01:01:01 · Luca Ferrari, Siddhartha Ahluwalia
[01:01:01] S1: I don't know too much about it, to be honest. We do have one or two colleagues from India who happen to move here. Hard to tell. I mean, I'm sure there's even more talented people than in Italy. And probably there is a comparable opportunity to build something remarkable. I know you have some significant tech companies coming up and some established ones. Yes. [01:01:26] S0: Some of the things that I wanted to ask you, right, because what we are today contribute... Is majorly contributed by our childhood. Right? I can tell it for myself, right, being an entrepreneur, starting company, and then starting a fund. I saw my father as a small and medium businessman staying in a tier three city in India, failed four to five times at businesses. And I saw him that business can't kill you and that... [01:01:54] S1: If you don't let [01:01:54] S0: it. Yeah. [01:01:55] S1: I guess. [01:01:56] S0: Unless until you go in debt or [01:01:58] S1: Oh, yeah. No. No. [01:01:59] S0: Do gambling or something. [01:02:00] S1: Don't let it burn you out or something. [01:02:02] S0: Yeah. Yeah. But but business can't kill you, and that motivated me to start right after my college. Like, what what was your childhood, I can ask, DNA or upbringing that made you work today?
01:02:17 · Luca Ferrari
[01:02:17] S1: I'm very thankful to my parents. I'm an only child, loving parents. Certainly can't complain. It's hard though to trace any advantage when it comes to entrepreneurship to my upbringing because I came up in this tiny village as I mentioned in the Northeast Of Italy. 900 people lived there. People there mostly were farmers, truck drivers, plumbers. My parents were hairdressers. Nobody in my family gotten, say, a university degree. It's not that my horizons were pretty small. So my dreams were fairly abstract in that regard. I think in hindsight, it's fairly easy for me to see I had in me a strong desire to build something or try at least to contribute building something wonderful, significant. But I believe if you had asked me when I was say 12, 14, 16 what being entrepreneur is, I probably had heard of the word, I didn't even know what it meant. When I went to university, I met a group of people who had much wider far reaching views than I had on the world and they infected me with that knowledge. I remember quite clearly, fairly early in my university years, maybe second or third year, someone showed me TechCrunch And I'd never even seen a similar... At the time it was called a blog, now it's kind of an online... An outlet for information that's a little bit broader than that with plenty of journalists and researchers. And I remember falling in love with the idea of building technology and businesses. It was love at first sight but before that I didn't know. I had a phone very late, internet very, very late during my high school before I didn't have internet. So I came late. As I said, was pretty naive and I guess a late bloomer in that regard.
01:04:49 · Siddhartha Ahluwalia, Luca Ferrari
[01:04:49] S0: And your university, was it in one of the big cities in Italy or was it in a small town? [01:04:53] S1: I went to a university in Padua which is one of the... It's not... Probably the biggest, most prestigious university in Italy for I studied engineering, for engineers is in Milan. It's a technical university. Padua one is considered a good one, one of the best, probably not the best. So I studied there and then I was fortunate enough to get access to a double degree program which enabled me to get a second master's degree in Denmark, Copenhagen, where I then happened to briefly work as a consultant to launch and fail with the Evertale, the startup. And then as I said, we founded Bending Spoons and moved it to Italy later on. [01:05:38] S0: And why do you think many tech companies... Like, you are the largest tech company in Italy and I would say one of the largest top 10 in Europe. Would that be a fair assumption? [01:05:48] S1: Well, there's... It really depends on how you define a tech company because, there's plenty of much older technology companies. [01:05:55] S0: A little software company. [01:05:57] S1: I would say maybe those among the companies TechCrunch would talk about, know, that were considered startups and probably yes. I haven't seen so. In Italy, easily, I would say, but in Europe, I'm not sure. Haven't... Maybe. I I didn't check. I don't know.
01:05:57 · Luca Ferrari, Siddhartha Ahluwalia
[01:05:57] S1: I would say maybe those among the companies TechCrunch would talk about, know, that were considered startups and probably yes. I haven't seen so. In Italy, easily, I would say, but in Europe, I'm not sure. Haven't... Maybe. I I didn't check. I don't know. [01:06:12] S0: Yeah. But why do you think, like, more people are not starting companies in Europe? Like, why is Europe not seeing the same scale as probably... You know, Europe is pretty large. Right? And talent density is quite good. The resources are there. It's
01:06:33 · Luca Ferrari
[01:06:33] S1: hard to tell. Some of it may be simply some of these phenomena are somewhat exponential in nature and exponential functions grow pretty quickly. Maybe Europe now is where The US was five or ten years ago. And so if you continue comparing it to The US, it looks dismal but it's only at its natural step on the growth pattern. I don't know because really do not invest any time into looking into this. Maybe people who do and have the data will have a different view but that could potentially be an explanation. I'm sure there is an element of culture that plays against Europe in this regard. I feel and I'm generalizing on average, I feel Europeans tend to be more traditional in nature, more risk averse, more process and bureaucracy oriented. Americans are more pragmatic, more entrepreneurial, more innovative, more aggressive with the good and the bad that comes with it. And when it comes to building new companies, those attributes tend to win out. So I think that plays a part probably so that all else being equal Europe would still do worse I believe. And then a lot of these... There are a lot of factors that mutually enhance. For example, the more capital, the more projects and that forms more talent and then more new projects and more capital comes in. And again, that goes back to the exponential nature of what I discussed earlier. But it's not just exponential. It's not just about the math of it. It's also that there may be certain competitive advantages that get established. It's unusual to talk about competitive advantages when you talk about an ecosystem but they may apply too. And so it's possible that in The US you have established certain assets now that make it hard for other locations to compete at the same level so that the kind of the saturation point is higher in The US than you will find it in Europe. There are also other advantages The US enjoys. For example, it's a larger market. If you launch a company in Italy, your market, whatever software you're building, will be maybe 5% of The US market. And so you have to immediately work in multiple languages, making sure you appeal to a more diverse customer base, you comply with a more diverse set of laws.
01:09:15 · Luca Ferrari, Siddhartha Ahluwalia
That can be a fairly substantial hurdle at the margins in such a competitive environment whereas if you launch a successful technology product from Kentucky, more or less naturally it will spread all over The US. Also the media online people like if people start talking about it, it's English, people are on X or Instagram and they're all connected. You don't even know where people live in The US. Whereas, again, in Italy you have a different set of journalists, of influencers. So there's all sorts of disadvantages and when you put them all together, they probably make a fairly substantial difference. [01:10:00] S0: And you would also attribute it to the risk taking and celebration of failure in the ecosystem?