Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari Talks IPO

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Carol Massar** (0:07)
We've got Luca Ferrari, the co-founder, CEO and chair of Bending Spoons joining us from the NASDAQ, also with us, Bailey Lipschultz, Bloomberg News IPO reporter who joins us here in the studio. Luca, I want us to start with what exactly the portfolio is 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.

**Luca Ferrari** (0:32)
Thank you for having me, first of all. Let me explain how we operate because it's quite unusual, perhaps unique. We've spent the last 13 years building, what I consider an exceptional platform, very high talent density, a culture of high performance and rationality. 50 plus proprietary technologies and operating system for running digital businesses as effectively and as efficiently as possible. And a lot of data that helps us make better decisions at the stage of acquisition and operations. Now, what we do with this engine is we go and acquire digital businesses with an express potential and we integrate them very deeply onto this platform in a way that I haven't seen anybody do before. They share the entirely the same technological layer. We have a core team that moves fluidly across all our businesses.
And we transform them deeply. We rebuild the org, the technology, the monetization, we accelerate innovation, launch new features. So it's a pretty unique model. And as you were describing, we have established over time a portfolio of brands, some of which are very well known and some of which are more dated. We also have bought more up and coming companies, but there's a bit of both.
We win, we do well, not necessarily when the company we buy is a young or old, growing fast or more stagnating, but when we can make that trajectory a lot better. And so that's what we try to excel.

**Tim Stenovec** (2:04)
Luca, we were talking earlier about this, and I'm just 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?

**Luca Ferrari** (2:21)
Yeah, exactly. Half a billion people use our products. Quote, unquote, only nine million people, so roughly 2% pay for them, which obviously is an opportunity. We also believe that it's important to provide 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 bring value through word of mouth and that will probably continue to be the case. But yes, we have an opportunity to monetize better and we have a history of doing that, I think, quite successfully. So yes, going forward, hopefully we can improve the percentage of our users who choose to pay for our products.

**Tim Stenovec** (3:01)
And Luca, Luca, 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 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 OpenAI or Anthropic?

**Luca Ferrari** (3:34)
I think Bending Spoons hasn't been a company run by friends like that in a long time. We feel we are a highly professional organization. We've had blue chip investors on board for many years. Bailey Give for Durable Capital have been with us for many years at this point. So we have operated as rigorously and seriously as it gets for as long as I can remember. Obviously, the constituents will be a little bit different as a public company, but 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. In terms of data, we have never sold any data. We've never enabled any third party to train their models on our data. We don't have any plans to do that.
I'll let you know if that changes, but right now, that's our stance.

**Bailey Lipschultz** (4:19)
Luca, I'm trying to understand a little bit more too about the business model. You guys have identified 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. It feels like, are you just buying your way to growth and masking perhaps a slowdown in retention? Is that the strategy?