Bending Spoons IPO首日涨40%，市值16.8亿美元

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We've got Luca Ferrari, the co-founder, CEO, and chair of Bending Spoons joining us from the NASDAQ. Also with us, Bailey Lip Schultz, Bloomberg News IPO reporter, who joins us here in the studio. Luke, I want us to just start with with what exactly the portfolio is and and sort of how you want to communicate to investors what you're going to do with assets that many people remember from the world of web 1.0.

Thank you for having me. Uh first of all, uh let me explain how we operate cuz it's uh quite unusual, perhaps unique. uh we've spent the last 13 years uh building what I consider an exceptional platform uh of very high talent density, a culture of high performance uh and uh rationality. Uh 50 plus proprietary technologies and operating system for running digital businesses as effectively and as efficiently as possible and a a lot of data that helps us make better decisions at the stage of acquisition and then operations.

Then what we do with this with this engine is we go and acquire digital businesses with unexpressed potential and we integrate them very deeply on onto this platform uh in a way that I haven't I haven't seen anybody do before. They share the entirely the same technological layer. We we we have a core team that moves fluidly across all our businesses. Um and uh and we transform them deeply. We rebuild the org uh the technology the the monetization.

We accelerate innovation, launch new features. So, it's a pretty unique model. Uh, and as you were describing, we we have established over time a portfolio uh of of brands, some of which are very well known and uh some of which are more dated. We also have bought more up and cominging companies, but there's a bit of both. Um, we win, we do well uh not necessarily when the company we buy is young or old uh growing fast or more stagnating, but when we can make that trajectory a lot better.

So that's that's where we try to excel.

Luca, we were talking earlier about this and I just am interested if you can explain for viewers kind of the path to better monetization. Again, you have about a half a billion monthly active users, but only a small fraction of that are actually deriving value from what does that mean for the company going forward and how do you grow that?

Yeah, exactly. Half a billion people use our products. Quote unquote only 9 uh million people, so roughly 2% pay for them. Uh which uh obviously is an opportunity. We also believe that it's important to provide uh excellent value to our customers. So we're not looking to monetize as much as possible and we're happy to have a vast population of users who use our products without paying and they they you know they bring value through word of mouth and and that will probably continue to be the case but yes we have an opportunity to monetize better and uh we have a history of doing that I think quite successfully.

So yes uh going forward hopefully we can we can improve the percentage of of our users who choose to pay for our products

and ult yeah go ahead sorry

Luka no just thinking through though kind of what changes when companies go public now you have to answer to public investors and obviously that draws the potential towards you know partnering with AI companies letting them train their LLMs off of their data how are you guys thinking about the potential partnership opportunities again it's no longer a company where you and your friends are running it Now you have to answer to the public investors.

Is there any sense of pressure from them that you would need to better monetize and therefore partner with say an open AAI or anthropic?

I think Benoon uh has hasn't been a company run by friends like like that in a long time. We feel we we are a highly professional organization. We've had blue chip investors on board for many years. You know Bailey G for durable capital have been with us for many years at this point. we have operated, you know, as rigorously and and seriously as it gets for for as long as I can remember. Obviously, the the the constituents will be a little bit different as a public company, but we are uh I don't think we're going to change our views.

We're trying to maximize value 10 or 20 years out, and we'll continue doing that. The in terms of uh of data, we have never sold any data. We've never uh enabled any third party to train their models on our data. We don't have any plans to do that. Um, and you know, I'll let you know if that changes, but right now that's our seems.

Luka, I'm trying to understand though a little bit more too about the business model. You guys have identified um more than a thousand digital businesses in Europe and North America that could be attractive acquisitions over the next few years. That's according to your listing document. Are it feels like are you just buying your way to growth and masking perhaps a slowdown in retention? Is that the strategy? I mean we

yes we are buying as a key engine of growth. I think there's no difference in putting dollars against u marketing driven growth or R&D driven growth or M&A driven growth. They're just different livers you can pull. We found that with our platform uh M&A uh has been by far the most efficient. We have doubled the company roughly speaking every year for as long as I can remember. not too shabby and we've barely raised any equity in the past.

Uh certainly much more efficient than uh we would have achieved through more conventional means. Uh and having said that almost every time the companies we've owned we have improved uh retention, monetization, organic growth. Uh so we're managing these assets for the long run. We have never sold the company we bought nor do we plan to. We try to be excellent stewards of these businesses again with a 10 20 year view as long as we can. uh uh project out.

Uh but yes, we do anticipate that the vast majority of our growth will come from acquisitions and as long as that's where the highest returns come, we'll take it. We like it a lot.

Oh, sorry,

Luca. The next acquisition I look, tell us what it'll be. If you can, feel free.

If you don't, I'm going to give you a a gimme. Uh or you're going to give me a gimme, I guess. Um what's the theme and the theme that you're looking for? We're not thematic as an acquirer. If you look at our portfolio, we have enterprise businesses, we have consumer businesses, we've got ticketing, we've got video platforms, a little bit of everything. So the what we what we look for is businesses that we can improve tremendously.

Uh whether it's uh the product has a loyal customer base, but it's a bit dated that you could overhaul the user experience, add features, improve the technology, whether it's the monetization is isn't is inefficient, maybe the cost base is bloated, maybe a bunch of these at the same time. Um and and the the let's say the customerf facing side of things can vary but those fundamentals that have to be at least one or two of these have to be in place for us to be interested.

Um so we're always looking at a bunch of companies hopefully we'll acquire additional companies in the in in the rest during the rest of the year. But uh um but yeah it even if I wanted to I couldn't share any theme. We don't think that way.

Yeah. Yeah. We we aren't surprised by that. A good one by Tim though. Uh, Luca, one question though. When you hear SAS apocalypse, does that present opportunity or does that present risk? Just thinking through the portfolios of companies, uh, doesn't seem that difficult to me as someone who's not that smart to replicate

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