00:11:36 · Luca Ferrari, Roman Kirsch
[00:11:36] S2: I think it was natural and I will say the resolve was probably more important to go through the long failure of EverTail than to start Bending Spoons. I feel that we really saw being entrepreneurs, engineers, managers as a craft we wanted to master. And like a sculpture or someone who's trying to become a sculpture, a sculptor, and you probably produce pretty shitty sculptures initially and you have a vision but you come well short of that vision because your skills are not there yet. If you're passionate about the craft, then when you fail your next sculpture, you probably can't wait to try again because now you know you can do it better. And I think EverTale, this startup failing, was liberating in many ways because we could finally stop firefighting or trying to resurrect something that had no legs and start afresh with hopefully a better, more successful vision, better practices. And so I, not that we didn't have our fair share of emotional breakdowns or whatnot, because it was tough. It was, we had spent three plus years working essentially every waking hour to make it happen. So it's not easy to say, okay, we've still, we failed miserably. But it was a strong desire to try again and deploy all the lessons learned. [00:13:09] S0: So were there any doubts or concerns at this point in time or? [00:13:13] S2: Not about trying to gain. I do not remember even discussing, hey, should we maybe apply to go work at Google instead? Like, I do not remember a single conversation like that.
00:13:13 · Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, Roman Kirsch
[00:13:13] S2: Not about trying to gain. I do not remember even discussing, hey, should we maybe apply to go work at Google instead? Like, I do not remember a single conversation like that. [00:13:24] S1: Which if anything, I mean, you know, that experience just gave us the feeling that that was our path. You know, if we if we had any doubt about it, we were sure about it. So... And, you know, a couple of years later, three years later, we were better positioned. We had learned things, and we knew that the next time around, we would just have more chances, you know. [00:13:43] S0: And that was the time, was that the time when you moved to Milan and started Bending Spoons? Was that kind of at the same time or?
00:13:49 · Luca Ferrari
[00:13:49] S2: Not immediately because we found the Bending Spoons in Copenhagen. We moved it to Milan about a year later, give or take, a year and a half later, when we started to expand the team. We felt we had maybe saying figured out the strategy is a little bit too much, but we felt we had a more specific vision and approach for what we wanted to do. And so the topic of where to build it came up. So we pride ourselves on being quite rational and open minded and so we thought it seems that most companies never really ponder the location topic. They just happen to be in a place. But location probably makes a fairly significant difference in your fortunes. And so we went through a proper location strategy. I remember a 10 or 15 page document we wrote with all sorts of research in different we looked at 20 or 30 locations in Canada even, I remember And ultimately picked Italy and within Italy, Milan for a couple of reasons. One was the balance of sheer number of talented and well educated people versus the opportunities they currently had was particularly favorable. And so we thought this could be a win win. We have this massive ambition. And a lot of these people probably can't wait to be part of and shape that ambition and that project. And their next alternative is a lot worse. And so we could for the company acquire fantastic talent and make the team very good and for these talent give them essentially a fantastic ride as they would give us a fantastic ride. It's really a team sport ultimately. So that was one big reason. And the second big reason and a couple of countries you could make similar claims but when it was a tie, us being Italian it was just easier. We knew some of the universities, we understood the culture a little bit better. On the margins that made the difference you could have said similar things of France for example at the time. Today France is more developed but I think at the time that would have been true. The second reason was we had this ambition to build a company for the ages, one of the most successful companies in the world of our generation. Not that we thought we would succeed but that was the goal. And we thought, okay, if we fail, failing in Copenhagen or Milan or Paris or New York is basically the same. Nobody cares.
00:16:22 · Luca Ferrari, Roman Kirsch
But if we were to succeed, even partially relative to that big ambition, doing it from a place that hasn't seen a whole lot of success in general in entrepreneurship, certainly in tech for like forever could make a very big impact in terms of inspiration, kind of igniting a virtuous cycle of economic growth, cultural advancement. When I say cultural, don't mean like the liberal arts, but more again entrepreneurship and believing you can build interesting things. And Italy was particularly appealing place in that regard because again, it was one or two steps behind some other countries that had potential. And so we picked it. We haven't looked back. We're a very international company now. We have an office in London and people all over the planet, including The US. But trying to build a super successful massive global company with roots in Europe in general because you can make a similar argument for Europe overall and Italy also was a very motivating for us. [00:17:28] S0: No and I mean probably there's a lot of... You're the local heroes here, right? Now looking back kind of versus ten [00:17:35] S2: years Well, ones because you know what we learned is that when you succeed, before nobody [00:17:40] S0: Yeah, us both, right? But at least you polarize. You're hurt. [00:17:44] S2: Exactly. Initially nobody cares either way and then either they love you too much or they hate you too much. Like there's no middle ground.
00:17:44 · Luca Ferrari, Roman Kirsch
[00:17:44] S2: Exactly. Initially nobody cares either way and then either they love you too much or they hate you too much. Like there's no middle ground. [00:17:53] S0: Yeah, but I couldn't kind of agree more and also emphasize how important it is to have those role models because Milan is actually, like a lot of other cities in Europe, a center for entrepreneurship just in different industries. Like so, there's a lot of fashion entrepreneurs, like it's high end luxury and so on and so forth, but kind of having a bit of inspiration for the young kids that you can also do it in tech is probably worth the risk. Like every big decision, know, there's pros, as you said, with ease of hiring and kind of leaving some sort of legacy, but also challenges because you had the lack of ecosystem. There's probably not a lot of people that you can chat over coffee who go through the same challenges. [00:18:33] S2: Especially at the time. [00:18:34] S0: At the time, yeah. [00:18:35] S2: The city has made major strides since, but at the time certainly... [00:18:40] S0: Yeah, at the time, exactly. So how did you... Did you just accept that or did you make an extra effort to reach out to other people in other cities to kind of share best practices? So how did you approach that?
00:18:40 · Roman Kirsch, Luca Ferrari
[00:18:40] S0: Yeah, at the time, exactly. So how did you... Did you just accept that or did you make an extra effort to reach out to other people in other cities to kind of share best practices? So how did you approach that? [00:18:54] S2: I'd say at the beginning we didn't really have any coaches, mentors, advisors partly because we were nobodies and very talented, knowledgeable people generally don't coach nobodies but they coach people they already believe can go places. And even access tend to follow that also even if someone wanted to give back to people who don't necessarily deserve it, still you would struggle to find those people. And the location didn't help. And I frankly don't think we even sought that out very much. We could have done more. I don't know why. It's hard to remember. But we were quite self reliant. Thought perhaps arrogantly we've got to figure it out on our own. And I think that was both good and bad. The good part is that we came up with a lot of non obvious insights, ways of doing things that are proven powerful for us. On the baddies, of course, sometimes we reinvented the wheel or made mistakes that others had made for us in theory, but we didn't pick up on those lessons.