now know that it's best not to try that thing again because the likelihood of success is very, is very low.

• 49:31Molly O'Shea?

  What are the hardest lessons that you've had to learn?

• 49:33Speaker 03

  You know, as a product person, you actually need to be optimistic, right? You need to believe that if you come up with an idea, there's a possibility that that idea will be revolutionary, that, you know, will lead to great things. It's the basis of being able to generate those ideas in the first place. If you don't have that optimism, you're going to be like, oh, you know, nothing will work. You know, what am I even doing here? So you need to start from there. But, you know, being optimistic about a thing and a thing sounding plausible and a thing sounding like it could work is very different from actually working in practice. And so I think like the general, like, you know,

• 50:15Speaker 03

  one of the things that you'll learn by working for decades on so many different products is how often your ideas are wrong, how often you end up failing. And again, you need to, it's a sort of, you know, it's a trade-off. It's a fine balance between retaining that optimism that at the 10th attempt or the 15th attempt will show you the way, while at the same time retaining the common sense and the knowledge of probabilities that will tell you that a lot of things will fail. So, and so you avoid over-investing in things that sound good and maybe you don't have validation for. Or as I said earlier, you avoid investing in things that

• 50:58Speaker 03

  they sound pretty reasonable, pretty rational, but you see them fail a bunch of times before and you don't think that it's just a matter of not having found the right product for them to succeed, right? So that helps a lot. It gives you a lot more common sense. It gives you a deeper understanding of reality and it helps you focus your resources on the few initiatives that could really move the needle rather than having a more kind of spray and pray approach.

• 51:25Molly O'Shea?

  I know we have a few minutes left, but I think it was really great to hear over lunch with you and Francesco, the team, how impactful the IPO was for you all and in many different ways. So I'd love to hear from you. I know you gave a speech at the IPO. What was your speech about? What was different?

• 51:46Speaker 03

  So it was a very emotional moment for me. One of the reasons is that

• 51:52Speaker 03

  Like because of our culture, we don't get to pause very often and celebrate achievements and milestones and pat ourselves on our shoulders. Of course, I mean, we were happy when things go well, but we've always had this mindset like, you know, what's the next challenge? What can we do better? What can we do more? And, you know, the IPO was a sort of like forced stop to that mindset so that like for one day we could just look back at what we accomplished and take it in. So for me personally,

• 52:29Speaker 03

  like that day was really, you know, they say that in near death experiences, you have your whole life flesh in front of you. I haven't tried those, but that's what they say. But in a way, you know, that IPO was like a moment where all the, you know, the whole experience and all the failures, all the hard work, all the people that contributed to it, you know, they sort of

• 52:54Speaker 03

  manifested very clearly in my thoughts. So very emotional, have like fond memories of that day. And while that that speech was substantially

• 53:07Speaker 03

  was substantially, you know, showing that our take, which is impossible sometimes is just maybe, and it's not that impossible after all.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  I mean, that IPO was a clear example of that. We compressed the time it typically takes to IPO to much less than it normally does. And, you know, the banks supporting us were all believed that we would never make it for the day that we had planned to make it. So again,

• 53:41Speaker 03

  one more demonstration that we believe in this impossible maybe tagline. And then it was just thanking everyone for the insane amount of hard work that went into making Bending Spoons. And I also add a personal reflection that I know was shared by a lot of people about the fact that, yes, it's spooners, as we call ourselves, that put in the hard work. But for sure, we benefited from having some friends and family and people around us cheering on us and supporting us and believing in us and, you know, making it possible for us to focus

• 54:23Speaker 03

  on making this possible than on other things. And I know that that resonated with a lot of people. So I'm happy about it. But it was super emotional. And, you know, when I started talking, it was a short speech, so only a couple of minutes. But when I started talking, I felt the burden of representing everybody's thinking and everybody's emotion. And I also was reminded about the fact that it wasn't really something that could repeat itself, you know? So I had to make it work with just one attempt.

• 54:57Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  So at the very, at the very beginning, it felt almost impossible again. But then, but then, you know, what I wanted to say and

• 55:08Speaker 03

  how grateful I was for the people there and outside for their effort was so powerful and so strong that ultimately I just delivered this speech. And it should have been Luca delivering it if he had decided to join us on the podium. But I admire him so much for deciding to to join the rest of the team on Times Square instead. And so he fell on me not so much because I was the right person, but because, you know, I gave a couple of speeches before. And so, you know, I probably was the best, the best second alternative to it. But I'm really happy that I had that opportunity. And yeah, it was definitely a moment to remember.

• 55:51Molly O'Shea?

  Incredible. So many incredible stories. I said this before, but I'm going to have to come back to Bending Spoons. You guys have so much going on here.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  So much to tell.

• 56:01Molly O'Shea?

  So much. Well, thank you so much, Matt. I really appreciate the time and all the expertise that you shared with us.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 56:09Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you. Today's episode is sponsored by V C X by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. Learn more at getvcx.com. Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called Generated Assets, and it brings A I into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before. Here's how it works. You type in an idea like A I powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow, or defense tech companies growing revenue over 25% year over year. Public's A I then dispatches a swarm of agents that scan every single U S stock, evaluates them, and instantly builds a custom index around your thesis.

• 56:52Molly O'Shea?

  What really stands out is how clearly it explains why each stock is included. And before you invest, you can even back test your idea against the S and P 500. So you're making decisions with real context, not just guessing. And beyond Generated Assets, Public lets you invest in stocks, bonds, options, crypto, all in one place. They'll even give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com/sorcery. Paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in the description. Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone, anywhere. Get visas handled fast and get back to building.

• 57:32Molly O'Shea?

  Visit deal.com/sorcery. That's D E E L dot com slash sorcery. Vali, welcome to Sorcery. Thank you for having me here at Bending Spoons.

• 57:44Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you for having me.

• 57:46Molly O'Shea?

  You're very welcome. So I'm, one, very excited to speak with you, but also a little bit intimidated. You've been here for five years. You're the general manager of AOL now. You manage 90 plus products. And it took you three applications to get in?

• 58:05Speaker 04

  That's right. Yeah, it took me three, three tries. The first one was for a summer internship a few years ago. I was still probably not ready. So I got, you know, rejected right at the C V application, C V screening, gone. Then I tried again for First Ascend, which is a great event that we run for very highly talented students. And I got rejected after almost getting at the end. And after that, I just said, you know, like, I want to get in now. I was rejected too many times. And I was like, now I have to prove myself that I can get in. So I tried again. And the third was the charm.

• 58:50Molly O'Shea?

  What age did you start applying? Because you joined when you were 25. You're five years into this.

• 58:56Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 58:56Molly O'Shea?

  How did you know Bending Spoons was going to be the most legit company owner?

• 59:02Speaker 04

  So for this, I have to thank my sister, who's also a spooner, fun fact. She told me, you should check out this company. It's really great. Sounds super fun. When I was around maybe 22. And that's the first time I applied. And by then, like Bending Spoons was not, of course, as well known as it is today. But the more I got to know it, the more I got engaged and I understood it was probably going to become a great company, just because of the people who were running it and the people who were working here. They were all awesome. And I was like, I want to work with these guys.

• 59:38Molly O'Shea?

  So Christie was just telling me before we started that when you joined, there was like, there was an all hands or a meeting of some sort, and you raised your hand to speak. And you said, how do I get involved in the most, the largest projects here? And you were just 25 at the time. He was a little bit intimidated by that. But then he also said, that was pretty badass to come in fresh and immediately want to be put on the largest projects. And now you're G M of AOL and manage 90 products. So what was the thinking there?

• 1:00:11Speaker 04

  I think I just wanted to be involved to really listen in to what other people were saying, how they were thinking about things. I feel like here, the biggest thing you can do is to listen to people because everyone is so great and so talented. That is really a wasted opportunity not to listen in, at least in meetings. So that's what really, that was the angle, why I was asking that question back then. And I think over the years, I learned how to just listen to people, understand more about what we do, understand the vision behind Bending Spoons from Luke, from Francesco, from the other Francesco, we have so many Francescos, many Francescos. And I just, I guess I just leaned into, into the Bending Spoons culture and.

• 1:00:58Speaker 04

  It worked very well.

• 1:01:00Molly O'Shea?

  In your five-year anniversary, Luca said you are two great things. You're very empathetic, and then you're also a go-getter yesterday. So how did you develop this intense desire and, I guess, what you guys call extreme ownership?

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  So I think everything was very much rooted in the first years I was here. At some point, I got asked to join an acquisition. It was a pretty small one compared to the ones we are doing now. And I joined there as a data analyst initially, but I was the only non-technical person there in the sense that I was working only with another software engineer. So I started working in many roles at once. I started doing customer support and design, product management, growth management. And I got to get a bit of everything that we do here and understand more hands-on what everything is really about. And I think this approach was really a privilege for me because it got me to understand

• 1:02:03Speaker 04

  all the roles, all the functions here, who does what, how things link together. And this kind of attitude, I think, is what really helped me then becoming a lead and helping others develop that kind of hands-on attitude and just, you know, get things done, which in the end is what drives this company. I think getting things done is what we like the most.

• 1:02:26Molly O'Shea?

  Do you think most people put kind of superficial limits on themselves? And at what point do you break through that?

• 1:02:32Speaker 04

  Yes, I do think. And I think that's actually a great point because this is one thing that Francesco Manconi, our CTO, really did well for me because every time I told him something like, "I don't know, Francesco, I don't know if we can do this. I don't know if we can manage to get there." He was always telling me like, "It's easy," you know? And once you click and you think that everything is easy to achieve, then impossible becomes really, really possible. And I think having this switch in mind is really what helped me with my trajectory here. Every time thinking nothing is too hard to be achieved, which I think is also in our motto because our motto is "impossible, maybe."

• 1:03:14Speaker 04

  I think that's really a mindset, and it drives a lot of the impact we have here at Bending Spoons.

• 1:03:20Molly O'Shea?

  Because you have had such a fast descent, just walk me through that. Like, how did that happen? And how did the AOL deal happen for you?

• 1:03:31Speaker 04

  So it was a pretty long journey because from this first acquisition I was telling you about, basically, we started embedding a few more other mobile apps that were, you know, left without a team here and there. So it was really just, you know, collecting a lot of unattended products back then in time. And slowly, we started understanding that there was still a lot of impact to unlock. And with more and more acquisitions coming into Bending Spoons, many other teams and many other apps and products were embedded into my team. And then there was this one big acquisition, which was Mosaic, which is a large suite of mobile apps.

• 1:04:13Speaker 04

  Once we acquired that, the team by then was 50 people, more than 80 apps. And we started really thinking big about what we could achieve. After that, another couple acquisitions came in, and then AOL in January this year. When I knew about AOL and about all the technical challenges that were involved there, I almost always, you know, laid my eyes on it and I was like, "Hmm, that looks very fun." So I volunteered to take on AOL.

• 1:04:47Molly O'Shea?

  But you're still managing Mosaic while you're leading AOL?

• 1:04:51Speaker 04

  I have other managers who support on both the Mosaic acquisition and Remini, which I'm overseeing. Most of my focus right now is on the AOL acquisition. So I would say 80% of my time is devoted to AOL.

• 1:05:07Molly O'Shea?

  Did you ever think that you would be managing a very large American company?

• 1:05:12Speaker 04

  No, absolutely not. No way. If you told me this, but even three years ago, I would say, "Impossible." But again, impossible, maybe.

• 1:05:22Molly O'Shea?

  Exactly, like, what is the process through an acquisition for you guys? How big are the teams? Like, how long do you set, like, maybe target dates, milestones, goals you want to reach? Like, what is... I have no idea. What is the process like with an acquisition like that?

• 1:05:41Speaker 04

  So when we start an acquisition, we always start from, you know, some very solid basis on which we can believe, we believe we can, you know, help the business grow, where we see very, you know, untapped potential, where we could drive impact. We usually select those targets. But after we acquire a company, that's where we really get hands-on on understanding everything. So we usually always start by interviewing everything, everyone at the company to understand how things, you know, are working, like what we do, like what people do in their everyday work, what we can do better. And we really try to map out everything that there is to know about the business.

• 1:06:24Speaker 04

  Because unlike how many people could think about acquisitions, you don't really know everything until you really enter the door, right? So you don't understand everything there is to understand before buying a company. You need to get in, understand how people are running things, and decide like where you wanted to go from there. After that, what usually starts is this transformation phase. This is the moment where we apply our, you know, Bending Spoons platform. We start designing the roadmap for the product, for the business, and how to make it grow. This phase for AOL was a bit different because there was this carve-out to be done.

• 1:07:07Speaker 04

  We acquired AOL from Yahoo, and we had to somehow replatform everything onto the Banning Spoons platform from the Yahoo one. And this took many months because it's technically and operationally very challenging. But it's also, I think, the most fun part of the project itself. So I'm obsessed by operational excellence in general. So I love to see things work out and, you know, puzzles. That's what I love, so.

• 1:07:37Molly O'Shea?

  Did you find any surprises?

• 1:07:40Speaker 04

  Many.

• 1:07:42Speaker 04

  Many surprises. Many surprises, but again, nothing that would change, you know, our excitement about the acquisition.

• 1:07:52Molly O'Shea?

  So I'm going to be interviewing Jim Landzone of Yahoo, I think, in a week or so. This might come out around the same time. I don't know. You never know when these get released. But in the prep of that and speaking with their team, you know, it's kind of underrated. A lot of people will say, "Okay, you know, AOL is a dead brand. It's, you know, kind of like a zombie company or something like that." But talking with their team and understanding the acquisition, no, it was like, it was a very healthy company. They got it to a great place. You guys are going to make it to an even shinier place. But what were, like, what were the kind of initial observations of the company and

• 1:08:37Molly O'Shea?

  what you wanted to change?

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, so as you say, AOL was a pretty healthy business when we acquired it, and it's still as of today. I think there are many misconceptions about the brand just because it's been there for a while. People think that it's dead. But instead, it has like millions and millions of users who are still very active and still very engaged. We have the news portal where we are envisioning, you know, to improve the content we can offer to users, the way we recommend content to users. And despite many perceptions, our user base is also very interested in exploring AI, maybe having someone who can start, like, start them to this experience.

• 1:09:20Speaker 04

  And of course, there is also the mail product. And the mail product is like extremely retaining by design, right? So people are extremely engaged with their mail. We have many ideas of how to make the mail better for our user base. And we believe that the product has been slightly neglected in the past few years. So we believe to give it, you know, a fresh start with Bending Spoons.

• 1:09:44Molly O'Shea?

  You have a data background. So how do you think in terms of data and kind of the measurements of what success looks like?

• 1:09:50Speaker 04

  So we are extremely scientific. I am also, but in general, at Bending Spoons, I would say we are very scientific in the way we approach things. So everything we do for our products, everything we want to test, we really test it. So we A/B test everything we release because we never want opinions to get in the way of success. So I'm never, you know, I'm never asking people to do something or we never say, "Let's do this," and then we just, you know, roll it out because of an opinion or because of a hunch, because of an idea we have. We always test what we do. So that's where data really comes in.

• 1:10:34Speaker 04

  Unless there are KPIs that are really responding to what we're doing and that are indicating clear success, we don't release anything. So that's what I love because we have the possibility to test also very bold ideas and see how numbers and KPIs roll in that direction or in the other. And then, very statistically and very rigorously, we apply the changes.

• 1:10:59Molly O'Shea?

  Since Banning Spoons has quite the first principles approach to software, and you've worked across so many products, what are the commonalities between maybe mistakes that were embedded in initial products that you had to fix? Or kind of intuitive things that were, yeah, that were missed? Or some things that were overlooked within those products?

• 1:11:23Speaker 04

  I think the issue most of the times is that while obsessing on perfection, people miss so many opportunities to get things done and testing things. So I think the analysis paralysis, especially when it comes to, for example, code deploy or infrastructural design, those things can really slow down a product. So you need very few but very solid bases when you build something. But then you need to add a lot of flexibility and make sure that there are not, you know, not super constraining processes or approval lines and things like this.

• 1:12:06Speaker 04

  Because in my experience, those are the things that kill a product, the inability to act on the product. And sometimes companies, just because they become bigger and bigger, they tend to... You know, overweight themselves with these processes and approvals and inability to really run the business. Well, when you have an extremely talented and responsible team who really feel own like owners of what they do, you really get to a place where people can drive change safely and meticulously, but with like without ever adding too much, you know, in terms of processes and all those things.

• 1:12:50Speaker 04

  So I think this is always reflected in the code. It's always reflected in the infrastructure, but it's also reflected in the processes people have to follow that sometimes are just overly long or overly burdensome, like cumbersome.

• 1:13:05Molly O'Shea?

  What are the typical compositions of the teams working on various projects?

• 1:13:10Speaker 04

  It's very diverse. I wouldn't say there is one fits all kind of organization. It depends on the product, but I would say there is always maybe a forty, thirty, forty percent of engineers in our teams and the rest is divided into more business oriented roles like product managers, growth managers, customer support managers, designers. So I would say a forty sixty business, engineering to business.

• 1:13:41Molly O'Shea?

  And where do you see most people are coming from?

• 1:13:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we are looking to hire talent talent across all Europe. So of course we have a nucleus of in Italy, just because that's where the company started. So that's where our brand is very strong, but I think we are becoming stronger and stronger in Europe. And at some point, very soon, probably, we're already doing it. We will start higher also in the U.S.

• 1:14:10Molly O'Shea?

  For someone with such a drive and motivation, this is a question I'll ask in most of my interviews. People will say like, performance is derivative of who you surround yourself with or who you're inspired by. Where did you get that drive? Like, who are the people that keep you motivated?

• 1:14:26Speaker 04

  You know, as cheesy as it could sound, really, I think all of my team does this with me every day, just because it's composed of people who are so genuinely interested in moving things forward that it's it's impossible not to feel driven in this company. When I first started, for sure, Francesco Mancona, who's the CTO today, and Luca, Luca Ferrari, our CEO, they have been two of the most relevant people in my growth, but there are so many others that it would be like unfair not to mention, just because they have all really participated in who I am and who I became in Bending Spoons.

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  So I'm thinking of my software engineering lead, Martina, like she's awesome, many others, so many others, like really couldn't name them all, but so many.

• 1:15:20Molly O'Shea?

  Do you find this culture to be unique between your friends' cultures or people you went to university with?

• 1:15:26Speaker 04

  I would say sadly, in the sense that I wished for all my friends to have the same experience in their companies, but I feel like so far Bending Spoons has really been a one of a kind, at least in Italy. So I hope many other companies will start, you know, applying this framework and the values that Bending Spoons have. Of course, there are many others that are rising and that's exciting, but for our most established companies, I feel like we're not there yet. And I wish people would start, you know, realizing that this is a model that really works and that we have so much talent in Italy, in Europe, that just waits for, you

• 1:16:07Speaker 04

  know, a good opportunity to make their their talents grow and shine, which, yeah, that's that's what I really hope, but we're not there yet.

• 1:16:16Molly O'Shea?

  So as we close out, I have to ask you, what are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months?

• 1:16:22Speaker 04

  I'm looking forward to making AOL shine and to finish this carve out process so that we can really get hands on on focusing a thousand percent on the product and making sure we can give the best experience possible to our users.

• 1:16:40Molly O'Shea?

  What is the opportunity for AOL?

• 1:16:42Speaker 04

  I think there is so much, like, we have so many ideas on how to grow the company with synergies also with Bending Spoons products. There are so many. Our user base on AOL is extremely engaged, so we believe we can provide a lot of value for them through many, many different channels, many different ideas. We know what they like, so it's very easy for us to, you know, present them with very relevant either products or content on both levels. There is so much opportunity, so.

• 1:17:16Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing.

• 1:17:17Speaker 04

  I really look forward to that.

• 1:17:18Molly O'Shea?

  Vali, thank you so much.

• 1:17:20Speaker 04

  Thank you so much, Molly. It was great being here.

• 1:17:22Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.