Great convo with @luke10ferrari on his home turf in italy about irrational investor preference for growth over cash, invention vs. optimization, where durability lives after the saaspocalypse, and what happens to the org chart when AI writes 94% of your code. Some takeaways: - Investors seem to oddly dislike profit and greatly prefer growth - optimize for compounding free cash flow knowing that this is just a moment in time distortion. - Invention vs. optimization: pick a camp. Invention has higher peaks but an awful median case. Google is still ~80% search 30 years later. - Ambition in product, paranoia with debt. Rule #1# of becoming a huge success is not dying in the meantime & credit is a high wire act. - Software has been cheap to build for a long time. Durability lives in habits, network effects, proprietary data and scale. - SaaSpocalypse wasn't really about AI. In many cases these were poorly run companies and this cycle gave them an opportunity to improve. - Bending Spoons went from 0% to 94% of code written by AI in two years. Support managers now look like PMs, data scientists build tooling instead of cleaning CSVs - everyone is both oddly more direct + giving more direction. - If you're not winning when do you quit? No idea - bureaucracy created Bending Spoons b/c a Danish tax refund that never came killed Luca's first startup and catalyzed Spoons. 02:05 Is every company a bond or an option? 03:40 Why investors overvalue growth 05:15 Why the multiple is just one factor 08:20 Invention vs. optimization: pick a camp 12:20 Customers know the what, not the how 14:05 Hard problems over hot brands (and why AOL excites him) 15:15 Why founders should hate the median case 18:40 The Bending Spoons debt playbook 23:15 SaaSpocalypse wasn't about AI 25:05 Where durability actually lives 29:40 Is your data worth more than your company? 31:05 Inside the Bending Spoons operating system 33:35 The AI agent that ships bug fixes 37:00 From 0% to 94% AI-written code 37:30 Logic over instinct 39:00 When to quit vs. keep pushing 40:35 Advice for the next great tech company