Luca Ferrari: Scaling to 500M Downloads, $360M in Reported 2023 Sales and a $2.55BN Valuation |E1127

(instrumental music) The moment you think you're very smart, the likelihood that you make very dumb mistakes skyrockets, in my opinion. We let others seek pro- 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, they have made it up to that point. The reason why we, we took that route, I think, is precisely because we crashed and burned by being arrogant in thinking we knew what the market would want and we could build it for them.

Luca, I am so excited for this. I think Bending Spoons is one of the coolest stories that, uh, we've seen in recent times in startup land. So first, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

I would love to start with a little bit of context. What would your parents and your teachers have said about the young Luca growing up? How would they have described you?

Well, parents are probably not a good, uh, a good source. It seems to me they tend to be biased. Uh, I would say my teachers probably would say that I was, uh, incredibly shy. Some may even say I was pathologically shy. Uh, weird, I think. They would say probably, probably weird. And gentle, I think. I was considerate. Uh, kind of, uh, very careful not to hurt, uh, people's feelings. Yeah, probably those three.

I would have been described as weird too. Can I ask, did you feel like an outsider when you were growing up? I di- I didn't have many friends at school, and it shaped a lot of how I do what I do.

Yeah, probably. I really wanted to, to make friends. I couldn't for the first, probably, 10 or 12 years of my life. Yeah, I would say it's 10 years. Uh, I had major struggles socially. I'm not, um, incredibly well versed with, uh, socializing these days, but I (laughs) have definitely improved a lot. Um, so yeah, I guess you could say an outsider. But an outsider who wanted to be an insider, who was an outsider because he was, uh, incompetent, uh, at, uh, being part of, uh, you know, of, of people's groups.

Sorry for this weird tangent. Did you s- ... Would you say you've become an insider or you just accepted being an outsider?

No, I think I, I had different phases. So I was, by, you know, your definition, I was probably an outsider initially who really wanted to be an insider. Then I became, you know, uh, kind of average, so make it an insider. Like, I started having friends and being invited, uh, to, to doing things with others. And then as I grew older, particularly the last five or six years, I think I've become a little bit more of an outsider again. Uh, mostly because I find my bandwidth and my patience, uh, have become more limited, or perhaps have been tested more aggressively. And so I've learned to build more walls and more protections.