Assertion certainty 3/5 debate potential 1/5

Evertail VCs sold equity back for €1 to avoid liquidation hassle

Luca Ferrari · Luca Ferrari: Scaling to 500M Downloads, $360M in Reported 2023 Sales and a $2.55BN Valuation |E1127 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 15, 2024 · at 8:27

Luca Ferrari is the co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons. He describes how investors in his previous startup Evertail waived their liquidation preferences to let the founders keep leftover capital.

0:00 / 0:25exact quote · 25.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The venture capital firm at the time preferred to sell their, the money would have been theirs because they had liquidation preferences. It would be pretty typical for a VC deal, but they, for them, it was more of the hassle of going through the liquidation process for 40,000 dollars and paying for lawyers and all that, and so they sold their shares to us for, I don't know, a euro, I think, or something”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Luca Ferrari

Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ferrari predicts AI will eliminate far more jobs than it creates
“But I will say, maybe, no, I don't, it doesn't qualify as advice, but the opinion I hear most often that I think is really poorly informed and poorly thought out is that Artificial intelligence will create more jobs than it will eliminate. I believe, and again…”
Luca Ferrari Mar 15, 2024 ▶ 58:47 Luca Ferrari: Scaling to 500M Downloads, $360M in Reported 2023 Sales and a $2.55BN Valuation |E1127 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Bending Spoons hires almost entirely for talent and motivation, disregarding experience
“In our case, we chose to focus on talent and motivation almost entirely disregarding experience.”
Luca Ferrari Mar 15, 2024 ▶ 41:22 Luca Ferrari: Scaling to 500M Downloads, $360M in Reported 2023 Sales and a $2.55BN Valuation |E1127 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Contradicted
Bending Spoons pays identical salaries regardless of an employee's geographic location
“Currently we have the same salaries regardless of where you are.”
Luca Ferrari Mar 15, 2024 ▶ 46:15 Luca Ferrari: Scaling to 500M Downloads, $360M in Reported 2023 Sales and a $2.55BN Valuation |E1127 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
No shareholders in Bending Spoons have liquidation preferences
“All our share owners, myself, our institutional investors, our colleagues who got equity through their working at the company, nobody has any liquidation preferences, so we're all on equal terms economically.”
Luca Ferrari Mar 15, 2024 ▶ 54:04 Luca Ferrari: Scaling to 500M Downloads, $360M in Reported 2023 Sales and a $2.55BN Valuation |E1127 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Bending Spoons acquires companies post-product-market fit to optimize them
“We let others seek market fit, and then we, if they will sell it to us, we will acquire their company and try to make it even better than they have made it up to that point.”
Luca Ferrari Mar 15, 2024 ▶ 0:08 Luca Ferrari: Scaling to 500M Downloads, $360M in Reported 2023 Sales and a $2.55BN Valuation |E1127 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Ferrari believes Apple Arcade has not been a great success
“I think Arcade is not a great success either.”
Luca Ferrari Mar 15, 2024 ▶ 19:26 Luca Ferrari: Scaling to 500M Downloads, $360M in Reported 2023 Sales and a $2.55BN Valuation |E1127 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.