Representative appearances

• In Conversation with Luca Ferrari, Co-Founder and CEO of Bending Spoons

  I've I've when I talk to some people in Italy, I always say Benning Spoons is going to be the next like PayPal mafia and a bunch of incredible companies are going to come out of there hopefully. Uh that's losing talent obviously. impossible you um but um kind of what do you think are the next steps we can we can uh that are going to act as catalysts to grow and and scale our ecosystem to whatever level where we can compete globally and not just with outliers like yourself I've always believed that so naturally there is a chicken and an egg problem with these things with ecosystems probably intuitive I've always believed believe that the the one factor that was most likely to ignite that switch that change was the very successful companies/companies first for a bunch of because I think you can you can uh through sheer luck and a superior effort and competence you can still build a worldbeating company from almost anywhere not quite probably there are some exceptions And once you have that automatically you attract talent not just for the company but then investors become interested in in looking for other companies in that region. They start believing that you can succeed in that region. Company the company attracts excellent talent from abroad and and that talent improves the company but also can then build new companies. the company develops talent talent internally that you know your PayPal mafia kind of metaphor um whereas so I think the entrepreneur the company can be the uh catalyst I don't believe say capital itself can be the cap the catalyst because what do you do like plenty of capital but you would probably initially like if there is no evidence of anyone doing anything interesting it's very difficult to to to to make a difference and my in my experience by the way most investors are quite open-minded about investing in almost any geography. Maybe the bar is a little bit higher in Italy or in other locations than it is in the US for sure, but it's it's not prohibitively high. So if you have great people, a great idea, great a great great traction, you can still raise money. Maybe the valuation will be a little bit lower. So I I've never believed that we haven't had a lot of success in Italy because it's difficult to raise capital. I think the the truth is we haven't had any anyone you know really great and who got also sufficiently lucky. Uh if you look at the history of of California and Silicon Valley actually there was nothing there uh up until you know almost uh the the middle point of the 20th century and then you had fair child semiconductors come up and that was out of sheer luck a couple of very talented people were supposed to build a company elsewhere. ended up being in California. It was a huge success. Uh and from there you had Intel and then from there you had Kleiner Perkins. But the first you know the the seed of that company was really out of luck and the right people the right time. So we we need one or two good good good examples of success. I hope can be one of many not just the only one and then other things will follow. uh but but naturally there's no closing the gap with say the US overnight. I mean it's a it's it's an exponential process will take a long time but but I do and there are some structural disadvantages in Italy than uh do not depend on the ecosystem but more like politicians and and also the size of the market but I but I do think that bing spoons and similar cases is the only way to to kick it off. I I don't believe there is any other place to start.