Bending Spoons

“AOL is actually, I believe, a top five, the fifth most used email inbox in the Western world.”

“Most of our general managers who run businesses, on average, 50, a hundred million in revenue, so if they were a scale-up, they would be considered a large scale-up. Many of these people are like 27, 28. Most of them are, I think, very few are above 30.”

“It's the tip of the iceberg, but then from there to actual day-to-day, make it work, but even if I started over with all I know, and even if someone said, oh, I trust you'll do super well, here's a billion dollars, to get to where we are now, say, 12 years aft…”

“We have You know, many assumptions each as a probability distribution, and we debate assumptions extensively without ever looking at what the model will spit out as a consequence. That's forbidden, because we think that if you see the P&L, basically the busine…”

“All else equal, we do prefer a permanent capital, and it's not so much because you, even permanent capital could ask you to liquidate. It's just that they don't have to. And I think the fact that they don't have to reduces the probability that you'll find your…”

“A hundred percent acquisitions, no minorities, like and then, unlike a private equity, which would typically look to sell them three, five, seven years down the line, We buy off our balance sheet to own and operate forever”

“We don't win because we're good at predictions, we win because we can run them better, so we can offer a good price”

“If you look at our per share revenue or EBITDA growth over the past four years, Where we are a decent scale, I guess, like I said, about 1.3 billion this year. It's still about 75% per year.”

“I check each candidate before we extend an offer. I extend the offer. I talk to many of the new hires. I help with talent density.”

“And like we said, we raised seven hundred million dollars at an eleven billion dollar valuation in equity.”

“We actually went after a grinder The LGBTQ plus dating app in 2019. So the app was owned by a Chinese firm and Sifuse was forcing it to sell. It was a big bite for us at the time. We're much smaller. It would have quadrupled the company. We didn't have an equa…”

“And the time investment and the effort does not scale linearly with revenue. So for us to do an acquisition that will bring in half a billion in revenue is not five times as time consuming as one that will bring a hundred million.”

“The first acquisition, I think we closed it within the year, so pretty quickly, and we paid 10,000 for it, and I don't remember what it was called, but it was a, an iOS app to personalize your keyboard.”

“So we have a massive investment in AI applied to predict future performance based on CVs, cover letters, test results.”

“We saw almost no correlation between the teams we considered more talented and more hardworking and those who came out on top, and so we concluded probably, I mean, it's not a huge sample, but probably to go from zero to one, Luck plays a huge role. There are …”

“Meetup, historically, you could only use it as an organizer. You could only use it if you paid for it. We introduced a free tier, so you could organize quite, we actually do quite a lot for free, which kind of qualifies as a price decrease in a way, like we ga…”

“Unlike a private equity, which typically would make relatively shallow interventions, maybe change the management team, rethink the entire company, try to come up with a vision for the most successful version of that company, and then work as hard as we can to…”

“From the beginning, we enabled people, we pay just cash, no variable pay of any kind, and people can choose, though, to receive some of their cash pay in equity at a discount.”

“We try to make an offer that's sometimes the maximum will to pay or close to it because we think although we could probably get a better deal in the moment if we started lower, Then we don't want to establish a reputation for people you can push around and get…”

“Retention is at an all-time high, despite prices being higher, because now Evernote is substantially more, it varies by country, and, but it's probably an average, say, 60% more expensive, so it's substantially more expensive than before, but actually retentio…”

“I think people in general overestimate the value of R&D. Let me qualify. They think that generally pouring money into building stuff pays, pays off. It's really not true at all. What we find is that there's a very small number of things that pay, pay off hands…”

“I think we have far superior competitive advantage, advantages than a private equity because essentially a private equity, every single, every acquisition is, is almost a, we start afresh in a way. In our case, we do well because of the platform and the struct…”

“We think about the jobs we offer as our most important product. So you need to know what your customer is, what you're offering, how you're differentiated, and have the courage of really focusing on that sharply.”

“We had about 40,000 euros left. The, that money belonged to the VC because of liquidation preferences, but it was too little for the size of that fund, and they told us, look, it's just too much hassle and legal cost for us to go through this administrative pr…”

“Either we buy businesses where almost all the value lies in existing customers or users, like people, ok, these have been acquired, it's just about now managing them as well as possible. Or if a lot of the value is predicated on substantial additional user acq…”

“My guess is that we paid, like, 50% more than the next best offer, so it was really a win-win, which is the way I believe you should try to, any good strategy needs to be somewhat win-win, otherwise it will not go far.”

“We will do maybe five acquisitions a year. Could be one, could be 10 max. I mean, if it's really a stretch.”

“It's absolutely guaranteed to create at least some perverse incentives, because nobody can set perfect incentives. The world is too complicated. It changes too fast. For sure. So, even if you are a genius whatever you set as incentives will be imperfect.”

“This year alone, this twenty-twenty-five, it's almost at the end of the year, we'll be receiving About 800,000 unique job applications will be hiring 250 people.”

“I think in two and a half years, we have released But not probably about 250 significant product improvements.”

“Today, we're actually hoping to invest easily a billion plus, but conceptually the same thing.”

“Another one we do is a yearly retreat where we bring everybody to a remote, exciting, typically exotic destination for seven, eight, nine days on the company's time and dime. it's just a vacation, but with colleagues. The last one, so I don't remember in whi…”

“We rebuilt almost entirely the code base, the cloud infrastructure. There's almost nothing, at least nothing of the core components. It's now far higher performance. Notes sync up in less than 10% of the time. In some cases, one percent of the time.”