Luca Ferrari: The Operating System Behind Bending Spoons

About this episode

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: exceptiona