20VC: Bending Spoons: The Most Untold Success Story in Startups: Lessons Scaling to 500M Downloads, $360M in Reported 2023 Sales and a $2.55BN Valuation... Bootstrapped with Luca Ferrari, Co-Founder and CEO @ Bending Spoons

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2024

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Luca Ferrari is Co-Founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, one of the most incredible but untold success stories in startups. Luca has scaled Bending Spoons to 100M monthly active users, $380M in sales in 2023 and aiming to reach $500M in EBITDA by the end of 2026. The company’s products include Evernote, Meetup, Remini, and Splice and their products have now been downloaded more than 500M times.

In Today’s Episode with Luca Ferrari We Discuss:

From McKinsey Associate to $2BN Founder

What was Luca like as a child? How would his parents have described him?
Why did Luca share his McKinsey salary with his co-founders?
What were Luca’s biggest lessons from his failed startup?

Bootstrapping Bending Spoons

Why did Luca decide to bootstrap Bending Spoons?
What does Luca think about the EU vs. US startup environment?
Why did Luca kill a $7M project? What were his lessons?
How did Luca pick his investors?

How to Find the Best Talent

What are the 3 key traits Luca looks for when picking the best talent?
Why does Luca think traditional interview strategies do not work?
What tests does Luca conduct for each candidate?
What were Luca’s biggest hiring mistakes?

Mastering Acquisition & Growth

How does Luca determine which products to acquire? How does he identify signals?
How does Luca approach pricing assets? How does he win every bid?
What are Luca’s biggest lessons from acquiring Evernote?
What key lessons on risk management does Luca wish he’d known 10 years ago?
What are Luca’s biggest challenges on user acquisition?

Transcript

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0:00.0	The moment you think you're very smart, the likelihood that you make very dumb the mistakes
0:05.4	skyrocket, in my opinion.
0:07.5	We let others seek market fit and then if they will sell it.
0:12.2	Plus, we will acquire their company and try to make it even better than they have made
0:16.2	it up to that point.
0:17.1	The reason why we took that route, I think, is precisely because we crashed and
0:21.2	burned by being arrogant in thinking we knew what the market would want and we could build it for
0:26.3	them. Welcome to 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so excited for the show today. This guest
0:31.2	is the founder of the most incredible success story in tech that very few have ever heard of.
0:36.7	Bending Spoons, an Italian company that has scaled
0:39.9	their product suite to over 500 million downloads, 100 million monthly active users, are reported
0:46.5	380 million in sales in 2023, an evaluation of $2.25 billion. Absolutely insane. Plus, for the majority of their life,
0:57.5	they were bootstrapped. This is such an incredible story. I'm so thrilled to be joined today by
1:02.3	their co-founder and CEO, Luca Ferrari. But before we dive into this incredible discussion,
1:07.3	there's no shortage of helpful AI tools out there, but using them means switching
1:11.7	back and forth between yet another digital tool. What was supposed to simplify your workflow
1:16.6	just made it way more complicated, unless, of course, you're in Notion. In Notion, you can
1:21.9	automate the tedious tasks, like summarizing meeting notes, or finding next steps, really freeing you up to do the deep work
1:29.1	that we all want to do. And that's why Notion is used by over 50%, 50% of Fortune 500 companies and
1:36.3	teams that use Notion, send less emails, cancel more meetings and reduce spending on tools.
1:42.8	Try Notion for free when you go to notion.com
1:45.8	slash 20VC. And speaking of amazing products like Notion there, I'd like to talk to you about a
	...

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