Bending Spoons CEO Sees Opportunity in ‘SaaSpocalypse’

A good way to think about Bending Spoons is that we try to be the perfect operating machine for, uh, technology businesses. And so we have built, uh, besides a very good, uh, team of people, also powerful proprietary tech that enables us to do, uh, more and better work, basically build better products, monetize them more efficiently. And AI has been a massive tailwind as we as we do this over the past, uh, at least a couple of years. Uh, so, yes, we use AI models to help us predict, uh, who in our job, uh, applicant pipeline will turn out to be the best performer. We use AI to help us, uh, optimize the monetization. We use AI, of course, to write software. We currently write between 90 and 100% of our software. With AI, we use AI to design our products. And the list is, you know, long. But the list is long. Are you able, Luca, are you able to give us an approximate dollar number on the kind of savings that you that you extract by by using AI across all those different functions. Um, no, I don't think we share that. But, uh, I believe the, the most important, uh, advantage we take, uh, or we enjoy, thanks to AI, is not so much in terms of savings, but the fact that we can, uh, do more acquisitions and improve these products and the underlying technologies and the efficiency of the monetization of these products a lot faster than would otherwise be possible. Um, so I think the savings aspect is fairly significant, but not overwhelmingly so. It's mostly the scalability of our model that becomes, uh, way, way better now. Is it is the disruption that we're seeing in the software space. I mean, some SaaS populates where we are in that journey is is up for debate, but that has driven down valuations. Does it make does it make it easier to to buy up assets then essentially on the cheap. Yeah, I think frankly that uh yes it's obviously advantageous for a serial acquirer like Bending Spoons. Um, I believe that valuations in SaaS were, uh, unreasonably high and had been for for probably a decade. Um, and so what we see now is not, uh, it's not low. It's where they should have been before AI AI I believe was a trigger event that caused investors to go back to their spreadsheets and question whether their, uh, assumptions with, uh, say, organic growth sustain a 10% for 15 years. Uh, made any sense? Um, I think these valuations are perfectly fine considering the cash flow, uh, potential of these businesses. Mhm. And what would stop and what does stop AI native startups kind of cannibalizing and disrupting the actual businesses that you are that you're acquiring and then rewiring. How do you prevent that. How much of a risk is that potentially. I think it's a relatively low risk because of how we select the businesses we acquire. We look for businesses with significant moats, uh, whether it's, uh, network economies. Take Eventbrite, where organizers go to post events because there's, you know, 90 million people going there to to look for events and vice versa. People go there, look for events because they, you know, pretty much everybody is posting their events on Eventbrite or businesses with proprietary data like a moat where, uh, you know, thanks to to the history and the user base, we know where a, um, a, uh, path in the forest is muddy, where there's a dog barking and whatnot, uh, things that are not, uh, available to, to new entrants or scale economies where it would be uneconomical to, uh, to compete unless you have a substantial business. Uh, but broadly speaking, I think for, for the digital market that a lot of companies will, I think will suffer, uh, because of the increasing competition, which is probably a good thing. Um, and you've acquired Airtable. You've agreed to buy. To buy? Miro. Uh, what are you able to do for those businesses that the owners couldn't do? So the owners, are pretty good at both businesses. The the advantages we, we, we enjoy are, uh, structural and built over a decade. Uh, so the fact that we can bring together these, these businesses under the same roof and integrate them deeply within the same technological platform and, and the same, uh, core team that creates a massive, uh, efficiencies that are not available if these businesses are to be run on a standalone basis. So there's nothing those owners, uh, can do about that. Um, given that they had to run them as separate companies. And also, we've spent the last decade investing heavily in our proprietary technologies at this point, uh, the extra effectiveness and efficiency that we get out of those, uh, is, uh, is staggering, I believe. Um, so again, it's, uh, it's not any, uh, flaw in how they were managed necessarily. It's just that are very model and investments we've made over, you know, since 2013, uh, put us at an advantage in being the preferred operator of, uh, many of these businesses. And Luca, before we let you go. You've talked about building this exceptional team in Milan. Why? Why not build instead of buy? Well, I mean both. So to be clear, we build a lot and we innovate on the on the, on the brand. Some products we own, uh, substantially, often at a much faster pace than was the case before we acquired these products. Uh, demonstrably. Uh, but we you're right in that we generally don't launch, say, new products or brands, uh, from scratch. We have done that a couple of times, which is very rare. Um, I think ultimately, you know, you can't be the best in the world at everything. Um, uh, certainly we can't. And so we decided to try to be the best in the world at, uh, taking something that has already proven, uh, product market fit as a customer and user base and make that, uh, a ten out of ten the best it can be in the long run. Um, and we try to focus on that. Um, okay. Every working hour.