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.”