Elon’s #1# priority is to find the bottleneck and attack it relentlessly. @PeterRahal’s says a good way to think about that idea is picturing your business as a river: “Running a business is like a river. As long as it's flowing, great. But if there's something blocking that flow, you need to f*cking fix it.” “If something's in the way, I ruminate on it to the point where I can't sleep. I have to fix it so I can sleep.”

When @mickymalka was 24 years old, he met Charlie Munger. He owned just 1 share of Berkshire, but Charlie told him he was the wealthiest person in the room: "Charlie looks at me and says, 'You must be very wealthy to be here! I said, 'Actually, no, I only own one share?' He says, 'You don't get it. You are the wealthiest guy in the room. You have the power of time. All of us here are in our last chapter. You're just starting your time. You will compound for the next 70 years of your life. So never forget the rule I'm about to tell you: you only need to get rich once.' And then he says, 'And now I'm going to eat, and just sat down and ate."

Sam Altman on the best advice Peter Thiel ever gave him: “ChatGPT was growing super fast, but it felt very unstable, or kind of almost low-value growth.” “A lot of people in the company were like, ‘We gotta figure out something else. This is not sustainable value.’ And we were talking about this list of 5 or 6 other things that we could focus on instead.” “He was like, ‘It's an obvious mistake to do anything but this.’” “Besides the fact that it's growing, which is rare and great, he's like, ‘The power of this is the power of the Google text box. It's like a text box you can type anything into, and it does the right thing.’” “He's like, ‘People have just been chasing the Google business model for 20 years and this is the first thing that's come up, and clearly the empty text box worked for Google, so why don't you just double down on that? It's growing. It's very flexible and it has all of the signs other than it doesn't fit the current Silicon Valley wisdom.’” “So we went super hard on ChatGPT and it was great.”

“Uniquely focused, ruthless, highly rational and effective. A 10 out of 10 in all those areas” Luca Ferrari (CEO of Bending Spoons) describing Adam Foroughi (founder of Applovin)

The best founders in the world like @elonmusk or @tobi “go ultra-hardcore on deletion and simplification.” Luca Ferrari says Bending Spoons employs this idea of “Relentless Simplification” across their businesses: “Humans have a tendency to add complexity and do things that destroy value.” “If you leave an organization, almost any environment unattended, and you don't provide guidance in this regard, it will tend to become more complicated. People will add parts. It could be expanding a team or adding a step to a process, or adding an entire new process. If it's a product, adding a feature to the product. New rules. It applies to almost any human endeavor.” “People tend to add pieces, they very rarely remove pieces.” “If you don't make a conscious effort to achieve simplicity, and avoid this increasing value-destroying complexity, that's how we got to our modern society with all the bureaucracy and complicated regulation.” “We have this principle whereby we ask everyone who works here, every time someone is suggesting that we should be adding complexity, the burden of proof is on those making that suggestion. The people who support the thesis that we shouldn't be adding complexity don't need to prove it. They just have to raise a flag and say, ‘I don't think we should.’ The burden of proof is on those who want to add complexity.” “The other part of relentless simplification is that we want people to be on the lookout for existing complexity and suggest that we should remove it.”

Luca Ferrari’s Dream Team style of management: Great teams should have as few rules as possible. "If you have a mediocre talent then the appeal of process and procedures becomes greater because you need to guide them more. You can't count on people to problem solve autonomously.” “You can't count on them coming to work with fire in their belly.” “If you are lucky enough to have a very strong team, then you want to have as few rules as possible. You want give people massive leeway to express and develop their talent.”’ “This makes them feel trusted and they will bring the best of themselves to work.” “It's similar with sports. If you were coaching the Team USA Dream Team with Jordan and Barkley, you would do it a certain way that would be different than the way you would optimally coach a team of modest talents.” “It's a lot easier to win with Jordan.” “You're not gonna tell your more modest talents, 'Okay, go and figure it out.' You will try to give them a system that's a lot more guiding. So we try to approximate as much as possible to be like the Dream Team."

Luca Ferrari says Bending Spoons has never been outbid: “I don't remember a single case, at least not in the last five years, in which we put forth an offer and then the seller sold to someone else.” “We always say, ‘Do you want to shop it around?’ Often people try to look for exclusives. They're like, ‘This is my offer, but unless I get exclusivity within five days, the offer is gone.’ Because they know that their best chance is to win on timing. They know the offer is not that great.” “In our case, we almost always say, ‘If you want to, we encourage you to go and shop it around.’ Because once you convince yourself that this is the best offer, it'll be easier for us too. We'll sign faster, and we'll close more easily.”

Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari says too many companies chase vanity metrics while ignoring what actually matters: cash. “For instance, if you are running a business where most of the revenue comes from subscriptions, and you know that the optimal price is a higher price, pretty much with any product in a free market, if you raise prices, you're going to have fewer customers. Which can be fine. Maybe you have 30% fewer customers, but each ultimately contributes twice as much—you're better off. However, often the markets will punish you dramatically if you do that because when they see that the number of subscribers has gone down, even if revenue has gone up, they will not like it.” “If you're a management team, in that particular context, you will have to heed the opinion or expectations of the market, and you will not do that pricing change even if you know that it's going to be positive.” “However, if a business is run within the broader Bending Spoons, where none of the businesses ends with itself, but it's a piece of a broader puzzle, a source of cash for further deployment and growth, then it's much easier to make those otherwise unpopular decisions.”

“We're not big on founders.” “I know this is maybe ironic to say given your podcast.” “We try to eliminate the idea of a founder from this company as much as possible. We think it distracts people from the company. The company is the center and whether you're a founder or you joined a little bit later, all that matters is your contribution, your trajectory.” — Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari

I love this idea from Bending Spoons founder Luca Ferrari: Find someone young and talented and “saturate their capacity.” “Everybody at the company should have way more on their plate than feels even remotely comfortable.” “Let's say you have 10 possible tasks, each with a certain ROI attached. If I add an 11th, assuming you select well, it's impossible that adding an 11th task will lower the ROI of what you choose to do because you still have the other 10.” “If this is a lower ROI than the others, you're going to do the others. But it's possible that it happens to be the highest ROI of all, and so you end up doing something more valuable.” “The more work you give people, the better the opportunity for them to create value.” “When you give people a lot more work than feels comfortable, you're really forcing them to come to terms with the immensity of the possible.”

Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari believes procrastination can actually be a good thing: “We like to make decisions as late as possible.” ”Procrastination is awesome if it doesn't come from laziness, because if you postpone decisions, you often have more information when you actually get to make them.”

“People who compare Bending Spoons to private equity have a simplistic, superficial view of the world.” 3 main differences between Bending Spoons and private equity: 1. They buy to hold: “We have never sold a material business. We buy to hold and operate forever.” 2. They deeply transform the businesses they acquire, “sometimes beyond recognition.” 3. They integrate them under a shared platform and operating system, with a core team of “Spooners” handling R&D, marketing, and operations. “People who compare Bending Spoons to private equity have a simplistic, superficial view of the world.” “None of this bears any resemblance to what private equity does.” “Those are funds that buy to sell after, say, 5 years. They intervene maybe on costs or price, but I've never seen PE reinvent a product or rebuild the org, or rebuild the technological infrastructure. And they generally don't integrate the businesses together under a shared platform because they don't have a platform, and even if they did, they need to sell them piecemeal. So if you integrate them, you can't sell them, or at least it would be much more difficult to sell them.”

Why Bending Spoons eliminated all job titles: “At some point, we were looking for ways to streamline and simplify, and someone said, ‘Why do we even have titles? What's the benefit of titles?’” “Let's not be arrogant. There's probably some benefit. What's that benefit? We ultimately determined that the benefit was that people needed titles for bragging rights.” “So we just got rid of titles and told people, ‘You can pick your title for your CV, LinkedIn, whatever. We don't need to know. We don't want to know. We don't need to approve it. We don't want to see it. Just don't embarrass us." “If you're a new hire, don't say you're the CTO because then people will question our integrity as a company. But as long as it's broadly reasonable, we're good. We have never reintroduced them again. We don't have any titles.” “We never looked back. We probably saved easily hundreds if not thousands of person-hours in terms of defining different terms and having emotionally draining discussions with people. Never had a problem, not a single instance of someone complaining that we didn't formally assign to them a title ever out of, at this point, many hundreds, actually multiple thousands of people.”

“If you want to try to be the best of the best, you need to take some risks and rethink things.” "If you copy what most people are doing you're guaranteed to be mediocre.” Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari says being geographically isolated from most startup hubs, helped them to think differently: “We figured, let's try to experiment, invent, and think from first principles. We will make more mistakes. It will take longer than if we copied some of the tried and tested approaches, but we should be able to find at least a few insights, a few new ways that will set us apart.” “Being more isolated geographically has probably played to our advantage in that regard. We weren't under the influence of the mantras that everybody in the big startup hubs over time were preaching."

The best founders in the world like @elonmusk or @tobi “go ultra-hardcore on deletion and simplification.” Luca Ferrari says Bending Spoons employs this idea of “Relentless Simplification” across their businesses: “Humans have a tendency to add complexity and do things that destroy value.” “If you leave an organization, almost any environment unattended, and you don't provide guidance in this regard, it will tend to become more complicated. People will add parts. It could be expanding a team or adding a step to a process, or adding an entire new process. If it's a product, adding a feature to the product. New rules. It applies to almost any human endeavor.” “People tend to add pieces, they very rarely remove pieces.” “If you don't make a conscious effort to achieve simplicity, and avoid this increasing value-destroying complexity, that's how we got to our modern society with all the bureaucracy and complicated regulation.” “We have this principle whereby we ask everyone who works here, every time someone is suggesting that we should be adding complexity, the burden of proof is on those making that suggestion. The people who support the thesis that we shouldn't be adding complexity don't need to prove it. They just have to raise a flag and say, ‘I don't think we should.’ The burden of proof is on those who want to add complexity.” “The other part of relentless simplification is that we want people to be on the lookout for existing complexity and suggest that we should remove it.”

My conversation with Luca Ferrari, co-founder of Bending Spoons. 0:00 Fanatical founders building enduring companies 1:23 Luca on building the best company there ever was 4:22 The origins of Bending Spoons 5:47 Talent and why experience is overrated 15:05 Turning hiring into a science 23:30 Why Bending Spoons doesn't use bonuses 29:26 Why everyone in the company has the same job 42:41 On finding great potential and saturating their capacity 49:50 Insisting on a culture of extreme ownership 59:28 Luca's principle of relentless simplification 1:05:15 Why Bending Spoons doesn't use job titles 1:10:27 The proprietary operating system behind Bending Spoons 1:17:07 Why Bending Spoons isn't private equity 1:19:32 How Bending Spoons acquired & transformed Evernote 1:28:01 How Bending Spoons uses AI 1:40:42 How Bending Spoons thinks about capital allocation 1:43:50 Why procrastination without laziness is good 1:46:46 Operational excellence is not optional 1:49:07 How Bending Spoons negotiates acquisitions 1:54:47 Logic over numbers Includes paid partnerships.