Going from zero to one takes a lot of luck. While building his first startup, Luca saw almost no correlation between the teams he considered most talented and hardworking and the ones that actually succeeded. It's the reason why Bending Spoons buys and rebuilds existing digital businesses instead of starting them. “Being really good at the functional knowledge and skills to run a digital business is a matter of perseverance, effort, and discipline. We can bet on that. We don’t want to bet our entrepreneurial lives on getting lucky.”

The difference between good and great investors: "Good investors recognize patterns. Amazing investors assess each business on its own deep fundamental merits...and that gives them the ability to see what others don't. The truly outstanding investors find something that's really good but only a few people think is good. And the only way to do that is to not apply a pattern."

"Most of the technologists I know are really interested in studying the history of technology because you don't want to be just a one-hit wonder. You don't want to just have one product that works and then passes by, but you want to be able to serve multiple ways." — @collision

Luca and his two co-founders had no money for their startup. They agreed that whoever got the best job would pay rent and food for the other two. Luca got an offer from McKinsey but told them that once they raised capital, he planned to quit. They hired him anyway. A year later, they raised money and he left McKinsey. That first company ultimately failed, but they used the leftover capital to start Bending Spoons, which just became Italy’s first decacorn.

.@gradypb on how Sequoia’s culture of stewardship began and how it’s been preserved across generations: In the 1990s, when Don Valentine handed the partnership to the next generation, it was standard to buy out the old partners. But he didn’t ask for any money, he just handed it over. "In doing so, he imbued the partnership with this sense of stewardship, which is actually a big part of what drives us. We feel like we've been giving this wonderful gift that is Sequoia. The only thing that's been asked of us in return is to make sure that we leave it in a better place than we found it." In 2012, Doug Leone became the senior steward and he discovered the legal documents didn't allow him to ever be removed. One of his first actions was to change that. He didn't want to be "safe", believing that safety breeds complacency, complacency breeds mediocrity, and mediocrity is the beginning of decline.

Luca Ferrari is the co-founder and CEO of @bendingspoons, one of the most fascinating companies in Europe and just became Italy's first decacorn. He describes it as 25% private equity firm and 75% technology company. They fully acquire and rebuild digital companies like Evernote, Vimeo, and most recently AOL. @luke10ferrari shares exactly how the Bending Spoons playbook works — how they find great businesses, improve every core function, and finance them with both debt and equity to own and operate forever. We also talk about his obsession with attracting and developing exceptional talent and why he's determined to build a generational company in Europe. Enjoy! Timestamps 0:00 Intro 0:30 What is Bending Spoons? 4:30 Why Europe Lacks Trillion-Dollar Companies 7:25 The First Test: From Failure to Founding 10:52 The McKinsey Years & Funding Co-founders 13:24 The Strategic Insight: Why M&A Over Building 16:13 Structural Advantages of the Platform Model 21:00 Talent as the Ultimate Edge 22:50 Rejecting Consensus 26:28 Early Days: From $10K to Billions 30:52 The Evernote Transformation 36:17 Pricing Power & Monetization Sophistication 40:32 Valuation & Deal Discipline 44:52 Financing Strategy 1:01:47 No Variable Pay: A Contrarian Approach 1:04:14 Areas of Dissatisfaction & Regulatory Frustration 1:09:25 Raising Europe's Largest Private Debt Round 1:13:28 AI's Impact on Software Businesses 1:17:26 Building Culture: State of the Spoon & Retreats 1:20:20 Why There Aren't More Bending Spoons 1:23:35 The Kindest Thing

"We have 3,000 kids working for the company today. They started out pushing carts from the lot. They're multimillionaires, and they're still working for the company. That's the value of treating your people right." — Ken Langone (co-founder, Home Depot)

15 maxims from @kevin2kelly: 1. Don’t be the best, be the only. 2. The reward for good work is more work. 3. The most selfish thing you can do is to be generous. 4. Master anything. 5. If everyone rejects your idea, it might mean you’re the only one who can do it. 6. Your life should be inventing a new definition of success. 7. The thing that made you weird as a kid will make you great as an adult. 8. Strive to die having become fully yourself. 9. Money is like gas for your car. The purpose is to drive around, not see how much gas you can get. 10. The lack of resources is actually the feature - it forces invention. 11. Imagination is mostly about removing what you expect to see. 12. Intelligence matters less than will, empathy, and endurance. 13. Speak only what is true, necessary, and kind. 14. Simplify, simplify, simplify and then exaggerate. 15. Attend as many funerals as you can. You’ll realize what actually matters.

"You want to shorten the cycle as much as possible between idea and putting the thing in front of a customer." — @karimatiyeh (CTO, @tryramp)

One of our favorite "kindest things" from @traestephens: > crying on his couch, unsure if he'd get into college > mom asks "where do you want to go?" > "Georgetown." > they drive to tell the Dean that Trae is going to college there > it worked Your story isn't written yet.

.@GuptaRK22 on focus: It's not focus or prioritization until it's painful. To keep the main thing the main thing, people need to believe it. But then they say, what's the main thing? Well, there's five of it. No, you have already violated it. So for me, the lesson is learned through pain. It's learned through working at Instacart and us having five goals that we want to work on, and everyone is so happy because we have five goals, and one of the goals appeals to every single person in the organization. But then three months later, is a terrible day because you made no progress, or even worse, really good progress on two of them that don't matter and no progress on the one that does. So the lesson for me is simply this, when you don't do that, you don't get done the most important thing. As a result, what ends up happening is you value activity over progress on the key thing. And I realize now that it's just simply the pain of actually going through it first and having the hard conversation with someone of, “I understand that that is important for you. It is not the most important thing that we need to do for the business, and we will get to that, but we will get to that after we finish this thing that has to be done.” Keeping the main thing the main thing is the source of what is good in my life, professionally and personally.

I never thought I'd be able to spend 2h sitting still. @patrick_oshag made it so much fun. We talked about building @tryramp, AI, and the craft of making things move faster.

.@karimatiyeh outlined exactly how @tryramp thinks about talent: > only hire people you would start a company with > hire for slope and spikiness > hire obsessed people who care deeply about every little detail > hire people earlier than anyone else (eg, hire freshmen v. juniors) > hire people who have a clear superpower (extremely good at 1-2 things) > hire where they have asymmetric information > understand exactly (1) how accurately you judge your own ability, and (2) how far you’ve actually taken that skill > hire people who raise the temperature and want to go faster > hire people who help them differentiate > hire for versatility > hire people who are taking and excelling in the hardest classes > hire people who got into incredibly selective programs (eg, RSI) and then figure out exactly what you want them to do and empower them to do the best work they can. Example: @calvinleenyc > interned at Paribus (Karim’s previous company) for one month (no one does one month internships) > had less than one year of college experience > left high school early to prepare for the Informatics Olympiad > finished college in two and a half years > hired by Ramp > went from being an engineer → sales → runs the FDE org

One time Karim was abducted at gunpoint by a militia group, and he negotiated a release that included some militia members helping carry luggage He also built one of the earliest AI agents and started a generational fintech company He is the Chuck Norris of tech, and he’s speaking here with one of the great interviewers of modern media TLDR you should watch:

Incredible episode from @karimatiyeh — full of gems for operators My favorite story: when our entire engineering capacity (aka Karim) went skiing and came back with a broken arm That’s when we learned to take “manage the inputs” literally — four fingers and one thumb at a time

"Difference for the sake of it in everything." — James Dyson Karim explains why @tryramp is yellow:

This is the Karim you hear me talking about on Founders. This is exactly what the conversations we have are like. If you value craftsmanship, obsession, and quiet intensity, this is the episode for you:

Our 20 favorite ideas from @karimatiyeh: 1/ Ramp is yellow because it’s different. Seek differentiation for its own sake. 2/ If you’re doing well, people will try to kill you. 3/ The key to survival is perseverance. 4/ Investors are like employees: pick ones who push you forward. 5/ Speed is everything. 6/ The journey is the reward. 7/ Customers don’t know what's possible. Your job is to show them. 8/ The easiest way to win is to simply care more. 9/ If you’re solving for impact, things should break. Breakage means progress. 10/ Don’t optimize for round valuation. Optimize for total enterprise value created. 11/ Build something that outlives you. 12/ We wanted the UX of Instagram, but for business software. 13/ The best teams feel like the Avengers - everyone has one clear superpower. 14/ Speed compounds. Shorten the distance between idea and customer. 15/ It’s not that it doesn’t work - you just haven’t figured out how to make it work. 16/ The most important interview test: would you start a company with them? 17/ Your ambition and scope should only get bigger. 18/ We want businesses to spend less. That’s how we win. 19/ The job’s never done. 20/ I’d love for Ramp to be the last job anyone here ever applies for.

My conversation with @karimatiyeh, co-founder and CTO of @tryramp and one of the best operators active today. I love talking to people who are obsessed with their craft, and Karim is one of them. The way he talks about every part of the business makes it clear that Ramp wins by caring more than anyone. They labor over every pixel and detail that helps customers save time, eliminate waste, and spend less. We talk about how to build products faster, assembling a team of "Avengers", seeking differentiation and how Karim’s "divinely discontent" mindset drives Ramp’s culture. It's a conversation about craftsmanship, obsession, and the quiet intensity behind one of the fastest-growing companies in the world. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 0:29 Competing with a Day One Mentality 7:58 Winning with Consumer-Grade UX 10:40 Divinely Discontent 14:18 Building a Culture of Mutual Accountability 16:05 Origin Story: Growing Up in Lebanon 21:40 The First Company: Paribus 28:02 Lessons from Building on an Unstable Platform 36:42 From Paribus to Ramp 48:59 The Framework for Choosing Investors 57:54 Shifting the Business Model 1:03:00 Why the Best Builders Will Be Technical 1:06:05 An Engineer's Approach to Marketing 1:20:15 The Power of Differentiation 1:22:22 Recruiting for Spikiness 1:27:41 The Tactics of Speed 1:34:52 The Vision for Ramp 1:43:40 Kindest Thing

I am probably responsible for half the views on this video alone One of the greatest podcast episodes of all time. Come back to listen to it every now and again