Bending Spoons Replaces Exec Teams, Ivy Grads to Run Acquired Software

Bending Spoons打破名校偏见，在180亿美元并购扩张中重用青年人才 严格的运营整合与高潜力人才胜过行业经验，传统操盘模式已无法适应现代软件资产。 Luca Ferrari阐述了Bending Spoons如何利用资产负债表直接收购企业并永久持有，通过剥离冗余的企业外壳，在统一且高度优化的运营基石上对其进行重构。该公司通过极高的人才密度实现卓越业绩，以量化级的严格标准筛选数十万求职者，看淡精英名校光环，并提拔具备极高成长潜力的二十多岁年轻人担任最高领导职务。在内部，Bending Spoons挑战了传统企业架构，取消了执行委员会，将专业职能与项目汇报线分开，并对任何提议增加复杂性的人设定了不对称的高举证门槛。立足米兰而非硅谷，Ferrari将公司的长期复利归功于极度坦诚、基于第一性原理的执行力，以及绝不说谎或隐瞒关键事实的绝对道德准则。 Bending Spoons通过永久资本平台模式达到180亿美元的股权估值，通过自有资产负债表收购软件企业并永久持有，剥离企业外壳后将其置于统一的基础设施上运营。 (0:46) 去年在80万名求职者中，Bending Spoons录用不足300人；其招聘运作宛如量化投资基金，采用数百个经过验证的绩效信号和逐字预设的标准化面试脚本。 (8:07) 该公司的数据模型显示，哈佛和斯坦福的学位对实际工作表现的预测价值微乎其微，而在青少年时期热衷政治活动并在二十岁出头时退出，则与极强的驱动力和主观能动性高度相关。 (13:45) Bending Spoons废除了高管领导团队，转而依托“职能”与“团队”的双负责人矩阵，并指派学习曲线极陡峭的25岁年轻人才负责管理所收购的企业级产品。 (46:12)

Luca Ferrari argues that Bending Spoons compounds capital by operating acquired software businesses through a unified proprietary technological foundation powered by extreme talent density and relentless operational simplification. Buy, Rebuild, and Platform Permanent Assets (1:13) Rather than managing acquisitions as a federated holding company or limited-life private equity fund, Bending Spoons acquires software targets directly onto its balance sheet with a permanent hold period and zero intention of selling. Targets are stripped down to the studs, retired as independent corporate entities, and replatformed onto a shared technological infrastructure where proprietary codebases, cloud infrastructure, monetization systems, and internal operational tooling replace legacy setups. Host Brian Halligan notes that the company reached roughly $18 billion in equity value around its public market debut, validating its strategy of buying assets to permanently run and optimize them. Treating Talent Selection Like Quantitative Trading (10:00) Ferrari attributes operational outperformance directly to extreme talent selectivity. In a single year, Bending Spoons received approximately 800,000 global applications and hired fewer than 300 individuals, a ratio below 0.04%. Ferrari contends that this talent concentration allows roughly 20 high-caliber operators to run businesses that previously required 200 employees, helping achieve a 0.6% regrettable churn rate among core staff. The company evaluates applicants through a quant-style pipeline using data scientists and standardized assessments rather than open-ended conversational interviews, which Ferrari considers useless noise. Prioritizing Slope Over Pedigree and Seniority (13:45) Statistical analysis within Bending Spoons reveals that Ivy League credentials correlate poorly with real-world output, often offset by entitlement, whereas unconventional indicators like teenage political activism that ceased in the candidate's twenties signal agency and drive. When staffing leadership roles, Bending Spoons regularly installs 25-to-27-year-olds to run mature acquired products. Ferrari prioritizes raw intellectual learning slope and extreme ownership over decades of industry experience, arguing that seasoned executives often resist hands-on work and attempt to copy-paste outdated playbooks. Algorithmic Matrix and Relentless Simplification Bending Spoons abolished its executive committee to eliminate status-based gatekeeping and toxic overhead, instead deploying an automated matrix where employees report to functional leads for methodology and team leads for specific project objectives. Internal governance relies on a principle called relentless simplification, where anyone proposing an additional process step, team, feature, or headcount bears the entire burden of proof to justify the complexity. Opponents are not required to provide counter-evidence, and unproven changes must be quickly reversed. Radical Candor and Non-Negotiable Integrity (40:00) Communication across the organization is anchored in radical candor, demanding that constructive criticism be delivered openly on the spot rather than held back out of fear of causing offense. Personally, Ferrari operates under a strict rule adopted in his twenties to never lie and never omit relevant information. While total transparency can cause short-term discomfort, Halligan notes that acquired founders independently praised Ferrari's integrity, which Ferrari views as a competitive asset that builds long-term trust during acquisitions. While Bending Spoons' model has succeeded in product-led growth assets, Halligan questions whether a reliance on young, high-slope generalists over experienced domain veterans can translate equally well to complex enterprise sales environments.

Bending Spoons 联合创始人兼首席执行官 Luca Ferrari 提出，通过打造高度集中的底层技术与运营平台，企业能够以买入并永久持有的模式持续整合软件资产，并凭借量化筛选的高密度顶尖人才实现资本的高效复利。 软件操作系统与深度重构模式 (1:13) Luca Ferrari 指出，Bending Spoons 历经 13 年建立的核心逻辑在于：只要构建出一套运营效率远超同行的底层系统，公司就能通过并购实现长期的资本复利。不同于传统私募股权基金拥有固定的存续期或伯克希尔·哈撒韦的去中心化控股方式，Bending Spoons 直接利用资产负债表进行收购，坚持永久持有且从未出售核心资产。被收购的企业不再作为独立法人实体运作，而是被彻底拆解并重新部署至统一的技术底座上，由公司统一调配研发、产品、设计与营销等共享人才资源，全面重构老旧代码、云基础设施与变现模式。主持人 Brian 提到，该公司公开市场上市前后股权价值达到约 180 亿美元。 量化驱动的极端人才密度与招聘机制 (5:00) Ferrari 认为公司的核心竞争壁垒主要来自运营执行而非资产挑选。Bending Spoons 去年收到约 80 万份求职申请，但最终录用不到 300 人，录取率低于 0.04%。Ferrari 认为极高的人才密度创造了显著的效率杠杆，使 20 人的精英团队能够完成以往需要 200 人才能处理的业务规模，去年核心团队的遗憾离职率仅为 0.6%。公司将招聘构建为类似量化对冲基金的数据科学体系，追踪数百个离散信号与实际工作表现的相关性，同时摒弃非结构化的传统面试，改用严格统一的脚本问题、跨岗位解题测试及隔绝主观偏见的录音评分机制。 打破履历迷信与倚重年轻潜能 (13:45) Ferrari 的数据模型表明，名校光环与实际业绩的相关性极弱；毕业于哈佛或斯坦福所带来的微弱智力优势，往往会被随之而来的特权心态和自负所侵蚀。相反，少年时期积极参与政治活动但在二十出头退出的背景，由于体现出高度的主动性与务实转变，反而表现出极强的绩效相关性。在管理任用上，公司看重学习斜率（Slope）而非履历年资，甚至大胆启用 25 至 27 岁的年轻管理者直接接管如 Vimeo 等被收购业务。Ferrari 认为行业老将容易生搬硬套过时经验并丧失饥饿感，而选拔管理者 80% 的权重仅取决于快速学习能力、逻辑推导水准以及极致的主人翁意识。 极简组织、双线矩阵与彻底坦诚 在日常协作与架构设计上，Bending Spoons 废除了传统的执行委员会或高管团队，认为虚设的管理层级只会造成政治内耗和低效会议。公司运作一套算法化的双线汇报矩阵：员工同时向负责硬技能标准的职能主管（管“怎么做”）和负责项目目标的团队主管（管“做什么”）汇报，角色在管理与独立贡献者之间自由流转。公司践行“彻底坦诚”（Radical Candor），要求员工发现问题时直接且公开地指出，不必过分顾虑措辞与情绪。在企业流程方面推行“极简原则”（Relentless Simplification），规定任何试图增加流程、层级或人员编制的提案必须由发起人承担举证责任，若无明确证据或不可逆转则一律默认否决。 米兰区位套利与不欺不瞒的诚信底线 (57:08) 将总部设在意大利米兰为公司带来了显著的商业与人才优势。Ferrari 解释称，意大利拥有 6000 万人口与优质大学教育，却极度缺乏雄心勃勃的高成长科技公司，这让 Bending Spoons 能够以远低于硅谷的成本锁定本地顶尖工程人才；同时，创始团队也抱有打破全球科技财富向单一地理区域垄断的使命感。在商业声誉方面，多位被收购公司创始人一致评价 Ferrari 具备极高的诚信。Ferrari 透露这源于二十出头一次个人过错后的深刻反思，自此他确立了在任何境遇下“绝不说谎、绝不隐瞒关键事实”的处世准则，即使披露信息在短期内损害自身利益也毫不动摇，这一信誉最终在复杂的并购谈判中转化为了宝贵的信任资产。 Bending Spoons 证明了在传统硅谷模式之外，依靠资本负债表收购、底层技术重构、极高人才密度与极简治理可以构建出极具复利效应的软件集团。然而，主持人 Brian 亦提出疑问：这种高度依赖年轻高斜率人才和统一技术中台的打法，在产品主导型增长（PLG）资产中卓有成效，但若延伸至高度依赖关系与经验的大型企业复杂销售（Enterprise Sales）场景，其有效性仍有待进一步验证。

## Background 本期内容由红杉资本（Sequoia Capital）播客于 2026 年 10 月 8 日发布，由 Brian Halligan 主持。访谈深入对话了 Bending Spoons 联合创始人兼 CEO Luca Ferrari，聚焦这家接连收购 AOL、Vimeo、Evernote 等产品的数字巨头背后的底层“操作系统”，揭示其买下、重构并永久持有的商业逻辑，以及如量化交易般精密的人才运作与组织哲学。 ## TL;DR Luca Ferrari 深入拆解了 Bending Spoons 凭借卓越运营实现长期资本复利的核心飞轮：通过自有资金并购成熟数字业务后，依托统一的研发与营销中台进行深度重构并永久持有。在人才端，公司像量化交易员筛选股票一样拆解求职信号，打破名校光环迷信，极其重视自驱力与成长斜率，大胆任用 20 多岁的年轻人接管收购项目。组织上，公司彻底废除传统高管团队，推行以第一性原理驱动的“持续简化”准则，将增加复杂度的举证责任完全施加给提议者。整套体系不仅支撑了米兰本土的人才套利模式，更建立在 Luca“永不撒谎、永不隐瞒”的绝对商业诚信底线之上。 ## Atmosphere & style 整场对谈呈现出极具穿透力的反常识思考与极客理性，充斥着对主流商业陈规的冷静解构。Brian 与 Luca 两位资深创始人在对话中棋逢对手、惺惺相惜，既有对“组织架构只占正负 10%”、“去他的高管团队”等锋利观点的智识切磋，又有关于个人管理盲区与 360 度反馈的真挚自省。结尾处 Luca 袒露年轻时所犯道德错误并由此立下高诚信誓言的讲述，让这场充斥着硬核量化指标与商业战略的对话瞬间收束于震撼人心的真诚之中。 ## Bulletin - `05:00` Bending Spoons 去年收到 80 万份求职申请但录用不足 300 人，将招聘作为量化交易模型运营，通过回测海量信号筛选人才，核心团队的令人惋惜离职率仅为 0.6%。 - `15:00` 内部数据打破名校神话，哈佛与斯坦福文凭对实际绩效的预测力极低且常伴随特权心态；相反，“17 岁积极参政但 20 岁出头退出”被证实与高自驱力和能动性强相关。 - `45:00` 彻底废除传统高管团队（exec team），采用算法驱动的双轨矩阵架构，按业务需求动态拉人决策，并坚持“增加组织复杂性的举证责任在提议者”原则。 - `30:38` 坚持以斜率（slope）重于经验，频繁起用 25 岁左右的年轻人挂帅接管所收购的成熟公司，认为资深管理者往往动力衰退且存在照搬旧解的认知盲区。 ## Key takeaways - `00:43` 商业模式本质：Bending Spoons 不是传统 PE 基金或巴菲特式控股公司，而是软件公司的底层“操作系统”，用自有资产负债表买下业务并永久持有，通过彻底重写代码与共享中台实现资本长效复利。 - `05:00` 人效碾压与工具复用：依靠自主研发的整套打通技术底座与极致人才密度，Bending Spoons 仅需 20 人的精简团队即可接管重构原本需要 200 人的成熟软件业务。 - `10:00` 量化招聘与人才回测：将招聘漏斗视为量化投资，由科学家团队回测数百个微弱信号与员工实际工作表现的关联，以此持续优化选拔算法。 - `15:00` 名校光环的预测力幻觉：哈佛、斯坦福等顶尖学府毕业生对实际业务产出的预测力被严重夸大，名校背景往往伴随着自命不凡的特权心态，抵消了微弱的原始天赋优势。 - `15:00` 非显性自驱力信号：17 岁积极参与政治代表打破现状的主观能动性，而在 20 岁出头适时退出来到职场，则证明其已将事业工作列为第一优先，属于极佳的企业家特质指标。 - `15:00` 常规面试纯属噪音：非结构化面试是招聘各环节中预测力最差的一环，必须改用严格标准化的提问脚本，并实施提问人与评分人隔离机制以消除主观偏见。 - `20:00` 硬性排名的背景调查：传统背调充斥着老好人客套话，必须通过强迫量化对比（如要求回答“在合作最密切的 20 人里能否排进前 5”）来刺破伪装、还原真相。 - `21:45` 战略与人才远重于管理工具：商业战略与护城河起决定性作用（一门好生意哪怕管理平庸也能赚钱），人才密度次之，而汇报线与 OKR 等管理层级结构充其量只产生正负 10% 的边际影响。 - `25:34` 时序切换式领导哲学：身兼战略思考与一线执行时，切忌并行推进，而应按时间序列轮流切换——先留出整块时间沉浸于云端做顶层架构，再跳入泥潭全心全意抓细节落实。 - `30:00` 斜率重于经验：经验往往随着世界变化而贬值，并伴随动力衰退与照搬过往旧解的致命盲区；年轻人的天赋和快速学习斜率无法后天补足，是更优质的长期资产。 - `35:00` 年轻挂帅的双核标准：委派 25 岁年轻人执掌被收购标的时，只考察两大杀手级特质——基于极快学习速度的严密理性推演能力，以及近乎狂热的极致主人翁精神。 - `35:00` 深水区人才锻造：反对温室式的培训体系，坚信让优秀人才快速成长的唯一路径就是赋予远超常理的巨大责任，并将其置身于极高人才密度的同事圈中实战打磨。 - `41:08` 绝对坦诚与缺陷修剪：推行直击要害的即时面对面反馈文化，认为实话实说高于礼貌客套；针对 360 评估暴露出的个人硬伤，坚持“一年只攻克一个重大弱点”。 - `45:00` 废黜高管团队：坚决取消 Executive Team 编制以避免身份官僚主义，战略务虚会与关键决策仅根据“谁懂业务、谁能做出实质贡献”动态拉入具体人员。 - `45:00` 双轨矩阵系统：组织分为职能线（负责专业标准与技能）和团队线（负责商业结果），两者统一汇聚至 CEO，但组织架构图仅用于业务赋能，角色随时在主管与一线贡献者间灵活流动。 - `51:27` 持续简化与举证不对称：组织中每增加一项复杂性（流程、团队或 Headcount），举证责任全在发起提议者，反对者无需举证即可否决；若新举措上线后未获明确成功，必须迅速撤回原状。 - `57:08` 米兰基地的人才套利：留在米兰一方面避开了硅谷中游企业的恶性挖角竞争，为本土渴望宏大事业的顶级人才提供了无需背井离乡的国际级平台，实现极低成本高密度组队；另一方面承载着推动全球创新与财富分布去中心化的使命。 - `01:00:00` 永不隐瞒的诚信底线：高诚信源于早年犯错带来的道德警醒而非实用主义算计；坚持“即使对自己不利也绝不隐瞒对方应知信息”，长期看反而构建起极具复利的商誉，促成交易主动上门。 ## Detailed walkthrough ### `00:00` 名校学历与实际能力的巨大错觉 在节目的开篇片段中，Bending Spoons 联合创始人兼 CEO Luca Ferrari 直言不讳地指出了传统招聘中对名校光环的盲目迷信。他认为，大众如果得知哈佛大学或斯坦福大学的文凭在预测员工未来实际工作表现上的准确度有多低，一定会大吃一惊。很多人理所当然地觉得顶尖名校毕业生必然是天才，然而数据揭示的事实并非如此：这类毕业生的能力或许确实比其他院校的学生稍微强一点点，但绝对没有强到令人瞩目的程度。 更糟糕的是，很多所谓的名校高材生在现实中不仅难以兑现潜力，反而往往伴随着极大的负面属性。Luca Ferrari 尖锐地指出：“我们经常发现，这些人往往带有一种理所当然的特权心态（entitled），自我感觉过于良好，最终把仅存的一点原始天赋优势消耗殆尽。” 紧接着，主持人 Brian 介绍了本期嘉宾 Luca Ferrari。Brian 强调自己期待采访 Luca 已久，因为他创立并运营的 Bending Spoons 是一家极其迷人的企业。从表面上看，它有点像通过并购来整合业务的私募股权机构（PE roll-up），但骨子里却是一家彻头彻尾的底层技术平台公司。Luca 的思考方式、产品构建逻辑以及作为 CEO 的管理哲学都极为独特，放眼全球商业界，几乎找不到任何与其类似的企业。 --- ### `00:43` Bending Spoons 的核心飞轮：买下、彻底重构并永久持有 在被问及 Bending Spoons 究竟如何运作、其“底层魔法”是什么时，Luca Ferrari 详细拆解了支撑这家公司长达 13 年运作的核心商业假设： “我们整个公司赖以建立的前提假设就是：如果我们能打造出一套机器、一个系统，让我们运营数字科技业务的能力超越几乎所有人，那么我们几乎可以百分之百保证，通过不断并购，能够极其高效地长期实现资本复利。” 如果一个业务在并入 Bending Spoons 的平台后，其经营状况能从物理和逻辑上彻底优于由其他公司独立运营的状态，那么 Bending Spoons 就能向卖家报出一个无法拒绝的诱人高价，并在完成收购后依然为自身股东创造出极高的投资回报。 Luca 坦言，这套逻辑听起来简单，真正困难的是把这套“运营系统”构建出来。过去 13 年里，团队倾尽心力打造了一支顶尖团队，沉淀了强大的专有技术与专有数据资产。一旦收购完成，他们会对目标企业进行深度的“平台化重构”（replatforming）： - **共享中台运作**：拥有统一的研发（R&D）、市场营销（Marketing）以及通用职能与行政（G&A）团队，这些人员可以在旗下所有产品线之间自由、流动地调配。 - **底层架构重置**：彻底重构被收购业务的云基础设施，大规模重写核心代码，修复遗留 bug 并提升系统性能。 - **产品与商业化重塑**：重新审视商业变现机制与增长营销策略，推出高价值新功能。 正如一位投资人所总结的，Bending Spoons 本质上就是一套软件公司的“操作系统”。被收购的企业从一家家独立公司，转变为安装在同一个坚实底层平台之上的“应用产品”。Luca 特别强调了他们与传统机构的本质区别： 1. **与私募股权基金（PE）的区别**：Bending Spoons 不是基金，完全使用自己的资产负债表进行收购；创立至今从未卖出过任何重要业务，未来也绝不打算出售，遵循“买下并永久持有且运营”的原则。 2. **与伯克希尔·哈撒韦（Berkshire Hathaway）的区别**：伯克希尔倾向于让被收购企业保持原有管理层和独立运作，而 Bending Spoons 采取的是极端深度的整合与重构，从零推倒重写技术底座和组织架构。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Bending Spoons 平台运作与价值创造流 accDescr: 展示 Bending Spoons 从标的选择、深度整合到永久持有的价值创造飞轮 subgraph Acquisition ["收购阶段"] A["发现具备价值潜力的数字业务"] --> B["使用资产负债表自有资金收购<br/>（买下并永久持有）"] end subgraph Replatforming ["平台化深度重构"] B --> C["注入 Bending Spoons 统一操作系统"] C --> D["彻底重写代码与重构云架构"] C --> E["共享研发、营销、G&A 跨项目调配"] C --> F["重构商业变现体系与产品功能"] end subgraph Compounding ["长期复利"] D & E & F --> G["效率飞跃：以极少人员创造极高产能"] G --> H["释放巨大现金流与超额股东回报"] H -->|"再投资驱动新收购"| A end ``` - **资本化里程碑**：在采访录制前几个月，Bending Spoons 成功公开上市，当时股权价值（市值）约为 180 亿美元。 - **跨国巨头类比**：Brian 将其类比为自己在 20 多岁被 PTC 派往日本三菱总部工作时见到的跨国综合商社模式（如三菱或三星的紧密总部赋能体制），认为它不同于任何西方常规的 PE 或巴菲特式控股公司。 --- ### `05:00` 运营决定成败：工业化人才密度的超级杠杆 当 Brian 询问其成功秘诀到底是来自“选项目（Picking）”还是“运营项目（Operating）”以及各自占比时，Luca 毫不犹豫地回答：“这几乎完全取决于运营能力。”尽管公司也努力挑选好项目，但核心护城河依然是平台本身。 支撑这一卓越运营平台的最关键杠杆，是工业化的人才密度。Luca 透露了一组令人震惊的数字： - **顶级人才漏斗**：去年 Bending Spoons 收到了整整 80 万份求职申请，但最终录用的人数不到 300 人。 - **人效的绝对碾压**：依靠顶级的产品经理、设计师、工程师和通用型管理者（GM），Bending Spoons 能够用极精简的团队彻底重塑一家公司。Luca 强调：“任何长期经营过数字业务的人都会告诉你，员工人数其实根本没那么重要，关键在于人有多优秀以及建立了怎样的文化。拥有这种水准的人才，别人需要 200 人运营的业务，我们只需要 20 人就能搞定。” - **自研原生基础设施**：过去十年间，公司投入巨资自研了数字业务所需的几乎整套专有技术栈，所有模块原生打通互联。若是作为单体公司独立运营，既无资金研发这套底层工具，甚至根本无从下手，这成为了并入平台的“作弊码”。 在被问及初创期如何启动这一飞轮时，Luca 回忆道，当公司一无所有、缺乏雇主品牌和主动求职流量时，创始人必须以小博大、超常发挥。在创业最初的两到三年里，他将至少 50%（甚至更多）的时间全部倾注在招聘及人才相关事务上。他和早期核心成员想方设法搞到了意大利顶尖大学最优秀毕业生的花名册，通过主动触达和极严苛的选拔，一步步开启了这套人才飞轮。 ### `10:00` 量化交易式招募与打造极致的人才密度飞轮 Luca Ferrari 回忆起公司早期招募人才时的野蛮生长状态：团队追踪候选人，他甚至亲自拨打数百通电话，“略带死缠烂打地骚扰其中一些人”，直到对方同意加入。而如今，Bending Spoons 的人才团队已经由科学家和研究人员组成。他们筛选人才漏斗的方式，几乎就像量化交易员挑选股票一样：不断寻找各类微弱信号，并将这些信号与候选人未来的实际工作表现进行回测，以确定哪些信号具有预测性，或者怎样的信号组合最具预测力，并据此不断迭代。在现有的精密评估系统中，每一份申请都会被拆解并评估数百个信号。Luca Ferrari 强调，这一系统能让你在品牌吸引力不变的前提下，筛选出好得多的团队；但硬币的另一面是，公司必须吸引高质量的生源，“因为如果只有天才来投递，组建一支优秀的团队自然更容易。” Bending Spoons 的业务模式为吸引顶级工程、设计和产品人才提供了天然的“不公平优势”。许多人非常喜欢这种灵活性：他们可以花 9 个月时间帮助重建 Vimeo 的视频底层基础设施，接着花 6 个月时间重构 AOL 的广告体系，随后再花一年时间打造底层的平台技术。所有这一切都在同一家公司内部完成，面对的是同一种企业文化和同一群同事，候选人辛辛苦苦积累的战绩（track record）完全不会被稀释，无需每次换工作都要重头建立信任与声誉。 这种长期对极高人才密度的执念形成了一个自我强化的飞轮。Luca Ferrari 指出，只要建立了这种环境，员工因为热爱自己的同事而几乎不会离职，公司去年的“令人惋惜的离职率”（regrettable churn）仅为 0.6%，即便硅谷巨头们一直在试图挖角。同时，优秀员工又会向过去的优秀校友推荐公司。但他坦言，在公司发展后期再想建立极高的人才密度是极其困难的，必须从第一天起就彻底着迷于此，甚至为此承受巨大的痛苦：“即便这意味着在很长一段时间里招募到的人数远低于你的预期。仅仅因为你觉得能找到更优秀的人，而不得不与那些明明工作很有帮助的员工分道扬镳。这非常痛苦，因为大家不是反社会人格。”为了追求长期的顶级战力，甘愿牺牲短期的有效产能，这是极其艰难的抉择，但唯有坚持，才能建立起强劲的飞轮。 - 人才筛选机制全面量化，每份申请评估数百个信号并与实际绩效持续做回测。 - 业务模式允许工程师在 Vimeo、AOL 等多个并购项目间无缝流动，避免外部跳槽带来的声誉损耗。 - 核心团队（Spooners）去年的令人惋惜离职率仅为 0.6%。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Talent Density Flywheel accDescr: Bending Spoons talent density flywheel showing how selective quantitative hiring leads to culture, retention, and referrals. subgraph S1["筛选与门槛"] A["量化多信号回测筛选"] --> B["极高的人才密度"] end subgraph S2["留存与声誉"] B --> C["跨项目流动且战绩不稀释"] C --> D["极低的主动流失率 (0.6%)"] end subgraph S3["回流与强化"] D --> E["员工自发推荐顶尖人才"] E --> A end ``` ### `15:00` 破除名校迷信、青涩政治经历信号与结构化面试 当主持人问及数据科学团队挖掘出哪些与成功高度相关（高 $R^2$）的意外信号时，Luca Ferrari 坦言部分细节需要保密，但大方分享了打破常规的发现。首先是GPA有一定参考价值但并不强；而最令人意外的是毕业院校——哈佛或斯坦福大学的文凭在预测实际绩效方面的表现差得惊人。“大家以为斯坦福哈佛毕业的肯定都是天才，但数据显示他们虽然可能比普通学校的学生强一点点，却绝没有大家想象的那么强。”更关键的是，名校光环往往会带来负面副作用：“而且我们经常发现，这些人往往会因为更加自命不凡、心高气傲，而损耗掉他们潜在的原始天赋优势。” 随后 Luca Ferrari 分享了一个极具预测力的罕见非显性信号：如果一个人在青少年时期（例如 17 岁）政治上非常活跃，但到了 20 岁出头便停止了政治活动，这往往与极强的自驱力和企业家精神（entrepreneurial mindset）高度相关。他的逻辑解释是：17 岁时觉得学校的条条框框不够用、必须要折腾更多事情，这体现了能动性（agency）、积极性和不屈服于现状的健康特质；然而，如果到了 25、26 甚至 30 岁依然在搞政治，说明这很可能成了他的人生使命，而这种追求通常与把工作和事业放在首位是不可调和的。这个信号不需要翻看候选人的 Instagram，大部分人为了申请咨询公司，都会主动将青少年时期的领导力经历写在简历上，此外团队在后续的笔试和面试中也会通过特定问题进行引导。 聊到面试环节时，Luca Ferrari 直言不讳地指出：“在招聘流程中所有典型的环节里，至少依我们的经验来看，面试是预测性最差的环节。”他认为完全没有指导方针、仅凭主观好恶给出“我喜欢/不喜欢这家伙”的非结构化闲聊几乎纯属噪音。要想让面试发挥作用，唯一的办法就是极度结构化：给面试官极其精准、标准化的脚本，要求必须以完全相同的方式提问，记录面试回答，并由不同的人独立进行评估打分。 听闻此言，主持人分享了 HubSpot 在销售团队从 10 人扩张到 1000 人时探索出的反常识招募流程：放弃名校生，专门挑佛蒙特大学或威斯康星大学等州立大学、具备竞技体育背景的竞争型人才，跳过常规面试，直接进行 12 分钟的模拟推销（Role Play）。在第一轮推销被刁难后，面试官会给候选人实时反馈，给一分钟思考后立刻再做一遍，专门考察候选人吸收反馈和快速调整的“斜率”（slope），最后做背调录用。在讨论到背景调查时，Luca Ferrari 澄清由于意大利法律明文禁止“非公开背景调查”（blind references），为了保证全球各法域流程的通用性，Bending Spoons 不会背着候选人私下调查，而是让候选人提供推荐人名单并在团队指引下开展调查。 - 名校预测力偏差：哈佛、斯坦福等顶级名校的预测力被严重高估，且部分名校生伴随着更高的特权感和膨胀心理。 - 青少年政治活跃信号：17 岁参与政治代表高能动性与不甘平庸，而在 20 岁出头退出则说明工作能够成为其第一优先重心。 - 结构化面试规范：严格规定提问脚本与语气，并且面试实施人与答案评估人必须在流程上分离，以此消除主观噪音。 - 背景调查合规性：由于意大利法律禁止非公开背调（blind references），公司统一采取候选人提供背调联系人的合规流程。 ### `20:00` 背景调查量化考核：如何让背调真正具备预测力 在招聘流程的背景调查（Reference Check）环节，Luca Ferrari 强调了极度严谨与结构化的重要性。Bending Spoons 会尽量联系候选人过往最重要工作经历中的合作者，最理想的情况是直接联系其前任主管。然而，如果单纯由背调人员拿起电话随意聊天，结果几乎千篇一律是好评，因为极少有候选人会主动提供可能批评自己的人的名单。为了打破这种“老好人偏见”，Bending Spoons 将背调完全标准化，强制背调对象做出极其艰难的硬性分级抉择。 在具体的背调提问中，他们会直接给出强约束的量化对比，例如：“在你合作最密切的 20 个人里面，这个人算不算最出色的那个，或者能排进前 5 吗？”随后再追问细节以验证其回答是否言之有物。Luca 指出，许多原本情绪高涨、赞不绝口的前同事，在被追问具体排名时往往会退缩，承认候选人可能只能排在第 8 名左右——虽然这也不错，但绝非他们之前口中吹捧的“绝世天才”。正如 Luca 所言：“背调可以具备预测力，但在达到这一步之前，你必须投入大量的精力和结构化设计。”（“They can be predictive, but again, you need to be scientific about it.”）主持人 Brian 对此深有共鸣，指出这种强迫对比排名的盲测提问往往能直击要害，迅速撕开客套话的伪装。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 结构化背景调查流程 accDescr: 展示 Bending Spoons 从获取背调人选到强制量化排名的结构化调查流程 subgraph Input["获取背调对象"] A["候选人提供重要履历联系人<br/>（优先获取直属前主管）"] end subgraph StructuredQuestions["结构化硬性提问"] B["设置基准样本群<br/>（例如：合作最密切的20人）"] C["强行量化分级<br/>（是否为第1名？能否进入前5？）"] end subgraph Verification["追问与实质过滤"] D["追问具体业务案例与细节"] E["刺破客套夸赞<br/>（例如从'天才'降级为'第8名'）"] end Input --> StructuredQuestions StructuredQuestions --> Verification ``` --- ### `21:45` 组织架构只占正负10%：战略与人才密度才是核心驱动力 Brian 提到自己在采访了 20 位 CEO 后发现根本不存在放之四海而皆准的“管理手册”，现在的管理实践甚至呈现出两极分化：Kalshi 的联合创始人带着约 200 名员工，中间没有任何管理层级，实行全员汇报的“混乱式管理”（Management by Chaos）；而 Databricks 的 Ali Ghodsi 却有着高度严谨的架构，只设 8 位直接下属，每周开 3 次例会，每季度严格举行 QBR（季度业务复盘）和战略离线会。面对这两种极端，Luca 表示自己的风格介于两者之间，但他直言外界严重高估了形式化管理工具与组织层级的价值。 在 Luca 的商业哲学中，一家公司的成败绝大多数由商业战略、产品市场契合度（PMF）以及竞争护城河决定。他衡量业务好坏的标准极为务实：“对我来说，一门好生意是即使管理团队表现平庸——也许不是烂透了，但哪怕只是平庸——也能经营得很好的生意。”（“I always ask myself, to me, a business is a good business if it would do well even if management was mediocre, maybe not awful, but mediocre.”）第二重要的则是人才密度与公司文化（即团队如何做决策、看重什么、鄙视什么）。至于具体的汇报线、是否推行 OKR、抑或是扁平还是层级化，Luca 认为这充其量只在边际上产生“正负 10% 左右的影响”。只要拥有超高的人才密度、务实的商业导向与理性拼搏的文化，哪怕组织偏向混乱无序，人才也足以抹平管理漏洞；反之，若管理过于死板，优秀的人才也会为了业务结果而灵活变通，不会被流程卡死。 - **业务三要素的权重排序**： 1. 商业战略与护城河（决定性力量，好生意的平庸管理也能赚钱） 2. 人才密度与决策文化（价值取向与执行基底） 3. 正式管理架构与流程（OKR、管理跨度、层级结构，仅占约 $\pm10\%$ 的边际效应） --- ### `25:34` 领导者还是管理者？仆人式领导与“头顶云端、脚踏实地” 当 Brian 问及 Luca 觉得自己是更好的“领导者（Leader）”还是“管理者（Manager）”时，Luca 展现出了内敛与自我怀疑的特质。他坦言自己面对优秀团队时常常觉得自己做的不够、悲观地“只看到半杯水空着”，并评价自己在两方面都算过得去，但谈不上卓越。如果一定要对比，他认为自己可能更偏向领导者，但绝非电影《勇敢的心》里威廉·华莱士（William Wallace）那种振臂高呼、发表煽动性演讲的大师，而是践行“仆人式领导”（Servant Leadership）：“当你和一个言行一致、身先士卒、竭尽所能的人一起工作时，我认为你自然会受到激励。”（“When you work with someone who walks the talk and is in the trenches and does their best, I think you tend to be inspired.”）而在管理者层面，他自认并不擅长主持一对一沟通（1-on-1）这类常规管理例会。 针对 Brian 引用的埃莉诺·罗斯福（Eleanor Roosevelt）名言——“头顶云端，脚踏实地”（Keep your head in the clouds, but feet on the ground），Luca 详细阐述了企业家如何平衡宏观大局与执行细节。他认为自己的强项在于透过纷繁的杂音看透业务本质与战略方向，但同时他极度反对待在象牙塔里脱离实际。脱离一线的管理者既无法为宏观战略提供准确信息，也无法赢得同事尊重，更不具备指导与评估他人的资格。面对两种状态的冲突，Luca 总结出了一套时间序列的工作法：“我发现按先后顺序轮流处理这些任务，要比同时并行运转容易得多。因此，我会划出专门的时间让自己完全沉浸在云端，思考最重大的问题和机遇、扮演好架构师；随后则是长周期地扎进执行模式，从头到脚全身心投入到泥潭般的具体事务中去。”（“I find it's easier to sequence those activities than trying to run them in parallel.”） ### `30:00` 管理者的辅导职责与“经验 vs. 潜力”的抉择 Brian 提出管理者常面临的困境：自己从未管理过数千人规模的上市公司，往往觉得自己没有资格给高管当下属的教练（Coach）；同时，硅谷当下许多 CEO 都在纠结，究竟该押注内部上升期但毫无相关经验的潜力新人，还是花重金引进“看过这部电影”（即有成熟经验）的外来高管。Luca Ferrari 对此坦诚承认自己作为辅导者也经常感到能力不足。但他指出，在 Bending Spoons，公司从不假定直线经理必须懂得解决下属遇到的所有问题。辅导应当跨越层级和汇报线，任何人在某一具体问题上若具备经验，都可以去指导其他人。经理的核心职责是展现智力、逻辑分析能力、情感支持以及愿意卷起袖子下场干活的协作态度，而非拥有所有答案。 谈到经验与潜力的博弈，Luca 明确表示 Bending Spoons 对所谓的行业经验评价远低于外界主流认知。经验虽然有价值，但伴随着致命陷阱：世界变化太快，七年前行之有效的方案如今很可能失效；更可怕的是“经验主义盲区”，有经验者往往不顾具体语境，生硬照搬旧套路，导致引进好处的同时附带了大量糟粕。此外，Bending Spoons 拥有极度讲求务实（Hands-on）、零政治、极度坦诚（Radically Candid）、每个人都必须全权担当（Carry their own weight）的鲜明文化。那些在大厂如鱼得水的高管往往习惯了不同的领导风格，加入后往往水土不服，文化再造的成本极高甚至根本无法适应。最后，Luca 指出工作年限与工作动力往往成反比：与其要一个拥有 20 年经验但动力只有 6 分的人，不如选择一个仅有 2 年经验但动力满分 10 分的新人。即使随着公司规模大幅扩张，Bending Spoons 依然坚定不移地投资应届生或仅有一两年工作经验的年轻人。在人才市场上，经验可以通过时间培养，但天赋（Talent）无法后天补足。 - “Being someone's manager doesn't mean you're always in a better position to solve a problem for them.” —— Luca Ferrari 强调担任上级并不意味着在解决具体问题上一定比下属更高明。 - “And there is a huge risk that people will be blind as to the new context because they did it that way and they will just try to paste whatever solution they applied before.” —— Luca Ferrari 指出照搬历史方案往往会导致管理者对新环境产生致命盲区。 - “And last but not least, I find that generally people lose motivation as they gain experience.” —— Luca Ferrari 直言资深员工的动力衰退是普遍存在的组织痛点。 ### `35:00` 25 岁挂帅掌舵收购标的：核心考核特质与破局之道 在谈及让 25 岁或 27 岁的年轻领袖接管被收购企业时，Luca 承认，派一位 50 岁、拥有 30 年履历的人去接管，在被收购方团队看来表面上更容易令人信服，但 Bending Spoons 的过往战绩证明，年轻主管完全能把业务管得更好。派去挂帅的年轻人绝非盲目指派，他们此前都已经在小规模团队或业务中经过严格验证。在挑选领头人时，除了沟通良好、不混蛋等基本卫生因素（Hygienic factors）外，Luca 核心看重两大杀手级特质： 1. **顶级聪明与理性思考（Smart reasoning）**：学习速度极快且有事实证明；无论是诊断问题还是提出解决方案，其逻辑分析必须高度理性、准确无误、推演严密。 2. **极致的主人翁精神（Extreme ownership）**：近乎狂热地渴望成为全球顶尖高手，竭尽全力为团队和公司创造最大价值；一旦发现阻碍或自身技能短板，会不惜一切代价攻克。 当这种年轻人挂帅出现“排异反应”或失败时（虽然极罕见，历史上仅有一两例），通常源于两种情况：一是当事人虽然智商极高、跑得飞快，但缺乏共情力与敏锐度，无法在关键节点察觉团队的心理异样并给予妥当沟通，从而积累了对抗情绪；二是被收购团队中的老员工存在强烈的资历优越感，无论年轻主管多么优秀亲和，老员工在心理上始终无法接受被一个资历浅的人领导。面对后一种情况，公司会果断抉择——要么换掉抗拒新领导的原团队成员，要么根据具体业务环境调换负责人。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 核心选拔与落地机制 accDescr: 展示选拔年轻负责人的核心能力标准以及进入业务后的落地培养机制 subgraph Selection ["核心选拔标准 (占80%权重)"] A["快速学习与严密逻辑推理<br/>(Smart Reasoning)"] B["极致主人翁意识与攻坚狂热<br/>(Extreme Ownership)"] end subgraph Deployment ["实战培养机制 (抛入深水区)"] C["前期在小团队/小业务验证"] D["赋予远超常理的巨大责任"] E["身边配置极高密度的顶尖同事"] end A --> C B --> C C --> D D --> E ``` 在人才培养模式上，Luca 驳斥了传统温室式的培训体系。虽然公司提供基础培训材料，但他坚信“90% 的成效来自于把他们扔进深水区（Throw them into the deep end of the pool）”。最有效的成长路径就是赋予新人看似极其不合理的巨大责任，并让他们置身于极其卓越的同事之中——人类最强大的学习方式，就是在实战中向身边比自己更出色的人直接吸收经验。 - “I think 90% of the outcome depends on you throw them into the deep end of the pool.” —— Luca Ferrari 总结人才飞速成长的核心在于大胆压担子。 - “You give them way more responsibility that seems reasonable. And then you surround them with amazing colleagues.” —— Luca Ferrari 阐述 Bending Spoons 锤炼年轻负责人的极简法则。 ### `40:00` 360 度评估、“特性与缺陷”以及每年的个人修剪计划 主持人 Brian Halligan 分享了自己在 HubSpot 早期经历的一次深刻的 360 度评估。当时，他的联合创始人主动请缨来主持这次评估——这其实相当反常，因为那位合伙人是个重度内向者，“他当时的反应就像是：‘我怎么才能在不跟其他人形生物（homo sapiens）交谈的情况下把这事办成？’”于是合伙人想出了一个净推荐值（Net Promoter Score, NPS）式的极简问卷，只设了两个问题：第一，“如果满分是 10 分，你在多大程度上愿意推荐 Brian 继续担任 HubSpot 的 CEO？”第二，“为什么给出这个分数？”这份问卷发给了董事会成员、客户以及员工等约 25 人，结果收回来的不是简单的评语，而是“密密麻麻的长篇巨著”。 随后，合伙人不仅整理出了直方图，还用极具产品思维的“特性（feature）与缺陷（bug）”结构来向 Brian 汇报，并附上最扎心的原话引述。Brian 翻前十页时心满意足，觉得自己“浑身都是优秀特性”，然而从第 11 页开始，满屏的“缺陷”让他冷汗直流。更具冲击力的是，他顿悟到“有些我以为的特性，在别人眼里其实是严重的缺陷”——比如他对事情过度狂热、情绪过于激昂，反而给团队造成了巨大的压力。第一年 Brian 试图把所有毛病一次性改掉，但很快发现根本不切实际，于是后来的两三年里，他转为每年只挑选一到两个缺陷集中攻克。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 360 Feedback Processing Loop accDescr: Diagram illustrating Brian Halligan's 360-degree review mechanism classifying CEO traits into features and bugs. subgraph Survey ["调研与数据采集"] A["NPS 调查<br/>(1-10分打分)"] --> B["原因详述<br/>(长篇文字反馈)"] end subgraph Analysis ["归类与剖析"] B --> C["直方图分布分析"] B --> D["原话摘录分类"] end subgraph Outcome ["洞察与迭代"] D --> E["产品特性 (Features)<br/>前10页：被认可的优势"] D --> F["系统缺陷 (Bugs)<br/>第11页起：暴露出的硬伤"] F --> G["每年专注攻关 1-2 个硬伤"] end ``` Luca Ferrari 对此深有同感。他透露 Bending Spoons 内部推行所谓的“绝对坦诚（radical candor）”文化： - 只要员工的出发点不是为了宣泄负面情绪，而是真诚认为分享出来有助于当事人成长、团队获益或公司进步，就必须立刻说出来。 - 坦诚高于一切礼仪：“不要去过分担心用词是否精准、会不会伤害别人的感情。显然，在可能的情况下尽量保持和善，但与实话实说相比，态度和善只是次要的。” - 这种即时反馈尽量做到面对面，如果会议中看到问题，甚至应当场挑明，而不必顾虑人情面子；若是线上沟通或 Slack 上发现问题，则及时发消息反馈。 - 除了日常无处不在的即时吐槽与挑刺，Bending Spoons 每年也会组织一次正式的结构化 360 度评估，由 6 到 10 位评审人对每位员工进行打分诊断。 谈到自己的缺点时，Luca Ferrari 坦言自己同样经历了从贪多到聚焦的过程。他曾经一年列出 5 个需要改进的短板，结果半年就发现自身根本吃不消，从此严格遵循“一年只攻克一个重大弱点”的原则。当 Brian 追问他当前正在死磕的弱点是什么时，Luca 坦露了一段颇为隐秘的心路历程：“在这个世界上，我目前人生中最大的特权，就是能够和我身边这群高质量的人一起工作。我发自内心认可他们的能力、才华与贡献，但在大声表达赞赏这方面，我表现得糟糕透顶。” Luca 解释道，他对自己极度苛刻，“通常在深夜准备结束一天的工作时，我对自己的状态往往充满了失望”。因为习惯了用批判的放大镜审视自己与他人，哪怕心里万分佩服某些伙伴，口头上也极少主动当面夸赞对方有多棒。他今年的目标就是逼自己把这种内心的认可公开说出来，即使目前只能算“半成功半失败”，但也已经比过去有了长足的进步。 ### `45:00` 去除高管团队与“矩阵式算法”组织架构 听到 Luca 的弱点，Brian 笑着表示几乎所有 CEO 都有类似的毛病。传统管理学常建议“给一次批评前要配上五次表扬”，但多数技术型创始人的思维往往是“既然有 6 个名额，干脆全用来挑毛病好了”。Brian 甚至一度不得不在每周五下午专门圈出 15 分钟日程，强迫自己给别人发赞美邮件。 紧接着，Brian 抛出了一个许多创始人容易陷入的陷阱：CEO 是否只信任核心圈子里的三四个人，把一切战略事务收拢在极小的密室中，而对其他所有人敬而远之？ Luca 的回答出人意料：“完全没有，我们从来没有收到过这种反馈，因为我们在权力结构上是高度分散的。我们甚至没有高管团队（executive team）或所谓的领导层班子。”他解释说，Bending Spoons 很多年前曾设立过传统意义上的高管团队，但后来亲手把它废黜了。因为一旦设立了正式的高管编制，就会陷入极度荒谬的官僚陷阱：讨论某些事情时，仅仅因为某些人顶着“高管”头衔，他们哪怕不懂也必须出席；而真正懂业务、能提供关键视角的基层员工，却因为不属于“高管层”而被排斥在决策大门之外。 > “所以现在我们干脆变成：谁需要参与，就拉谁进来，不管他的头衔或者声望是什么——去他妈的高管团队（fuck the executive team），我们根本不需要高管团队。”——Luca Ferrari 哪怕是去开战略务虚会（off-site），与会名单也从来不是由级别决定的，而是基于实际产出和输入： - 会议主要邀请能做出实质贡献、或者能从会议中汲取关键信息的人。 - Bending Spoons 痛恨冗长和庞大的低效会议，但有时即使某个人全程不发一言，只要团队认为他坐在一旁聆听能加速个人成长，也会被破格邀请。 - 绝不存在任何“纯粹为了照顾对方情绪、为了让某人觉得自己很重要”而发放的旁听入场券。 面对 Brian 关于“你们是不是连组织架构图都没有”的疑问，Luca 明确否认。他指出 Bending Spoons 实际上拥有一个极其精确、由“算法运行”的矩阵式组织结构，这个系统被清晰地划分为两套轴线： | 轴线类型 | 负责范畴 | 职责定位 | |:--- |:--- |:--- | | **职能线 (Functions)** | 如何做 (How) | 负责硬技能、专业标准与方法论沉淀 | | **团队线 (Teams)** | 做什么 (What) | 负责具体的战略目标与推动公司胜利的商业结果 | 在这个双轨系统中，每个人都会同时向一位职能主管（Functional Lead）和一位业务团队主管（Team Lead）汇报，两套路径最终汇聚在单一的终节点——即现任 CEO 本人。Luca 强调，这套系统被用来自动化处理大量的内部运转与协作流程，但公司会反复告诫所有人：组织架构图存在的唯一意义在于它能够赋能业务，“员工绝不能让自己受到架构图的任何束缚与限制”。在公司内部，人员的角色极其流动，某个人今天作为团队主管带领攻坚，项目告一段落后回到一线独立贡献者（IC）的岗位继续写代码，是再常见不过的事情。 当聊到组织与领导权更替时，Brian 提到了英伟达 CEO 黄仁勋（Jensen Huang）的极客管理哲学——黄仁勋拥有 60 个直接汇报对象、不搞 1 对 1 单聊、所有决策与反馈直接在公开场合交锋。黄仁勋曾直言，如果未来自己退休，继任者绝不应该生搬硬套他的管理操作系统，而必须全盘推翻重构。 Luca 对黄仁勋的观点完全赞同。他认为就像带领一支竞技运动队一样，“如果你身为教练却宣称‘这就是唯一的赢球之道，这是最好的打法’，那你绝对是个不折不扣的傻瓜”。组织系统必须与掌控它的那个人的独特特质紧密啮合，任何盲目的继承都是削足适履。 ### `50:00` 第一性原理与“反常识”：不参考常规做法 Brian Halligan 谈到，组织架构应该服务于团队成员的实际特质，如果未来更换了 CEO，新任负责人是否应当根据自己的判断重写系统。Luca Ferrari 完全赞同这一点，他表示如果未来公司更换了 CEO，他会鼓励新任 CEO 自行判断是否需要做出变革：“他们如果喜欢现有的模式，完全不必去改；但同样地，如果他们认为改变能让事情变得更好，他们应该感到有充分的自由去调整。” ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Bending Spoons 第一性原理决策逻辑 accDescr: 展示从极高目标推导出必须打破常规、按自身语境独立寻找最优解的过程。 A["设定极高目标：打造史上最成功的公司之一"] --> B["意识到若完全模仿常规做法，结果必然趋于平庸"] B --> C["放弃研究行业惯例与 conventional wisdom"] C --> D["针对核心问题，从零构建独立的最优解"] ``` Brian 敏锐地指出，Luca 是一个极其信奉“第一性原理”（First Principles）的人，对所谓的行业常规智慧（Conventional Wisdom）抱有强烈的怀疑态度，这让 Brian 想起当年的自己。当被问及“常规智慧在哪些方面是对的，以至于你们也选择随大流”时，Luca 坦言，Bending Spoons 从创立之初就试图从零开始构建一切，质疑所有现成规则。这并非因为他们自以为比别人聪明，而是源于极其现实的数学逻辑。Luca Ferrari 强调：“如果你只是模仿其他人正在做的事情，那你注定只能做到平庸的程度——无非是稍微好一点或稍微差一点。”正因如此，他们甚至根本懒得去了解行业常规是什么，而是针对每一个关键问题，结合自身的具体语境和愿景去寻找最优解。他甚至开玩笑说，如果要说有什么常规智慧是正确的，大概也就是“对人友好一点”吧。 --- ### `51:27` 极度简化：增加复杂性的举证责任在提议者 Brian Halligan 提出一个观察：如今 ChatGPT 之后诞生的 AI 原生代公司似乎与以前的企业截然不同。现在的初创公司第二年就出海国际化，第三年就启动收购，执行节奏比当年 HubSpot 花八年时间才完成的事情还要快得多。而在 HubSpot 早期，Brian 扮演的是“激进简化者”的角色，甚至给自己买了一顶写着“NO”的帽子戴进会议室，因为在他看来，HubSpot 这种公司“更有可能死于吃撑了（过度扩张），而不是死于挨饿”。然而，现在很多戴着“YES 帽子”的年轻团队似乎把多任务并行推向了极致。对此，Luca 认同激进简化始终是一种赢面极大的策略，因为复杂度直接意味着成本增加、速度变慢和产出变差；但他同样认为，平衡点取决于具体的时代和技术环境。如果在 1800 年代创业，没有互联网和现代技术，能做的事情自然比 1990 年代少得多；今天有了 AI，同等资源下能做的事情更多并不奇怪。 然而，Luca 提醒大家不要陷入幸存者偏差。表面上某些公司兼顾了四五件事并取得了成功，并不意味着这是最佳路径；如果他们砍掉最小、最不重要的一项，集中精力把最核心的业务多提升 35%，整体回报可能会高得多。在 Bending Spoons 内部，他们把这一理念固化为一项名为“持续简化”（Relentless Simplification）的核心准则，并依此进行严格的自我审视与考核。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 复杂性提案的举证与复原机制 accDescr: 提议增加复杂度的人需承担全部举证责任，若未达成明确成功则必须迅速撤销。 subgraph 提议阶段 A["提出增加复杂度<br>(流程/功能/团队/HC)"] --> B["提议者承担全部举证责任<br>(反对者无需提供理由)"] end subgraph 决策与验证 B --> C{"是否有清晰证据<br>或改动是否完全可逆？"} C -- 否 --> D["直接否决提案"] C -- 是 --> E["批准推进并上线"] E --> F["提议发起者限期评估成效"] end subgraph 结果处理 F --> G{"取得明确成功？"} G -- 是 --> H["保留该复杂结构"] G -- 否 --> I["迅速撤销并恢复原状"] end ``` 关于该准则的具体运行方式，Luca 解释了一套权责极不对称但极为高效的规则： - **举证责任全在增加复杂度的人身上**：每当有人提议在组织中增加复杂度——无论是一个新的审批流程、一项产品功能、一个新团队，还是仅仅增加一个人头——证明其合理性的责任完全由发起提议的人承担。Luca Ferrari 明确指出：“那些认为这是个坏主意的人根本不需要提供任何证据，他们直接反对就行。” - **不可逆改动绝不轻易放行**：如果大家决定推进这项复杂性，要么必须有确凿无疑的前期证据证明其合理性，要么这项改动必须是完全可逆的（Revertible）。 - **发起人负责善后与迅速撤回**：负责推行新举措的人必须在事后严格评估其效果；如果未能取得极其明确的成功，就必须迅速将其撤回、恢复原状。 - **鼓励挑战既有制度，绝不产生盲区**：人性会对长期存在的复杂性习以为常并逐渐视而不见。因此，任何人只要敢于跳出来质疑存在已久的流程或规章，哪怕这会给其他人带来重新审视的麻烦，也永远应当受到掌声鼓励。 --- ### `57:08` 为何留在米兰：商业套利与使命感，世界不需要只有一个硅谷 Brian 谈到 HubSpot 当年把总部设在波士顿的利弊，很多人认为离开硅谷就无法做出伟大的企业，甚至会有一种“不够酷”的落后感。Luca 则大方调侃道：“像我这样一个把 AOL 这类公司买下来的人，根本不可能在乎酷不酷。退一步讲，就算我在乎，我也觉得‘不酷本身才是真正的酷’。”关于旧金山与外地的对比，Brian 提出自己的假设：旧金山是全球创业最好的起点，但在那里做大极其困难，因为成本高昂且员工几乎没有忠诚度。Luca 对此表示，如果你正在做全球最酷、潜力最大、资金最充裕的项目，旧金山确实是能以最快速度吸纳最多顶级人才的地方；但如果你的项目资质处于中游（即便按硅谷标准的中游也算极高水准），在旧金山规模化就会异常艰难。 Bending Spoons 最初由 Luca 和几位联合创始人在丹麦读完工程学位并关闭了他们失败的 AI 初创公司（2010 年创立、2013 年关闭）后，特意搬回意大利米兰创立的。他们选择米兰主要出于两个原因： - **极其实用且商业化的“人才套利”逻辑**：意大利拥有 6000 万人口和极高水准的高等教育，但本土却几乎没有顶尖的科技企业。许多渴望宏大事业、才华横溢的技术人才，过去只能被迫在平庸的本地小企业工作，或者背井离乡远赴他国。Bending Spoons 带着巨大的野心和优秀的项目来到米兰，为这些渴望留在家乡、陪伴家人的顶级人才提供了一个兼具国际视野与本地生活的选择。这使公司能够以相同甚至更低的成本，组建起一支实力远超同行的本土团队。 - **使命驱动的愿景：让财富与知识更均衡地分布**：Luca 认为，尽管像硅谷这样高出一个维度的全球创新中心是世界繁荣所必需的，但如果所有关键的创新、机会与财富都极端集中在一两个地方，长期来看对整个世界（甚至包括生活在硅谷的人本身）都会是一个巨大的问题。Luca Ferrari 表示：“我们希望尽自己 1% 的力量，通过证明你完全可以在一个意想不到的地方打造一家击败全球对手的公司，来推动哪怕 1% 的改变。” 如今 Bending Spoons 已经完全成为一家国际化公司，在意大利本土之外招聘的人数远多于本土，并计划次年在美国正式设立办公室。但回顾过去，Luca 认为留在米兰是一个极其正确的决策。在讨论的最后，Brian 抛出了一个铺垫已久的重磅话题：他在采访前私下致电了三位被 Bending Spoons 收购公司的创始人，未做任何引导，结果这三位创始人无一例外给出了完全相同的评价——极高的商业诚信（High Integrity）。 ### `01:00:00` 从不撒谎、从不隐瞒：Luca 的高诚信准则 主持人 Brian Halligan 透露，在录制采访前他与三位被 Bending Spoons 收购公司的创始人通了电话，三位创始人不约而同地给出了同一个评价：Luca 拥有极其出色的诚信度（exceptionally high integrity）。Brian 直言，在准备 CEO 访谈时他极少听到这样的评价，因此询问 Luca 这种个人准则究竟源自何处。Luca 坦承，这种诚信并非出于功利考量（not a point of expedience），而是一个纯粹且高度个人化的道德问题。在 20 岁出头时，他曾在感情中背叛了当时的女友，这让他深感羞耻。“有时我认为，犯一个大错往往比去理性推导自己应该如何行事能让人学到更多。”Luca 解释道。正是那次严重的自责，让他向自己许下了誓言：不仅绝不撒谎，而且即使在对自己不利的情况下，也绝不隐瞒对方应该知晓的重要信息（never omit something important that people should know, even if it's to my detriment）。 Luca 随后将这一准则贯彻到了生活的方方面面，包括商业运营之中。尽管这种做法在短期内经常会付出代价，但他坚信从长远来看它是值得的。当 Brian 提到被收购创始人对他的高度评价时，Luca 感到非常欣慰，并开玩笑说这比夸赞他的长相要好得多。对他而言，成为一个让人坚信能如实呈现事情真相的人，是一项终生的使命。长期来看，建立起值得信赖的声誉不仅让生活更简单、让友谊更长久，还能为商业合作带来极大的便利——创始人会主动找上门寻求出售，因为他们知道 Bending Spoons 的一诺千金。Brian 对这段真诚的分享表示赞赏，并祝愿他在带领公司迈向万亿美元的征途上一帆风顺，正式结束了本期访谈。 - 道德出发点：诚信并非为了获取短期利益或实用主义算计，而是经历人生严重错误后建立起的纯粹道德戒律。 - 行为底线：坚持“永不撒谎”与“永不隐瞒关键信息”，哪怕实话实说会损害自身的即时利益。 - 商业复利效应：长期建立的高度信任感会让被收购方主动找来，将承诺视为不可动摇的契约。 ### `01:01:16` Brian 的播客复盘：从不回避冲突、量化招聘与天资斜率 访谈结束后，Brian 对整期内容进行了个人总结与深度剖析。他指出，对于 CEO 而言，诚信往往是一个被严重低估的品质——声誉虽然难以建立，但一件蠢事就能让它彻底崩塌。Luca 谈到的“不隐瞒任何重要信息”直接呼应了 Databricks 创始人兼 CEO Ali Ghodsi 曾提出的观点：“作为 CEO，你能展现的最糟糕特质就是回避冲突（the worst thing you can be as a CEO is conflict-averse）。”如果不隐瞒真相，冲突就必然会发生，而勇于直面冲突正是卓越领导者的必备能力。此外，Brian 认为 Luca 在人才招聘上的量化方法极具独创性，这让他联想到 HubSpot 早期将一位营销人员转去负责 HR 并将其做成增长飞轮的经历（该负责人如今已是法律科技公司 Harvey 的 COO）。Luca 把招聘视为营销漏斗，并配备了专门的数据科学团队去测试成百上千个求职信号，反而将大家擅长伪装的“面试”环节权重调得很低。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Luca Ferrari 核心管理哲学体系 accDescr: 展现 Luca 围绕高诚信、量化人才选拔、天资斜率和战略执行展开的管理闭环 subgraph Moral["道德基石与领导力"] A["高诚信底线<br/>(永不撒谎/永不隐瞒)"] --> B["直面必然冲突<br/>(非冲突回避型)"] end subgraph Talent["人才与招聘飞轮"] C["量化数据筛选<br/>(测试海量信号/弱化常规面试)"] --> D["绝不降低用人标准<br/>(宁可长期高压工作)"] D --> E["偏好天资斜率 (Slope)<br/>(20岁出头的高坡度年轻人掌舵)"] end subgraph Strategy["业务与战略协同"] F["产品驱动增长 (PLG)<br/>(依赖卓越的运营重组)"] G["战略大于团队结构<br/>(优秀战略可容忍平庸团队)"] end B --> D E --> F F --> G ``` Brian 进一步分析了 CEO 们常面临的经典抉择：到底是聘用经验（experience）还是看重天资斜率（slope）。尽管 Bending Spoons 已经具备相当大的体量，但 Luca 依旧坚定地选择斜率胜过经验，其被收购公司的核心管理团队几乎清一色是 20 多岁但成长斜率极高的年轻人。Brian 指出，这可能与 Bending Spoons 多数收购的是产品驱动增长（PLG）类软件公司有关，这类业务不像大型企业销售那样高度依赖资深行业经验。访谈中让 Brian 感到意外甚至“有点烧脑”的是，Luca 既表现出对人才密度的极端执着，又抛出“如果战略足够出色，团队即使平庸也能赢”的论点。Brian 总结道，在实际商业竞争中并没有捷径可走，收购后的成功既离不开挑选公司的眼光，也离不开卓越的战略、非凡的运营执行力以及顶尖的人才团队，而 Luca 的实践无疑展现了一种极其独特且高效的企业操作系统。 - 招聘漏斗思维：建立强大的雇主品牌，配备专门的数据科学团队评估数千个候选人特征，降低常规面试的参考权重。 - 绝不放水标准：无论公司如何扩张，绝不降低人才门槛，宁愿忍受人员短缺带来的加班压力也不引入二流员工。 - 斜率优先与赛道匹配：在 PLG 为主的商业模式下，重用具备高认知和快速迭代能力的年轻管理者，而非因循守旧的高管。 - 战略、团队与运营三位一体：企业长期成功必须同时具备区别于对手且契合客户的独到战略、无懈可击的运营能力以及极高密度的人才阵容。 ## Notable quotes > `05:00` 任何长期经营过数字业务的人都会告诉你，员工人数其实根本没那么重要，关键在于人有多优秀以及建立了怎样的文化。拥有这种水准的人才，别人需要 200 人运营的业务，我们只需要 20 人就能搞定。 — Luca Ferrari > `00:43` 我们整个公司赖以建立的前提假设就是：如果我们能打造出一套机器、一个系统，让我们运营数字科技业务的能力超越几乎所有人，那么我们几乎可以百分之百保证，通过不断并购，能够极其高效地长期实现资本复利。 — Luca Ferrari > `50:00` 如果你只是模仿其他人正在做的事情，那你注定只能做到平庸的程度——无非是稍微好一点或稍微差一点。 — Luca Ferrari ## Mentioned Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons, Brian Halligan, Sequoia Capital, Harvard University, Stanford University, AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, Airtable, Berkshire Hathaway, PTC, Mitsubishi, Samsung, HubSpot, University of Vermont, University of Wisconsin, Kalshi, Databricks, Ali Ghodsi, William Wallace, Eleanor Roosevelt, Nvidia, Jensen Huang, ChatGPT, Harvey ## Video description Luca Ferrari is co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, a serial acquirer of AOL, Vimeo and Evernote, Airtable, etc, that buys to hold forever, and whose only real edge is that it operates software companies better than almost anyone else. Bending Spoons got 800,000 job applications last year and hired fewer than 300 people. Luca runs hiring the way a quant runs a portfolio — hundreds of signals tested against future performance — and he's blunt about what the data says. Harvard and Stanford barely predict anything. Interviews are the worst signal in the process unless they're scripted. The best candidates were politically active as teenagers and stopped in their 20s. He hires for slope over experience, which is why a 25-year-old routinely shows up to run a company Bending Spoons just bought, and why he thinks experienced hires from big tech lose motivation and struggle to adapt. He also explains why Bending Spoons has no executive team, why the burden of proof always sits with whoever wants to add complexity, and why he stayed in Milan on purpose. I called three founders whose companies Luca acquired before this interview. All three, unprompted, said the same thing: exceptionally high integrity. His answer about where that comes from is the most honest closing I've had on this show. Chapters: 0:00 – Introduction 1:13 – The Bending Spoons model: buy to hold forever, then rebuild from the ground up 8:07 – 800,000 applicants, fewer than 300 hires: industrializing talent density 13:45 – Hiring like a quant trader: hundreds of signals, scripted interviews 21:45 – Why strategy and talent trump org structure 25:34 – Leader or manager? Head in the clouds, feet on the ground, but never both at once 30:38 – Slope over experience: why 25-year-olds run the companies Bending Spoons buys 41:08 – Radical candor, the 360 that found Brian's bugs, and picking one flaw a year 47:00 – No exec team, no sacred org chart: whoever is CEO should rewrite the system 51:27 – Question everything, add nothing: the burden of proof is on whoever adds complexity 57:08 – Why Milan? The uncool is cool; the world needs more than one Silicon Valley 1:01:16 – Never lie, never omit: the high-integrity code 1:04:02 – Brian's takeaways [Source](https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/CPUAI6484422711.mp3)

[5:00] Luca Ferrari: 任何长期经营过数字业务的人都会告诉你，员工人数其实根本没那么重要，关键在于人有多优秀以及建立了怎样的文化。拥有这种水准的人才，别人需要 200 人运营的业务，我们只需要 20 人就能搞定。 [0:43] Luca Ferrari: 我们整个公司赖以建立的前提假设就是：如果我们能打造出一套机器、一个系统，让我们运营数字科技业务的能力超越几乎所有人，那么我们几乎可以百分之百保证，通过不断并购，能够极其高效地长期实现资本复利。 [50:00] Luca Ferrari: 如果你只是模仿其他人正在做的事情，那你注定只能做到平庸的程度——无非是稍微好一点或稍微差一点。

[50:00] Luca Ferrari: If you emulate what everybody else is doing, you're guaranteed to be approximately mediocre. [0:00] Luca Ferrari: I think people would be surprised by how poorly graduating from Harvard or Stanford predicts performance. [51:27] Luca Ferrari: Every time someone recommends that we should add complexity, whether it's a step in a process, a feature, a team, headcount to a team, you name it, any element of the system, the burden of proof is on those making that recommendation. [25:34] Luca Ferrari: If you're not in the details, in the trenches, feet firmly planted in the ground, then I think you're unlikely to be able to inform that big picture properly. [20:00] Luca Ferrari: I always ask myself, to me, a business is a good business if it would do well even if management was mediocre, maybe not awful, but mediocre. [60:00] Luca Ferrari: Sometimes I think, making a big mistake is a better way of learning than rationalizing how you should conduct yourself.

[0:00] I think people would be surprised by how poorly graduating from Harvard or Stanford predicts performance. Like people think, oh, you must be a genius. No, actually, yeah, you're probably a little bit stronger than people graduating in other universities, but not so much stronger. And often we find that people tend to lose some of that potential raw talent edge by being a bit more entitled and thinking too highly of themselves. Okay, today we have Luca Ferrari on. I wanted him to have him on for a long time because he runs Bending Spoons, which is this fascinating company. It's like a little bit of a private equity roll-up company, but it's really a tech platform company. And it's unique. I can't find any other company that sort of rhymes with it. He is very unique in the way he thinks and the way he builds and the way he CEOs. Hope you like it. Okay Luca welcome to Long Strange Trip Thanks for coming on Thank you for having me My pleasure Okay I think by this point most of the listeners have heard of Bending Spoons but I doubt they understand the model and what the magic is. So if you wouldn't mind educating us like two, three minutes on how it works and what's special about it. Yeah, sure. So we, I mean, the entire thesis on which the company is built is that if we can build a machine, a system whereby we can operate digital technology businesses better than almost anybody else, then we are pretty much guaranteed to be able to compound capital efficiently for a very long time through acquisitions. And the reason is that if a lot of businesses are physically better off once they're integrated into the system, what we call our platform, than being operated as standalone companies by someone else, then we should be able to offer prices to people that are appealing. And so they will sell their businesses to us and we still deliver a high return for shareholders. So that's the thinking behind it. Of course, the difficult part is to build that system, that platform, so that we can operate these businesses better than almost anybody else. And that what we have poured our hearts and minds into over the past well 13 years technically And so we have tried to have an amazing team of people strong culture powerful proprietary technologies, lots of proprietary data. And what we do, we buy these businesses, we integrate them very deeply into this platform. So we have a shared R&D, marketing, G&A team that can fluidly move across all of our businesses. We basically replatform the acquired businesses so that they're based on the same technological foundation. We, as an investor at some point, called it an operating system. I think it's a pretty apt comparison or metaphor. And then we transform them pretty deeply so we can rebuild the org, rewrite big chunks of the code base, re-attack cloud infrastructure. We try to launch useful new features, fix bugs, improve performance, rethink monetization and marketing. So, there is a serial acquire component that you will find in private equity, you'll find in companies like Berkshire Hathaway or Transdine. The big difference certainly vis-a-vis private equities that we are not a fund, we buy off our balance sheet we never sold a material business we don intend to sell one in the future So we buy to hold and operate forever And the other very big difference is definitely vis private equity but also certainly you know the Berkshires of the world is that we transform these businesses pretty deeply and we integrate them all together So they're much simplified, a bit like they go from being a company to being a product installed on the same foundation, basically. So that's the model. I've been doing it for 13 years at this point. Yeah, it's going remarkably well. You went public. What's roughly the market cap? At the time of IPO a few months ago, $18 billion, I think, equity value. Congratulations. I'm a huge fan of the model. It's really unique. I was comparing in my head to Berkshire Hathaway, but it reminds me, when I was in my 20s, I worked for a U.S. company called PTC, and they moved me to Japan to set up the Japanese operations when I was very young. and my office was inside of Mitsubishi headquarters and so I dealt with Mitsubishi headquarters people but like all the different divisions it feels more like Mitsubishi or Samsung than it does like some big PE firm or like Berkshire is that how do you how how would you describe it yeah I don't I don't know those companies that well so I can say for sure but uh [5:00] Again, the distinctive features are we buy to hold and operate forever. So I think that kind of strikes out P. firms and then again, this very deep integration. Most companies that acquire other companies serially, in my experience, try to run them somewhat separately for the most part. At least that's what I've seen. We take the completely opposite approach where we, again, we make sure to have the same technological foundation, broadly speaking, the same core team that moves fluidly across to go after R&D opportunities and withdraw when those are exhausted. And then a lot of serial acquirers keep these companies, broadly speaking, together. the same way they were before, we changed them completely from the ground up. And it's very time consuming and challenging. But the bright side of that is we generally deliver very high returns. So I don't know. I think I don't really know of any company that does it this way out there. It's kind of an end of one. I agree. It's kind of an end of one. Is the magic, Luca, in the picking or in the operating? And what percentage would you give it? No, I mean, it's almost completely the operating. I'd say the platform I described, we couldn't do what we do. So I'd like to think we've gotten pretty good at... selecting the right businesses, but It's relatively easy to deliver high returns if you have access to our platform because For example, we have... We have been enjoying an inflow of exceptional talent. We got 800,000 applications last year. We hired fewer than 300 people. So when you have amazing engineers, designers, product managers, general managers, it's much easier to take a business and rethink it from the ground up and run it much more successfully. Anyone who's run a business. Certainly a digital business, probably any business, but certainly a digital business for a sufficiently long period of time will tell you that headcount matters Not a lot, but it's just how good the people are in the culture we have established. And so when you have access to this caliber of people, you can run a business with 20 people that someone else would need 200 people for. And so that alone will give you both cost. efficiencies and opportunity to innovate faster, improve monetization faster. So that's an element, for instance, of our advantage vis-a-vis these companies being run as standalone or businesses being run as standalone companies. We have invested a lot over the past decade in building powerful proprietary technologies to do everything pretty much, I mean, across the board that you need to run a digital business or natively integrated with one another. And it just makes everything so much more effective and faster. If I were to run one of these businesses on a standalone basis, I don't know that I would be, well, certainly wouldn't have the resources to build this technology. It wouldn't even know where to start. And so, you know, that's also kind of a cheat code. So definitely the operational part is far more important than the picking. But we try to pick well, obviously. Why do it poorly if you can do it well? And Luca, let's just, I want to click on the hiring. So I spend most of my time with CEOs these days. And everyone talks about being... have high talent density, being a talent magnet. And a lot of them pull it off early, but as it scales, it kind of inevitably waters down. You seem to have almost industrialized this talent density idea, and you have some very unique ways of pulling in applications, pulling in interest at the top of the funnel, of qualifying the interest. Um, Let's just... Talk about the top of the funnel and talk about the qualification process and talk about it like roll the clock back when you were nobody's. No one had ever heard of you. You had no employer brand. You had no inbound interest. How did you get the talent flywheel kind of rolling? Yeah, so we basically believe that if you have a strategy that works, you can't do it. or can work, then almost all that matters is the talent you you deploy toward the execution of that strategy and the culture, meaning like the rules of the game, how people interact with one another, what they choose to do and how. I know that those are the areas we have obsessed over pretty much since the beginning. Now, you're right. I mean, you start with nothing. And so that's what founders or early team members need to to do well. That's basically punching above their weight. I remember early on spending. at least 50% of my time, probably more for at least the first two, three years on recruiting, among other talent related things. And I and a couple others managed to find the list of the best graduates or of some in that, at the time we hired pretty much only in Italy, now we're international. But some of the, you know, the best Italian universities, we managed to find the list of graduates and [10:00] We tracked them down, and I remember calling hundreds of them, poorly harassing a few until they accepted to join us. And later we built a pretty substantial network The talent team these days, we have scientists, researchers, and we treat the selection of talent within our pipeline, probably not in, in, in, Similarly to how a a quantitative trader would pick in stocks. So we look for all signals and then test signals against future performance to determine whether they're predictive or what combinations of R and keep iterating. very rigorous and sophisticated system. At this point, we assess hundreds of signals in each in each application. So that helps you select potentially dramatically better, given the same level of employer brand and ability to attract applications. And half the game is also attracting very good applications, because if only geniuses apply, then it's easier to build a good team. And so there, I think we have kind of an unfair advantage with our model. We found that a lot of engineers, designers, product managers absolutely love the idea of being able to work at a company where they can, say, spend nine months helping rebuild, say, Vimeo's video infrastructure and then six months rethinking advertising on AOL, and then maybe a year building a platform technology, all with the same employer, broadly speaking, with the same colleagues, with the same culture, the track record they're building does not get diluted. When you change employer, obviously, a lot of that is lost. You have to reestablish credibility. And so that's a very powerful point of attraction. And the other one is because we've been so systematic and uncompromising on having extremely high levels of talent density. pretty much from the beginning, of course, compatibly with our appeal to candidates at each point in time. Once that's in place, it's a powerful means of retaining excellent performance and attractive more of those. Because when people find that they love their colleagues, they never leave. We have essentially zero regrettable churn. 0.6% regrettable turn of Spooners, the members of our core team last year. Um, And trust me, there are poaching attempts on big tech all the time, so it's not for a lack of opportunities. And equally, these people will tell their former fellow students or whatever, oh, it's amazing here, you should apply. So it makes your life easier, but it's very difficult to get to a very high level of talent density late in a company's history. You need to establish it from the beginning and just be completely obsessed with it and never... Giving up even when it means hiring way fewer people than you'd like to for prolonged periods of time. Parting ways with people who are being helpful just because you think you have better people. It's quite painful, both because, you know, nobody is a sociopath here. And as in most companies, you don't like to tell someone who's a perfectly good contributor that they should look for another job. Also, you're losing on good capacity in the short term to look for amazing capacity down the line. Those are difficult things to do. If you do them consistently, I think you develop a very powerful flywheel. It sounds like kind of a data science type team that is looking on all the inbound, and is looking for signals, what are the signals that are most strongly correlated with success The R-squared is high. And then once you get beyond that, I assume there's a human interview. What are the questions that tease out what you're looking for that maybe aren't obvious? Yeah, so we're fairly secretive about the details. I guess you get a similar answer from my quantitative trader. my metaphor earlier, but now I can share some of this. There are some obvious signals in people's applications, you know, their GPA, for example. It's not super strong, but it's helpful. The university graduated from, I think people will be surprised by how poorly they graduating from Harvard or Stanford predicts performance, like people think, oh, you must be a genius. No, actually, yeah, you're probably a little bit stronger than people graduating in other universities, but not so much stronger. And often we find that people tend to lose some of that potential raw talent edge by being a bit more entitled and thinking too highly of themselves. But it's still predictive. I mean, all else being equal, someone from Harvard will do a little bit better than someone from a less well-known university. So some of those are probably somewhat obvious. There are many that are not [15:00] One I can share. which is relatively predictive. I was surprised when this came up. We found that if someone is politically active as a teenager, But CZ is to be in their early 20s, that tends to correlate highly with someone's drive and entrepreneurial mindset. And the way we have explained it is, which at least are the newspapers are highly relevant, valued qualities. The way we've explained it is that if you are 17 years old and school is not enough, you want to... you feel like you need to do more, that shows agency, that shows productivity, that shows a level of... not settling for the status quo that's generally healthy, but if you still do that when you're 25, 26, 30, it means it's probably a life mission, which is perfectly fine, but likely incompatible with your job, your career being... you know, top priority, your job is probably probably takes a backseat to your political aspiration. How do you find that signal? Do you ask them that question in an interview? Do you look through their old Instagram? Like, how does that signal even arise in the process? Thankfully, People think they need to include leadership experiences in their CVs because that gets you a job at a consulting company or something. So most people we find would include something significant in that area if they did it. But in any case, we do ask later in the process, whether it's an interview or written assessments, questions that would very clearly lend themselves to people sharing this sort of thing. in someone's application. You can be very proactive. We find that a lot of the best signals in our case come from the practical tests, the things we do or ask candidates to go through. And so you can elicit signals that way. Interviews are of all the typical elements in a search engine process, at least in our experience, are the worst predictors, but you can make them decent if you give interviewers extremely precise questions they need to ask, and you tell them to ask them exactly in the same way. And then you make sure that the answers are recorded and assessed separately. So what's completely useless, pretty much, is having someone talk to someone else with essentially no guidelines or just a high-level agenda and then tell you, I like the guy, I didn't like the guy. That's noise, pretty much. So if you structure it a lot and you try to separate the actual conducting of the interview from the evaluation of the responses, then it can be somewhat predictive. Can I tell you about HubSpot unlocked on the sales side? a good process for doing this where we scaled our you know, inside sales org from 10 to a thousand, where lots of, we're kind of like you, we had a better, it was harder to get into HubSpot than Harvard. So we had lots of inbound and we would look at all the resumes and we would look for people who went to a state school, you know, went to University of Vermont, University of Wisconsin. We weren't looking for Harvard and MIT. And we looked for a person who had done a sport, who was athletic and competitive. We didn't interview them in a standard way. We just said, if they look kind of like this, let's give them a half an hour. And we give them a half an hour with a person. And what that person would do was set up a role play. So I would be the HubSpot employee. You'd be the potential. I'd set it up and then I'd have you sell to me and I'd give you 12 minutes to sell to me. So selling me whatever and I'm hearing I'm giving you objections. We finish it. then I would give you feedback, Luca, on how you did. I give you a minute to think about it. And then we do the exact same thing again. And if the person absorbed that feedback and did a half-decent job at the – You know, at the pitch, we would do a couple of blind references. Boom, we hired him. That actually really ended up scaling for us. We didn't do the normal interviews. That really worked on the sales side because I kind of agree with you. The other thing I wanted to ask you about is just blind references like, Where is that in your signal? Yeah, we do that as the very last step. Oh, well, so no, we don't do actually blind references. We do references. We don't do blind references because they're illegal in Italy. So you can't ask. And so we figured, OK, let's just have a method that works across jurisdictions, even though I know in the US you can call people and ask, oh, I was this team member. But we do references. It's the it's the the candidate who presents a few names. We try to guide it to. [20:00] Okay, give me people who... you know, We tried to get at least one person for at least the biggest experiences someone had, ideally their manager if possible. But ultimately it's their call. And we structured those interviews with references quite a lot as well. They can be predictive, but again, you need to be scientific about it. If you leave it to someone picking up the phone and calling, then almost always it's positive. Very rarely do people give you names of people who will... will criticize them. And so you need to be very specific in your questions and ask to make hard grading decisions. You know, for example, we ask them, okay, of the 20 people you've worked with the most, say something like this, I'm just, would you say this person is the best or top five? And then you try to ask a few follow-up questions to make sure there's a little bit of substance behind that response. And you find that people who are enthusiastic, often they will tell you, And you're like, hold on a sec. It sounded like this person was a genius and you're telling me it's maybe, you know, ranked eight out of 20, which is nice. But, you know, so you can make it predictive, but you need to put in the effort and the structure before you get there. Okay. I love that advice. I get a lot of blind references when people do that to me. It's, I think it's brilliant when they, is that the best person you've ever, that's ever worked for you? Well, no. And they say, why? And that opens things up. I want to talk about you. I think you're the 20th CEO I've interviewed. It's been really fun. And honestly, my thesis when I started this podcast was, I'm going to figure out kind of a common thread, what everyone's doing, and I'm going to write it down. I'm going to kind of standardize it. Thank you. The truth is There's not even close to a common thread. Everyone does it differently and there is no playbook and the playbooks are changing extra fast right now. And my last two interviews are emblematic of it. I interviewed Tarek from CalShe, and he and his co-founder have, I forget, 200 employees. There's no levels of management. They all report to those two. And he referred to it in the podcast as Management by Chaos. My last interview was with Aliotze from Databricks. And he's got eight direct reports. It's, you know, very structured. His direct report team, he has three meetings a week with his direct reports. He has a QBR. once a quarter and then he has an off-site strategy session once a quarter. So like polar opposites, both doing extremely well. Where do you fit in that spectrum? Probably somewhere in between. I think these things are generally... uh like There's more. formal approaches to management. I think they're greatly overestimated. I think if you, you know, in a company's outcome, I think almost all of the outcome depends on essentially your strategy, what people sometimes call product market fit, but also the modes you have. That's overwhelmingly what drives it. I always ask myself, to me, a business is a good business if It would do well even if management was mediocre, maybe not awful, but mediocre. So that's the first thing. And the second thing that matters to me is talent levels and culture, which culture is really like, you know, how do you make decisions? What matters? What doesn't? What do we value? What do we not value? Then everything else, you know, reporting lines, whether you have OKRs or you keep it fluid and informal span of control. I'm sure it does matter on the margin, you know, making things a bit better, a bit worse. optimal depending on the people involved because ultimately a manager a CEO is some sort of a leader or should be. And the same strategy, the same approach to working with others depends on the human capital you have. Different people react different. The culture you're trying to foster. But I think within reason, that doesn't make a huge difference. Maybe like a plus minus 10% kind of impact. So I think you're much better off obsessing over, first and foremost, a strategy, but then once that's in place, the qualities of the people and the culture you establish. person organization chaotic I don't know them, but assuming super high talent density, a culture of... business orientation, rationality, hard work, Even if a little extra structure I theoretically could be helpful. I think, you know, the talent and the culture will mostly trump any such gap or close any such gap and vice versa. maybe in the other extreme, a little bit more fluidity and flexibility with ADL, but if you have very good people and a great culture, let's get it done for the benefit of the [25:00] of the business, people will not get stuck because there is a little extra structure. So I haven't thought a lot about these things. I'm convinced they're not the most important thing, to be honest, in excelling in business. Fascinating. When I was the CEO, I tried to get better and evolve as the business scaled, and I got a lot of feedback. And one of the pieces of feedback I got a couple of times was, Brian, you're a very good leader and a very bad manager. Where are you on that? I don't know. I get a lot of feedback. I don't think anyone rated me on those two, against those two archetypes, your job descriptions. I'll put a little self-reflection here. I don't think, yeah. I'm not sure if I'm a good leader or a good manager, to be honest. I generally feel that I pretty privileged that I work with very good people and I tend to be more self and question whether I doing enough and I living up to expectations So I tend to see the glass half empty So my instinctual reaction would be I'm probably not terrible at either. I would be disingenuous if I told you I think I suck. But I would probably rate myself something like okay at both, but not necessarily amazing. I'm probably a better leader than manager, if I understand what you're hinting at. I think I've generally done okay at setting a vision that made sense and a compelling vision and communicating that reasonably well. If I've succeeded as a leader as being mostly through what I would call servant leadership, like just working super hard and helping people as much as I could, I don't think I'm the kind of William Wallace kind of leader, someone making a grand speech and everybody, you know, get their heart and get their hearts pounding and everybody, you know, gets to work. But when you work with someone who walks the talk and is in the trenches and does their best, I think you tend to be inspired. So maybe that kind of person. I try to be that kind of person. I don't think I'm a great manager. I don't think I'm the best at running one-on-ones or anything like that. Okay. One of the things I used to say to myself is actually I got this quote from Eleanor Roosevelt of all people I wanted to keep my head in the clouds but my feet on the ground And by that, I meant I wanted to be, okay, a JV, William Wallace, painting a picture of the future, getting everyone excited about where we're going, looking over their horizon. But feet on the ground, it's like, holy crap, there are a lot of problems and we have to deal with our freaking problems. and my glass was very half empty and I spent a lot of times a little negative looking at the problems. Where are you in the Eleanor Roosevelt quote? I want to give myself a little pat on the shoulder. I think if there's one thing I tend to do reasonably well is being able to see the big picture. So, you know, I guess head in the cloud kind of thing. Maybe I'm not the best at, say, articulating it again with the grand speech, But I think I'm pretty good at, you know, in the substance at understanding what matters, what doesn't, where the opportunity is, what logically we should be doing and what's just noise. And I think I've historically been very hands on in the details, in the trenches. I think it a it a good quality that you want to have as an entrepreneur and CEO I don think it a it not super widespread in the population but it quite commonly found I think in entrepreneurs and CEOs And I think it quite powerful because if you if you don have the big picture you can really set you know a direction strategy that's, that's the winning strategy, unless someone else bring it, brings it to you, which is always nice, but you can't count on that happening. It's, you know, hope is not a strategy, as they say. But if you're not in the details, in the trenches, feet firmly planted in the ground, then I think you're unlikely to be able to inform that big picture properly. You're unlikely to be inspiring to your colleagues. Very few people like working with people who are in an ivory tower. They don't get their hands dirty. It doesn't really scale. I think it's not good. You're not in a position to assess others, to coach others, because you don't really know anything about the work at some point. I do believe you need both to be successful and finding some sort of equilibrium. I find it's easier to sequence those activities and trying to run them in parallel. So I try to have times where I'm very much in the clouds thinking, OK, what are the big problems and big opportunities? How should you go about them and be more of an architect? And then long stretches where I just get into execution mode and I'm mad head to toe just get [30:00] stuff done, you know, blood, sweat, and tears. I think it's quite difficult to be both at the same time, but you can be both in sequence. Let's talk about coaching for a second. Similar to me, I had never been CEO of a company with thousands of employees in public, and I was figuring out as I went along. And sometimes I just didn't feel qualified to coach some of my executives. Do you ever have that feeling? And also related to that, so many of the CEOs I'm working with, like... They have a very talented person internally. They're on their way up. Should they bet on that person or find someone who's seen the movie before and has a little bit of experience like that's happening everywhere across Silicon Valley right now? Should we hire the bet and they were done that person or should we should make the person bet on the person who's on their way up and really hasn't seen anything close to this movie? So on coaching, I'm certainly inadequate as a coach, often people I work with, I think at Ben Inspeeds, we work off the assumption that our managers... should always be capable of solving or advising on a solution across all problems that are experienced by the direct reports. We just think that any one person may be able to coach any other person on some things, and they should do so regardless of reporting lines. I think a good manager would generally be someone very smart, a good problem solver, so at least they can provide kind of generalist support. They should be emotionally supportive and ready to get their hands dirty, Absolutely. Being someone's manager doesn't mean you're always in a better position to solve a problem for them. There are so many skills needed in a business like yours, like ours, that... Obviously, you need to divide and conquer in any case. I've never been a big fan of... I mean, we do value experience, but I think we value experience a lot less than most people. I believe that Yes, the being there, done that, helps but there are a few big buts. The first one is The world changes pretty fast, so I'm not exactly certain that someone who did something seven years ago that still applies all that well. And there is a huge risk that people will be blind as to the new context because they did it that way and they will just try to paste whatever solution they applied before. So maybe, you know, you buy some good, but you also buy a lot of bad. I'm not sure which of the two is stronger. For a company like Bending Spoons, Also, we have such a... as far as I can tell, distinctive culture, that we found that every time we hired someone, almost every time we hired someone very experienced, they struggled to adapt. We're so hands on, no politics, radically candid, everybody needs to... to carry their own weight. And it doesn't translate well. Often people who have been successful at large tech companies, they tend to have a different style to leadership, which may very well be optimal at those companies. I don't know, but it's not at Bennispoon. So we also need to account for the cost of that cultural change, which sometimes doesn't even happen. And if it does, it takes a long time. And last but not least, I find that generally people lose motivation as they gain experience. And so you need to consider whether it's better to have someone with 20 years of experience, but I don't know, six out of 10 motivation or someone with two years of experience, but 10 out of 10 motivation. I find often. The latter is better. It depends on the situation. So we're generally – we're not big on experience. We have hired experienced people occasionally. We prefer to hire. Has that changed as you've scaled? Have you changed your mind at all on that or you're like actually no? No. Yeah. Interesting. No, and I may be wrong. Look, we have tried. It's not that we never hired experienced people. We have hired some experienced people with great success. It's not that we were completely close-minded regarding that. But no, we keep investing in – students or new graduates or people with a couple years of experience where we think that we can really help them mold their skill set and professional culture in the way that we believe will best work. served them and the company in the long run. And also, there is a trade-off between talent and experience in a competitive environment. labor market and experience, we can provide it to you. We just need to be a little bit patient. Talent, we can't. And so we focus more on talent than experience. It's all considered we're happy with this. We we wouldn't change it necessarily, but we have encountered Difficult situations and times where maybe we have, you know, a 25 year old and lead engineer or something, showing up at an acquired company and essentially being the person in charge on our end and and people with 20 years of experience thinking, does this guy even know what he's doing? And I think our track record consistently shows, yeah, it does. or she does. [35:00] But I can see how It's a more difficult sale than if we had a 50-year-old person with 30 years of experience come in and say the same things. It's much easier to assume that person is competent. I've spoken to a couple of the founders of companies you acquired, and one of them said the person that replaced them was 25, and the other said the person who replaced them was 27. They didn't seem bothered by it, but I thought that was kind of interesting. What I'm curious about is like, let's just say that 25 year old that takes over. I don't know, Miro, whatever company you're buying, What are you looking for in that person who's going to run that show? Is there a... Certain quality you're looking for. I know you rotate them around, but let's say it's the first first go at it. What are you looking for? Yeah, and we wouldn't put someone in that position we haven't tested in a smaller version of it, to be clear. So it's generally someone who led a team or a smaller business before. But yes, it could be someone with just three, four years of experience, a very, very junior. Well, on a high level, we look for smart technology. and what we call extreme ownership, being smart for us, I mean, pretty obviously, is you learn very quickly and we have evidence of that. And you're capable, consistently capable of high quality reasoning. So when you... propose a solution or you diagnose a problem, consistently what you say or write makes a lot of sense. There's a meaning of all the answers but your analysis is always rational, accurate, logically sound. We think that works across the board and in almost any position. Two... We want you to have extreme ownership, which means you are absolutely... You care tremendously about being or becoming the best in the world at your job, bringing the greatest possible contribution to your team and the company. You're almost fanatical about that. So when you find an obstacle or you identify a shortcoming in your skill set, you'll be hell-bent on overcoming that. But then, of course, we look for more specific skills. But that's really like – we find that that's 80% of – when those are in place in big ways, those qualities, assuming you're, you know, Yeah. You can communicate a little bit. You're a nice, you're not an asshole. Those, you know, hygienic factors. But the core killer features are those two. And when it doesn't work, so you put in the 25 year old to run it and like, I don't know, there's an immune system rejection or they just weren't up to it. What is it? that that falls down. I think when... That's happened very rarely. I can only... think of one or two cases. But when that's happened, I think it's been primarily – Um, One of two things. One, the person, while very, very good, It could also be that we misjudged those qualities, but so far it hasn't been because of any such... We haven't seen any such case, at least for our general managers. What we've seen is either The person, we basically, we didn't pay enough attention at a person's ability to... to lead others, call it communication, a certain level of common sense and empathy. And so they were incredibly smart problem solvers, They moved 100 miles an hour... But they fail to notice when someone was a little bit off, had an issue, they didn't say the right thing at the right time, and that basically created a level of hostility or at least... friction that ultimately made them untenable as leaders. The other cases were enough people in the org for all sorts of reasons felt more competent. And although this person was great and super nice and empathetic and communicative, these people couldn't get over it. The fact that, oh, I'm so much more experienced, I cannot take... Even if, you know, like I cannot be led by this person, even if just formally. That's been very rare, but I can remember one such case where that occurred. And look, and there we could do one of two things. We either move or part ways with, you know, these people who reject leadership or we change the leader. And, you know, it depends on the context of which of the two makes more sense. How do you develop these people? Like, do you actually train them, develop them, coach them? Or it's like... They're smart, they're going to figure it out. You kind of throw them into it and they're good. Yeah, we have training materials, but broadly, I think 90% of the outcome depends on you throw them into the deep end of the pool. You give them way more responsibility that seems reasonable. And then you surround them with amazing colleagues. We find that we learn primarily personally. by working with amazing people. Almost invariably, some of the people around you will be better [40:00] Didn't you have some things? And so if you try to emulate those good traits, you'll learn from those. And also, you know, they will suck at some things. And if you notice the weaknesses, you can avoid falling into the same trap yourself. So the level of responsibility and the level of talent around you are the two things that we find drive growth the most. But, yeah, I mean, a little bit of formal training here and there and active coaching certainly works. adds that 10, 20% extra for sure. I tell you the one thing that helped me on my journey. We decided we're going to do a 360 degree review for me, which was a good idea. And my co-founder volunteered. which is a strange thing because he's really introverted. And he's like, how do I do this without talking to other homo sapiens? And so he did a net promoter survey. First question is on a scale of one to 10, I'd like you to recommend Brian as the CEO of HubSpot. And number two is why did you give that number? And then send it out to like 25 people, the board, customers, employees. And people wrote frigging novels. I mean, they wrote long novels. And he spent some time, correlated it, showed me the histogram, very helpful. And then he did something clever, like for each feature, for each feature, be like, here's a feature. And he would pull out direct quotes on what people said about the feature. So it really hit home to me that, OK, that's a feature. In the first 10 pages, I'm going through the report and I'm like, feature, feature, I got this. now. Page 11 is where the bug started. And then that's painful. And the direct quotes in there, it was incredibly helpful to help me get better. One of my ahas, by the way, was some of the features were bugs. You know, people didn't like that. I was really passionate and sometimes I get really excited about things. And so the first year I tried to fix all my bugs. And then second, third, fourth year, I'm like, I'm going to pick one or two of the bugs I'm going to work on. do you do that with your folks? Yeah, so we're big on feedback, a bit like you just described. We have something called radical candor internally. Basically, the idea is you should always tell people when you see something good or bad, as long as you don't share that because you're venting or because you believe there's a chance that they could improve or the team could benefit or the company could benefit, you should share. Don't worry about the accuracy of what you're saying, the wording, whether you hurt feelings. Obviously, try to be nice if you can, but that's secondary to being honest. Of course, we're not perfect. Not everybody does it all the time, but we try to have this. environment where opinions and observations flow very quickly and abundantly. So that's a very good source of... of learning. - You make everyone do it face to face. - Yeah, we try, but our recommendation is to, if it happens in person, say it immediately, even in front of everybody in a meeting. Don't delay, just say it. Again, respectfully and pathetically, but just straight up. If it's something that you notice... through asynchronous communications such as on Slack, then you can send them a message or whatever. Like it's really secondary as long as you do it and you're fully candid. So that helps a lot. And then we have once a year, we, We have something a little bit like what you described, where we'd give more structured feedback based on a bunch of assessors, not 25, but more like 20. six to ten depending on the person. Additionally, and so that applies to me as well. I try to also once a year identify at least one major point of improvement. I went through exactly the same thing where I had five and then I figured halfway through the year, it's too many. If these are challenging to improve, five is too many. So I tried to have one per year that I tried to get a lot better at. What's your one right now, Luca? I happen to be... is someone who I told you earlier that I don't remember exactly the words I used, but the message I was trying to convey is probably the greatest privilege I feel I have in my life right now, and I've had it for a while, is the quality of the people I get to work with. I don't mean it, and I really mean it. I really believe it to be the case. And, um... I appreciate their skills and talents and their contribution tremendously. I'm awful. at saying that aloud. I'm very critical of myself too, to be clear. Generally, at night, when I call it a day, Generally, I'm disappointed in myself. I'm the same way toward myself as I am to others. Maybe more critical of myself, I'd like to think. But so anyway, the point is even people I – I hold in the highest [45:00] team uh i rarely tell them how amazing they are and so i i decided that i need to be better at at telling them how much i appreciate them again in a fully honest way you know it's not like this has not been hypocritical just voicing the what i know unconsciously but i don't really linger on uh so i've tried to do that a lot more i think it's been a half a success half a failure but certainly an improvement over past levels i had the exact same feedback all pretty much every year and I would and I'm like I'm and there's a there's a saying in in some old school saying that you should give five pieces of positive feedback to every one kind of you know correction I would definitely the opposite before that out let's use all six slots for corrections it's pretty close to that and so I worked on that I got slightly better and there's a point where I would put like a 15 minute slot on Friday afternoon, like give compliments to force myself to do it. So I hear you. Most CEOs have that same. A lot of CEOs also get feedback from their teams that their trust circle is just small They trust four people and they run everything through those four people and everyone else feels like they very arm length Do you get that No actually I haven gotten this feedback We are we quite distributed in that way. There's no, we don't even have a, we don't have a, an executive team or a leadership team. There's no clear, I mean, people could reconstruct it and say, okay, I think whoever leads product should be in there and whatever, but we never, we did have it many years ago, we dropped it because we found the precise definition of that group didn't help at all because it would lead to some people being involved in discussions who shouldn't be involved just because they're part of the executive team. And then some people missing in discussions because we needed to have a discussion at the executive team level. So now we're just, okay, you involve whoever needs to be involved, no matter, let's say the title or the standing, fuck the executive team. We don't need an executive team. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. So how is it organized? Let's just say you're doing strategy off-site where you want to think big things and do some navel-gazing. Who's there? I would invite people who I think can contribute the most or take away the most. Sometimes I invite someone who... In general and I think this is not just me but the company we hate meetings and we hate big meetings But there are cases where inviting someone who won contribute to the meeting could still be a good thing if you think they can learn something Inviting someone just so they feel good about themselves is never an option, though. It has to be useful. I would try to invite the people I think could contribute the most. I would have to think about who those people are. Some names come to mind. But also depending on the precise, say, part of the strategy or angle, I would invite different people. Luca, it doesn't sound like you have an org chart. You're more like Calci. There's no, I report to Luca. No, we do. We do, actually. It's an algorithm. So we have two. It's basically a matrix organization with functions and teams, functions being in charge of how things are done, the hard skills. And teams being in charge of what we do. So like the objectives, what we're trying to accomplish to make Bending Spoons more successful. And then every person has a functional lead and a team lead. And it all flows to a single node, which currently would be me, is me. But, you know, it's basically whoever the CEO is at that point in time. So there is a pretty specific formal org and we use it to automate a lot of stuff but we remind people that it only useful to the extent that it useful In no way they should feel limited by it. It's just quite fluid. We've had many cases where someone is a lead for a while and then goes back to being an individual contributor. Yeah. You said something interesting, whoever's the CEO at that point in time. I had a chance to chat with Jesse Wong a year ago, and he's got a unique style where he's got 60 direct reports. And similar to you, he does give direct feedback, positive and negative in public. He doesn't do one-on-ones. And I asked him, like, if and when you ever retire, will the person who replaces you inherit that and use that system? And he said, oh, no, hell no. This is kind of built for me specifically. It's the way I work. Somebody else should come in and completely rewrite it. you said as long as you're CEO what did you mean by that and do you agree with Jensen? Yeah absolutely I mean I look as I said earlier it's almost it's almost like if you if you're coaching or you know running a sports team I think you'd be a fool saying well the way to win is this and that and that's the only way to win or the best way to win. [50:00] between no matter the people you have on the team, right? So the players. And so, yes, I mean, if and when we change our CEO, I would encourage her or him to, to see whether any change is warranted. I mean, they don't have to change anything if they like it the way it is, but equally they should feel free to change things if they... Thought that would improve things. Okay. Just from talking to you, you're a very first principles person. It feels like kind of a big skepticism of conventional wisdom. I was sort of the same way back in the day. What is conventional wisdom right about that you do? That maybe you are like, this is wrong, we're going to rethink it, but on our wheels, we should just do what everybody else does. You know, we've tried to build this company from the ground up. Yeah, questioning everything, not because we thought we knew better, but because we believe that... So we had this ambition of building one of the most successful companies of all time, knowing full well that we would very likely not succeed. But we thought that if that was how high the bar was going to be, the only chance we had to achieve that level of ambition was to... to do something differently. If you emulate what everybody else is doing, you're guaranteed to be approximately mediocre. I mean, a little bit better, a little bit worse. Um, And so we never even bothered understanding what conventional wisdom was. We just tried to, for each important problem, we just tried to find the optimal solution given our particular context and vision. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm sure there are plenty of things in conventional wisdom that makes sense. I don't know. Like being nice to people, I guess I agree. One thing that's kind of interesting that people ask me about all the time is… AI and native companies seem to be running a little bit different than companies founded before ChatGPT. You're kind of famous for simplifying things. So I want to hear about that. A lot of people are just doing a lot of stuff at once. Like in year two, they're going international. In year three, they're starting, they're acquiring a business. Things are just moving so much faster. Stuff that took HubSpot eight years, people are doing in the first couple of years. And then HubSpot, I was a big simplification guy. I even got myself... a no hat. Oh, that's awesome. I go to a big meeting and good thing about HubSpot, everyone's got great ideas. We should do this. And we would, I would always, We're definitely a company that was much more likely to die of overeating than starvation. And so I bought this for everyone to know how. Things seem to be changing. I've noticed these companies, like, they're wearing yes hats and they're getting a lot done and they're pulling it off. What's your reaction to that? It's certainly a winning strategy to be a radical simplifier. Yeah. Because complexity means... costs means being slower, being worse, generally speaking. But there's no... But the perfect balance depends on... on your particular context. Obviously if you were to build a business, let's say, in the 1800s. with no technology, no internet, you know, no, no, probably labor market that was way less efficient. Clearly, you should, at the time, you should have chosen to do a lot less than, you know, would have been reasonable in the 1990s. And so if we took modern technology and AI and what we learned, I'm not surprised we can do more given the same, let's say, resources than we could in the past. But I think as a general rule, leaning on Less. rather than more is a very, very useful thing, even in this day and age, particularly because I think the fact that some of these companies are pulling it off, it doesn't mean that they've chosen the right path. We don't know how well they would have done had they done three, but rather than four things and dropping the smallest, least important one. Maybe the biggest, most you know, 35% better and, and bigger, and maybe it's a net positive. So, um, We have a value, actually, or a quality that we call relentless simplification. We measure ourselves against and we demand... How do you measure yourself? That's fascinating. Yeah, measure, I meant like we assess ourselves against. It's not... Frankly, it's not very, very quantifiable. But we want people to every time. So the rule goes like this. Every time someone recommends that we should add complexity, whether it's a step in a process, a feature, a team, headcount to a team, you name it, any element of the system, the burden of proof is on those. making that recommendation. Those who believe it's a bad idea don't need to bother bringing any proof. They're fine. And so if we choose to go forward, there needs to be very clear proof that it makes sense, or it has to be revertible and the people who the initiative need to then determine whether it was [55:00] clear success and otherwise reverted pretty quickly. The other part of the rule is that we need to stay alert and question complexity that's been there for a while because we become blind to it as human beings. And anyone who does that should always be applauded even if it's a nuisance that, oh my goodness, again, we're questioning this process or this policy. Yes, if you have better technology, AI is amazing. And, you know, as someone who failed with AI startup in 2010, I mean, I didn't fail 2010. started in 2010, failed in 2013. Clearly, I believe in the power of technology. I'm not surprised we can do a lot more today than we could 20 years ago. you decided to base the company in Milan, We were based in Boston. I felt like there were some big pluses and big minuses to being in Boston. A lot of people think just you can't create a great company out of Silicon Valley. That's obviously not me. Why didn't you do Milan? What are the pluses and minuses of building outside the valley? Do you, do you permanently feel like you're like not a cool kid? Cause you're a millennial. You know, I actually couldn't care less about coolness. Someone who buys a company like AOL cannot possibly care about coolness. If anything, or maybe I do care, but I think that the uncool is cool. You choose, but it's one or the other. I'm not certain. What are the pluses or what are the minuses? Like my thesis is... San Francisco is the best place in the world to start a company, but holy crap is it hard to scale there. It's so expensive that there's not a lot of loyalty. It's just darn hard to scale. What's your thesis on it? Yeah, I mean, look, I haven't built a company in San Francisco, so I can't really tell for sure. It does strike me as a place. If you have... the coolest. Highest potential, best resourced company on the planet. I think that's where we want to build it. You can probably absorb the most talent, the fastest there than anywhere else. If you are more of a middling project, And by the way, middling by Silicon Valley standards is a pretty high bar. Then it may be harder there than in many other locations. In any case, we chose Italy, Milan. Today we're an international company. We're hiring way more people outside of Italy than in Italy at this point, but including now more and more in the States. I think we'll probably open offices there next year. Yes, we started it in Milan, Italy. On purpose, we actually were in Denmark with my co-founders where we had completed our engineering studies and launched and then launched. shut down our AI startup. We have two main reasons. One was Um, extremely commercial and selfish. basically what you described, we thought Italy, 60 million people, excellent education, relatively few, amazing companies, certainly very few, if any, up and coming tech companies could be a win-win for us in the talent. Like we brought a lot of ambition. We thought an idea that made a lot of sense, a project that we thought was exciting. And so a lot of people would otherwise be, uh, relegated to joining a inferior business or moving abroad, but they had their family there, they loved it there, could actually stay and have... you know, everything, both an exciting job and stay with their families. And so we thought we'd be able to build a better team, basically, for the same dollars or, you know, or, you know, a, a, an equally good team for cheaper which I think has proven to be true and a significant advantage. The other reason was more missionary. I believe, and I think my co-founders, did too, and we certainly believe so today, that the world in general is a better place if Knowledge. opportunity wealth are a little bit better distributed. I think it's totally fine and probably even a good thing that you have one or two hubs like Silicon Valley, that are one notch above. I think the world probably needs that to achieve maximum prosperity. But I think if the gap becomes... immense and basically everything that matters happens in one or two places. It's a really big problem, including for the people who live in those places in the long run. And so we wanted to Do our part, you know, 1%, make a 1% change by showing you can build a world beating company. massive ambitions in an unlikely place, Italy being one of Many, clearly, but we are Italian. It was easy. We understood the culture better. So that was it. And we don't regret it. I think it was a good move. You can never A-B test life, so I cannot definitively say that we would have done less well had we... start it in Silicon Valley. But I do suspect that this has been a better choice for us. My last question, so I interviewed three of the founders, didn't interview, I called three of the founders of companies you acquired. Thank you. And all three of them said the same thing. [60:00] They said, "You are exceptionally high integrity. Thank you. I don't hear that a lot about CEOs necessarily, and I don't hear that a lot in preparation for these calls. Are there some principles around that you live by? And what are they? And what can we borrow from you? I don't know that, you know, it's up to you to determine whether it's worth borrowing, but... It's not a point of expedience, it's a moral point. So the morality is very personal. Um, At some point early in my adult life, I decided that I never... So, I mean, I can be transparent about it. It's not... So in my early 20s, I cheated on my girlfriend at the time. And I was so ashamed. Sometimes I think, Making a big mistake is a better way of learning than rationalizing how you should conduct yourself. I was so ashamed of myself that I made a promise to myself to Never lie. but also never omit something important that people should know, even if it's to my detriment. So I've tried to extend that to all aspects of my life. I suspect that although it's sometimes costly in the short run, It tends to pay off in the long run. I'm very glad. You just made my day sharing that feedback. I didn't know you talked to them. And But I'm glad you did, and I'm glad they said that over praising my looks or something. No, because it really matters. No, jokes aside, it really matters to me. It's a life mission I set for myself to be that kind of person you can trust is telling you. thinks as they are, at least as I think they are. Yeah, I think it does pay off in the long run when you become known as someone who can be trusted. It's easier to have a good life, make good friends and relationships that last that matter. Do business. People will come to you and say, okay, we're looking to sell. We believe you guys. Your word means something. But it doesn't come from a place of seeking experience. It's really just a moral point for me, and it's very subjective in that regard. I love that. I'm going to leave it there. Congratulations on building something really special. Good luck to you on your journey to a trillion dollars, my friend. We'll do our best. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Brian. Okay, I thought Luca was really interesting. His company is doing really well and the guy beats to his own drummer. Just to stick on the ending there, I mean, for CEOs, integrity is really an underrated thing. You are what your word is. You've got a great reputation, probably, but you do one stupid thing and you can kind of have that crash down. So I like that. I like that he's like, I never lie and I never omit important info. And he could have just said that and I'd be like, that's a bunch of BS. But I had three of the companies he acquired kind of say the same thing. to go to from Databricks where He's like, the worst thing you can be as a CEO is conflict-diverse. And like if you're never going to omit important information when talking to someone, you're going to have a conflict. And so that just sort of reinforces that in my mind. Other things I really thought were unique was like the way he does hiring is really unique along a lot of different levels. I mean, he's very conscious about the top of his funnel and how he brings people in. He's very conscious about his employee brand. This does rhyme with HubSpot. She was a marketer actually that we moved into running HR and she was excellent at it. And she treated it like marketing. Like, how do we create a flywheel? How do we pull people in and create a real employee brand? And now she's the COO, actually, at Harvey. But I think that's really important for scaling companies, create a hiring brand. Getting very good at hiring, I think is important. He's got a whole darn data science team looking at hundreds or thousands of signals, trying to find the right candidates. And it sounds like he does lots of interesting things in that process. One of the least interesting things, it sounds like he does, is the interview itself. I kind of agree with that. Like when I interview, everyone's good at being interviewed now. And so I discount that a little bit relative to other signals. So I thought that was I thought that was pretty interesting. I mean, he's pretty obsessive on talent. He you know, he said it. He said it on this pod. I've heard him say it other times, like you just can't drop the bar. And like as companies scale, they inevitably do drop the bar. And it sounds like he really hasn't. And he's stuck on that. And it causes a lot of suffering and a lot of people working very long hours. But he he sticks with that. And, you know, he weighed in on the age old battle that I hear from CEOs all the time. [65:00] hire for experience or slope. And he's at a pretty big scale and he's still like full on slope over experience. I think his management teams probably, other than his founders, are all in their 20s. and have high slope and it's working for him. I'm not saying that's the answer. I think for some people experience matters. He also buys a lot of companies in the PLG type sales motion where You know, it's not necessarily enterprise sales or maybe some experience might be useful. But that's where he comes in on that. He talks so much about team, team, team. But then at one point he's like, actually, you can have a mediocre team if your strategy is really good, which I thought. hurt my head a little bit. And then he also talked about when he buys a company, is it more his picking or his operating? So operating, you know, he's a really good operator. I think the reality is you have to be really good at all of that stuff. You need to have a really compelling strategy and that's unique relative to your competitors. It is compelling to your potential customers. You need to be an amazing operator and you need to have an amazing team. There's not really any shortcut on any of that stuff. Anyway, that's Luca. I thought he was really interesting and smart, and I hope you liked it.