Twisting the rules of building software: Bending Spoons (the team behind Evernote)

just to confirm like for the products that you operate this is kind of like a core principle of on call should not be heavy or you should not worry when you're going on call that you're going to be flooded with notifications and

alerts we actually try not to have an on call scheme at all on many of our products and Technologies however knowing that you don't have that fullback as a software engineer as an infrastructure engineer really breeds

that have I thought about a corner cases I've I really looked at this and made sure it's really robust it's really sharply engineered if you know that the on Co is there it's not the same raising

capital in Italy was borderline impossible our model is so unusual no VC would be interested in investing and I believe that give us an edge over some of the competitors I do not frequently

hear loans from traditional banks with startups every know that Meetup are two products many people have heard about but what about the company called bending spoons bending spoons is an 11-year-old startup headquartered in

Milan Italy and they own and operate both Evernote Meetup and a bunch of other products bending spoons is a fascinating company they started out as five developers building small mobile

apps and have now grown to about 450 people surpassing $700 million in annual revenue what surprised me to learn about this company is that they've been profitable every single year and how

they spent more than $1 billion on Acquisitions it's rare to hear about a European company buying Silicon Valley companies and I was excited to learn more Straight From the Source in today's episode we do a deep dive on how the

evern old acquisition happened and why the complete back and needed to be Rewritten we look into how bending spoons typically operates and how it organizes product and platform teams but we'll start with the elephant in the

room addressing a pretty controversial perception on how bending spons acquires companies but then let's go a good chunk of the staff when they take over products we'll see that the reality is a lot more gray rather than black and

white in this case so let's jump in hello everyone today I'm happy to have the bending spoons team here with me we have Luca Franchesco and feder Rico Luca is a co-founder and CEO of the company

Franchesco is a CTO and Frederico is a product lead at bending spoons welcome to the podcast thank you thank you very much us being here so I have to admit

even a few months ago I had not heard of vending spoons at the same time things that I have heard about and and used are evernot meetup.com

which I knew were Silicon Valley companies and I also heard they got acquired uh by a different company and this turned out to be bending spoons it was actually the evern node acquisition

that I first uh you know like connected the two together but the interesting thing is that bending spoons is probably the most single sought after company and

the tech company in Italy uh when I first tweeted about bending spoons and how I discovered the interesting things that you're doing I had Italian developers ping me and telling me Oh I

actually apply to bending spoons they're the hottest place to be in Italy and I asked them when did you apply and they told me oh it was you know like four or five years ago so they already knew that

something really different and exciting was happening at the company the first time you came up was when you acquired Evernote but you operate other uh apps

and products which ones are you known for you correctly mentioned Evernote uh as one of the most well-known businesses we have acquired uh Meetup to we have

acquired Mosaic which is a collection of mobile products from interactive Corporation we requir the hoping and

streamyard uh possibly the most uh popular uh recording and uh and and live streaming uh Suite of features of

product uh in the world uh more recently issue for digital publishing and we transfer for uh digital file uh storage and transfer we also own and operate

ramini which is an AI based uh uh phot enhancer and Generator one of the top two or three most used generative products in the world with over 100 million month lative users but we have

been doing this for a decade and we have acquired dozens of businesses these are just the the most well-known ones this episode was brought to you by the Enterprise ready conference One Day

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core 4 I'd like to address the an elephant in in the room in terms of the the perception of a bending spoon

so you've already touched on this but I I I just really want to like like d double click on it because from the outside when you search for bending spoons often things in the Press will come up oh they acquired Evernote and

then they reduced the original team oh they acquired Meetup and then they reduced the original team oh they acquired this other company and and they did that so there's this real perception of like oh bending spoons buys a company

that is struggling or that wants to be sold and they just reduce the the the team and and then they take it from there but how do and this is just one side of a story obviously this is the

external I guess the hard numbers or or the things that make the rounds and and make people pay attention and and you know form opinions how do Acquisitions really look like from the inside like

what what is your approach because I I'm I'm going to just assume that it's likely not like we want to cross up like it doesn't make sense to acquire a company uh when uh you know like it it

sounds you want to make more more of this how do you approach it yeah definitely I think given that we they require companies to to own and operate

them forever uh and given that we do so with our own money we're not a fund we're not raising capital from investors to buy companies we're using our own money uh

pretty much all of my worth is in many spoons and so is the case for most people here including Francisco and Federico we would want to do the best we can with every single acquisition with a

long-term view which is what we do the way we approach it I described earlier a little bit we we will first of all go through a a phase of learning uh when you are on the outside of an acquisition

of a company you don't get to see a lot of stuff you need to be inside so once you're inside you you get to see enough that you can decide whether you want to acquire it or not and at what price but you don't know enough to be able to

decide how to operate it well and so we go through a learning phase and uh we really look at at the details we go Hands-On very deep across the board um and and the more we

do this the more the better we become at recognizing patterns and so we get faster more accurate but after generally a few weeks maybe a couple of months depending on the complexity we find uh

we form a pretty clear opinion and and develop a pretty Clear Vision as to what we want to do with the product the technology demonetization the organization and so on and so forth and then as I said we try to close that gap

between the stat status quo and that Vision as quickly as we can um often there is a gap in how we want the organization to be structured often we want it to be a much smaller organization where people have a much

more autonomy and and ownership of projects where we do not pursue projects that are not really likely to move the need in a major way so massive Focus

massive leanness and autonomy making that change and I'm talking again particularly the organization such as a layoff sucks uh it it sucks primarily

for the people who are let go of course it it's also not enjoyable for for those of us who uh implement it um and naturally uh we we have empathy for for

those people um we try to do it in a way that's as supportive financially logistically emotionally as we can um but it still sucks you know there's no

way around it however I will say if we believe that on the other side of that painful transition the company is much better positioned to heast for five or

10 years down the line uh if getting there requires making unpopular or painful decisions we will make them and you know we understand we'll take flag

for that in the Press uh and and it's fine I mean we there's a reason for it and it's okay but it's certainly nowhere near representative of the much bigger

effort and the M much bigger um Vision we have for all these businesses and a project like everold I think represents our trajectory well my first reaction

was like oh this is terrible a company buys buys another company and then lets a bunch of people go how terrible let's say with with the Evernote but then I was kind of thinking a little bit further and thought like hold on I've

read all these articles about Evernote how again this this might not represent but what I understood how they struggled to make a profit how they struggled to to operate how they were burning money how they tried this how they tried that

this this was I mean in this case this was clearly a struggling company and to to take that company to a successful company clearly if it would have been easy it it it would have clearly been done and when I look through a lot of

your Acquisitions some of them they are companies that are not necessarily doing well or they want to sell for some reason I mean if they would have been doing amazing they probably would have not sell like I I don't know dude like

sounds like bending spoons do not want to sell right now right so if you're successful we didn't steal any companies exactly we didn't steal them I these are these are companies are

actively looking for a buyer for some reason either either because they're strongly or not and I mean it sound sounds like you know they they've been through the the what are easy solutions

and what I I thought about this well I mean in my view a company that goes to painful transition and then becom successful in the long term or a product is probably better than one that slowly

dies and we've seen recently a lot of stars that just shut down and after they couldn't find anything so that's just a you know I I I was it's it's not all

black and white right no and I and I think you know we have been dealing with this criticism for a while now and I think I understand it better than I did a couple years ago I will say this to

simplify the world seems to be divided into two camps some people think ultimately that as long as a business uh can

survive it should not be made more thriving more successful if doing so means going through it painful decisions such as a layoff uh some people think that and they and these people think

that bringing the business from a 6 out of 10 to a 9 out of 10 if it means going through a painful decision such as a layoff it's evil and then there are people who think that uh as long as you

act empathetically supportively you should try to run a business in the most effective efficient way you can uh and that if doing so means going through a hard decision like a layoff you should

do it again trying to be super supportive financially and and logistically and emotionally but still do it we of course the latter view is

more kind of free market uh view the former you can give it a name we belong in the latter Camp uh but if you belong in the former Camp there is nothing I

can say to convince you you will believe we're evil and call us evil uh there is a different in the underlying deep assumptions of what one should strive to do uh but within this the latter camp we

we we we tried to do things the right way to uh to build the best products we can to uh build the best organizations we can to treat anybody in their way out as well as we can to monetize a product

as efficiently as we can and be rational and scientific about it so that's what we we are and if someone sees things more in this way then I think they'll have an incredible experience working

with us partnering with us in any capacity if someone sees the world in the former way we fully respect that it's almost a call it a political view in a way and uh and it's totally fine way of looking at the world but then

they will never like us you know there's nothing we can say to change their mind yeah and I respect that right I I think as long as you're open with what your values are what what you're doing and I think you know for example Netflix is a very good example they also are known to

have a very harsh culture you know they they have the the keeper test regularly challenging people but they publish this and again it's like they have this culture there's pros there's cons um and

I think it's nice when you're clear about what you stand for and and explain because again every company will be different it's just some companies are a bit harder to figure out because they don't talk about this so again the fact that we're you're actually talking here

this this is actually helpful we we are very transparent about it um we share a lot of stuff on our website including policies and whatnot when we extend an

offer to uh an applicant we send a document called controversial principles where we include seven or eight values or principles we implement

the that some people may consider controversial one being that we are uncompromising on Excellence which means that we want each position staffed with a performer that's at least in the

vicinity of the best possible performer we could we could hire uh so we see the company in the same way as you would see you know a an ambitious basketball team

or or or football team we really want to make sure at each position is Taff with an outstanding performer uh and and if it means demoting someone or letting

someone go we will do so so we tell you up front we're super honest about it um and again someone who's seeking a place where everybody is trying to be

absolutely great uh professionally will have a blast because Talent density is Sky High someone who's not seeking that

sort of uh one foot outside of of your comfort zone all the time place will not like it and I think both views are absolutely respectable and understandable you just need to be

honest about who you are and and that then it can be a match made in heaven you yeah and by the way it's good working at bending SP we must be doing something right because we have a level

of unwanted team member churn that to my knowledge unheard of in the industry about 1% per year uh 1% per year churn yeah uh unwanted churn and uh if you

look at our we call unregular attrition the official but yeah people who yeah yeah W if you look at glass reviews I

I'm not aware of many companies with you know such high uh High support uh so but but yeah it's not for everybody it's really not for everybody yeah that

that is very very low in indeed yeah so surprising because uh I I we did a I did a newsletter issue on this I think the industry average was

around 7 to 10% and then it can be higher as well depending on on the stage of the company so one 1% is is is truly impressive so yeah literally like a

handful of people out of 450 per year like three one five something like that depending on you must be doing something right and when when you do have this type of information to to look on that's

that's actually quite helpful I feel more companies could look at this data because it is quite telling and I'm assuming you have exit interviews with people who leave as well right we should probably put this in our website

somewhere I think I think people should know about it more yeah to put things in perspective could you share some some hard numbers especially inuring numbers to get a sense of of where you are in

terms of you know quers per second Revenue the things that can help Place how large and you know High load bending spoons is um so we're currently at uh

around $700 million in revenues we've been profitable uh every year since we founded the company 11 years ago we

serve well over 200 million manle active users um across uh you know a few dozen products uh and in terms of Team size excluding the most recent acquisition of

we transfer we are a little over 400 right now uh I think 450 give or take and if you include we transfer over 800

people work at Bish po we run multiple products I think it's north of 100 uh digital products at the moment uh

digital products wow that's uh yeah I mean it's keep growing but uh it's already like a I mean I think it's a an

important number um we we don't only take care of the developing the core features of this product I think one uh uniqueness of bending spoons is that we

build a platform that can provide services uh that these products can leverage at is which is also one of our biggest competitive advantage in my

opinion just thinking about all the services that we provide from the platform we're talking about more than

100,000 requests per second uh let's say taking care of everything about authentication uh security

monetization uh Data Tracking all of these uh utilities that we provide for the units that takes care of digital

products um is already like G giving us a lot of traffic that we need to handle uh that uh let's say

pushed Us in the years to build complex architecture able to scale accordingly can we talk about your AI products and specifically the AI load there is

because I know reminy it's a very popular AI application but how does it transform into like GPU use at the moment I believe on a on average daily

we do more than 2,000 inferences per second uh we can reach pcks of 8 8,000

per second and that turns uh into if you look at the GPU demand that we need to satisfy in order to fulfill these

inferences we're talking about around four 4,000 gpus that we need to sort of alloc it yeah dynamically uh because as

you can imagine there's they're they're very pricey and we need to be to run the infrastructure at the maximum efficiency not everybody May appreciate how here

there's a double uh problem to to be solved on the one hand you want to uh deallocate gpus you're not using so as to save in terms of financial costs on

the other hand the way the cloud providers operate is that that uh the only way to make sure that agpu is available when you need it is to keep it booked there are different ways you can

do that depending on the on the platform but that also has a cost and so we've built algorithms that help us predict whether un booking a particular GPU will

result in a comparable GPU not being available or being available so it's actually a very complicated uh problem to solve in a way that optimizes for D those two contrasting goals of ensuring

service and minimizing cost costs and do I understand correctly that you know one of the reasons you're doing all of this additional complexity is what you mentioned that you have been profitable

and I'm assuming you want to remain profitable because a lot of AI startups will just they'll just you know take their funding uh VC funded AI startups they will allocate however many gpus and their their number one thing will be

Let's Get Enough users but sounds like you have another constraint here right yeah definitely we we have run the company profitably every year initially

because you know 2013 2014 raising capital in Italy cuz that's where we are headquartered we have people all over the world particularly Europe but we started off in Italy so that's where uh

we had the you know the financing questions uh early on and raising Capital Equity Capital at decent terms in Italy in 2014 was I would say

borderline impossible um and then I think today things are much much better I'd like to to believe also thanks to bending spoons having been a success

case and and such attracted International Capital but at the time uh you know we we didn't have access to it uh and also our model is so unusual that

uh we felt no VC would uh would be interested in investing um so we had to develop that profitability muscle from early on I think in hindsight it's been a good thing we could have probably

grown a little bit faster with uh with Equity financing but having grown through our own cash flows and a little bit of debt from

traditional Banks has forced us to be extremely efficient and thoughtful about the allocation of resources more um um

autonomous uh and independent um and and I I believe that scarcity of resources has bred uh resourcefulness and uh and Ingenuity at

least I I'd like to believe that's been the case which today give us an edge over at least some of the competitors um particularly those who have been flooded

with u with financing yeah so I do not frequently hear we took B loans from traditional banks with startups in fact you're you're the first one when I I

hear that but let's talk about this this history because you today you're you said you're more than 400 people you're headquartered in Milan Italy but you started this company 11 years ago can

you tell me about how it started and if I recall correctly when I read your founding story it started with some AI application 10 years ago not even in

Italy can you talk about that right so uh so I when I graduated in Copenhagen Denmark studied engineering uh and with two friends at the time we started uh

company called evertale and the vision was to create a self-rising Diary of a user's life using AI so we he would install this app and it would collect data from the phone

transparently uh then through Ai and at the time we weren't even talking machine learning I think AI in 20 2010 this is 20110 I I believe you only heard about it in Academia I don't think people were

talking about it much in the mainstream media um so we we built this app uh it actually worked reasonably well but it was a commercial failure um and then on

the ashes of that project uh we were left with about $40,000 of VC money in that case we had raised

uh $1 million or or or about that in VC money uh and when it when we felt uh we had exhausted all all of our Avenues and we wanted to shut down the company uh

the VC firm told us they sold their shares to us for for $1 because they didn't want to go through the uh pretty cumbersome uh liquidation process the

$40,000 would have been theirs they had liquidation preferences but again for for Simplicity they sold us the shares that that amount of money which was very substantial to us was not was um was

peanuts to them a pretty large fund um and so we ended up uh taking out these $40,000 from from that failure and that was the the seed money for for bending spoons which started in Copenhagen in

2013 with that $440,000 the same three people who started evertale plus two people who had been hired at evertale and uh uh turned out to be particularly

uh capable uh and so we asked them to go found bending spoons so we started with that amount of money invested in the first acquisition soon after I think uh

2014 so uh at around the same time we moved the company back to Italy again at the time it was just the co-founders um and uh you know we invested the in the first acquisition

$10,000 what what was this first acquisition so that one was a an an app an IOS app to

personalize uh your keyboard very simple M I believe we bought it from a oneman show developer from somewhere in the world I

I don't remember frankly where um and we tried to improve it uh ultimately turning that $10,000 investment into say 20,000 and then you know and then

20,000 gets you a slightly bigger more promising acquisition and if you're good you turn it into 40 then the compounding is a pretty powerful force over time exponentially and so you fast forward

around 10 years later uh we're now acquiring companies hundreds of millions of dollars in in price we've invested more than a billion dollars in Acquisitions and hundreds of millions of

dollars in research and development uh but yeah it's been a pretty steady paced

uh Journey since then and and what was like a bigger Milestone like like I imagine clearly evern is is one very well known from externally but from

internally like you said it started off small you started growing but were there any kind of notable Milestones where you really kind of like stepped up a level I think one that's uh worth mentioning is

when we acquired splice a mobile video editor from GoPro that was the first time we acquired an asset from a you know a large structured seller as opposed

to single you individual developers or or small teams around the world so jumping over to ever know ever note it's one of the well known most well-known

note taking apps and it's one of the first times that I personally heard about you and you made it into into mainstream news can you tell us about how this acquisition happened from your

point of view the short of it is we we we came to know that Evernote could potentially be acquired

around late uh uh 2022 um we jumped uh at the opportunity the proc pretty fast I would say probably around a couple of

months and um it was basically all done by late uh 22 then you always have to go through antitrust clearance periods and so on so forth so the acquisition

actually closed very early January 23 and uh um and we you know we jumped into the the organization um and the way we operate is we spent the first several

weeks sometimes a couple of months in you know fully fledged learning mode where some some of the team members at bending spoons particularly the most

experienced ones um join at all levels management individual contributor in different teams and and just try to absorb as much information as they can

they talk to almost everybody uh look into almost every line of code or module U read many documents run analysis and and at the end of this process we try to

come up with a vision and the vision spans the gam with organization technology user experience monetization marketing everything we come up with a vision of the best version of that

business we we can come up with with a long-term view something uh there's a misconception about sometimes uh we acquire these companies to to own and operate them

forever so we think with the longest time frame we can um and and so that Vision embeds that sort of long-term thinking uh in it and then the second

phase starts which is where we try to close the gap between the state of squore and that Vision across the board as quickly and as fully as we can when you acquired OTE like what kind of

tech stack was it running on and and what were some tech changes that you decided to make and and why did you why did you do it I mean I assume it's always an exciting and opportunity to to

look at a a pretty established product and then see you know like what are the bottlenecks and how can we improve it um so the first thing we noticed when we

acquired EV not I think that's what was the main cause of all the other issues that we identified after all the things we could improve was that uh of course

it was a very old code base with many years of tech dep accumulated but one pecularity was that it was migrated at a

certain point from the more traditional data let's say bare metal servers to the cloud space and that migration was of

course supported by the cloud provider it was made in a one1 fashion meaning that it wasn't really uh happening

Evernote didn't let's say reshaped the infrastructure or the AR architecture making it Cloud native and

as a result of this we found ourself with a a monolith a huge one uh was a Java 11 monolith and it was running on

Virtual machines on Google Cloud but they were sort of manually provisioned they were it there were 750 machines

virtual machines all of them were manually provisioned and outou user users data were sharded among all of

these machines that sharding was not even after Toro analysis doesn't even have aspr to be uh even meaning meaning

that certain machines have heavier loader than others significantly heavier and sometimes that caused it also uh a lot of interventions a lot of

Maintenance uh we had to uh realize that on calls were actually very needed you know we have we run several products uh

what we do generally we try to make them reliable enough to not need an onal program that's one of the first objective of the engineering team

building the technology is that we want to make it reliable enough to make the unle an exception uh on every note we found it awesome so so just to confirm

like for for the products that you you operate like this is kind of like a a core principle of of like on call should not be let's say heavy or or you should not worry when you're going on call that

you're going to be flooded with notifications and alerts oh not even that I think it's even more than that ggal we actually try not to an unold uh

scheme at all on many of our uh products and Technologies so the goal is yeah but I think yes however knowing that you

don't have that fullback as a software engineer as an infrastructure engineer really breeds that you know have I thought about the corner cases have I really looked at this and made sure it's

really robust it's really sharply engineered if you know that the on call is there you know it's it's not the same you you know that a lack of foresight

there's a safety net so we try to reserve onal programs only where if uh an issue occurs the damage is truly

staggering uh or if we are not comfortable with the state of the infrastructure and code base as yet I I I love the different thinking because I think in the industry it's kind of a given like look we have we generate a

lot of Revenue we can afford to do on call and you know we'll pay Engineers a of extra like we'll we'll give them either a bonus for the week and a lot of companies operate like this so I really like how you actually just said okay

let's do it differently let's let's let's take from this principle I think a broader higher level principle we follow religiously at the company and it's probably one of the main drivers for

this views on on the on cold programs um is call it radical Simplicity we truly try to make it a

core cultural principle and value that everything we do we should seek out the most radically simple solution and approach and um adding

complexity uh the burden of Truth the burden of proof is always on those who want to do so as opposed to on those who want to retain this the simpler status

um additionally we encourage people not just not to not just not to add complexity but to to look for ways they could remove complexity so we constantly

uh question whether our any system really and it's it's not just technological systems it's also policies could be made simpler and we have plenty of examples of systems that I think were

reasonably simple to start with and made radically simple because of this approach one being pay at benm originally years ago we had you know bonuses and stuff now for for many many

years we've had fixed pay for everybody 100% fixed there's only a salary and people can choose to receive a percentage of their salary in equity if they so wish and and you even put it on your website right I saw that yeah I

think so I think so yeah we try to be quite transparent about that stuff so you know there was a a theory early on that bonuses would uh somehow Drive

Superior performance we documented ourselves on the topic in you know in the in the in the literature we had discussions we ultimately said there is very weak evidence that they do uh there

is certainty that there a big pain in the ass to manage of course you know set targets discuss you know I deserve it I don't deserve like it's not nice for anyone involved and so we figure let us

have just fixed pay we trust everybody working here that they want to do the best job they can and you know if they if they don't it's a different type of pro problem we shouldn't need a bonus to to drive performance and we haven't

looked back I mean we we don't even dream of adding bonuses back to the equation awesome and going back to to Evernotes so you said okay here was a

technology Java 11 virtual machines some of the manually provisioned what did you decide to move it on what is every note on these days in terms of the the technology stack architecture the how

did you make it more Cloud native yes so first of all we noticed that all the data user the users had their data stored on the virtual machines actually

the databases they were all deployed locally on the virtual machines that was one of the biggest uh weak point in our opinions the first first thing we did

was migrating all the data from the shards from the virtual machines to a managed database structure that allowed us then to move freely with the

application logic uh in the best possible way at that point after some analysis we found out that the best way moving forward was to move from the

monolith to a microservices architecture there were already some services that the previous uh Team of Evernote was already building uh let's say following

uh microservices architecture principle uh but they were very peripheral let's say uh they were not uh um let's say

handling the core that was uh about the notes about everything that the users were using uh from years so we had to

actually uh come out to come up with a plan that was um let's say taking into account how to move all that core logic

about nodes that without without uh disrupting the user flows one of the core projects also that we needed to take care of to do such a

move is changing the interaction mechanism between the clients and the the back end uh substantially before um

the clients were falling continuously [Music] boming classic 2010s exactly you know

how I went uh how you can go it's uh it was very heavy to to manage and also oh yeah quite the clients yeah the clients

also had to um let's say embed uh a heavy let's say quite of a big layer of logic just to take care of all the pollings and all the combin ing the

mutations that were coming back from the back end uh as you as you can imagine aot is also about synchronizing events that can happen from the client to the

back end uh Sometimes some mutations happen on the client they need to be propagated to the back end to be sure that they become permanent uh and that

let's say mutation must be acknowledged accordingly to to make sure that on the on the client also uh nothing strange

happens otherwise you incur in what we what we called uh in the past um in data

missing um issues let's say so what we had to do was to move from a this polling mechanism to an EV driven

communication uh we we built and we kept uh moving all the entities uh of the database all the ones that we that were

managed by the by the client uh from uh the polling system to what we called N Sync which was basically a downstream uh

event uh driven mechanism that allowed the clients to just receive all the events from the back end real time um

that required quite of an effort because we moved all the logic of combining um all the mutations and making sure that the end state is unique

and clear to the back end while before wasn't the client and making making that change though we made sure that lot of

data uh synchronization issues just disappeared because at the on the backand side we had much more visibility we had much more observability on what

was going on and in turn uh we were able to make sure that there was a unique state of what was the user data and that

state was propagated real time to the clients if it's a software engineer you want to take your system design interview preparation to the next level check out bybg go.com bbgo provides

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go.com so how did you get to this really fast Shing cence Frederico you were telling me that you you committed in in 20 24 to ship 100 updates and I saw your

your blog on on how you know you shipped 20 improvements in in I think April 30 more in July it's it's a really big step

up pace from from from before how did you structure yourself or or like how did you just speed things up so much

yeah so we approach these things in a variety of ways so we do have some bigger tracks that take longer to develop and so like big projects like the ones franisco was mentioning of

course like take months and we cannot ship them out um every week or two um but on the other hand um as we understood better what our customers wanted we Tred to prioritize those

things that people wanted but were also like easy to build uh in a sense and so given that we try to give a lot of autonomy to to product teams as Luca was

mentioning um we built this backlog of initiatives and features that that users uh needed um and we basically um try to assess them both from a standpoint of

how important they were for our customers but also on how hard they were to build uh and so we kind of try to rank the list by by both uh metrics in a

sense and and we just started shipping stuff very quickly um a few examples are like for instance collapsible sections inside the note editor Evernote was missing this feature and we were able to

build it in couple weeks um other examples are like SL commands through which you can like hit slash and select an item to add to a note there are other

examples but basically the point is um while there are projects that are longer and that need to go through like some migrations or stuff like that um in

other cases um it's much more the value that we build is much more related to the ux or or simpler features and so we try to prioritize those because that way

we can uh build stuff more quickly and and did you prioritize this to get an impression of like to to you know get get the team motivated to ship things to show show it to people or or were were

there other reasons because it actually sounds really smart to you know mix the easy and visual things and then do the hard and long thing kind of on the side together sounds like that's what you're

doing right we're doing both um showing showing both externally and internally uh what we're building is easy when you are shipping a product feature it's kind of harder to communicate when you are

changing the way metadata synchronization works for instance although we try to communicate this as much as we can because it's a big change it's a very impactful thing for for customers um in a good way like

performance increase a lot of reliability too so um we do try to synchronization actions now take a fraction of the time they used literally

one10 or 12 12th of the time they used to uh and that's the kind of stuff you you love of a product without without knowing you love it like you you just assume it you know it's fast and so

it's it's fine if it's slow you complain but if it's if it's fast just assume it should be fast so it's quite difficult from a point of view of your relation ship

with users and customers quality marketing to to highlight that stuff um as you're working on it um whereas it's a l a lot easier to empathize with the

or relate to a particular clear feature you're you're you're you're developing so yeah we do try to do both um to to make everybody happy although of course not everybody's

happy but let me also add with respect to what uh what you were saying before that from an engineering perspective what helped a lot shipping fast was also

to completely review the cicd pipeline uh I I think it's worth saying that uh we made huge advancement in that regard

uh it was also a lot of work but before most of the uh releases of the clients and the backends were uh required a lot

of manual steps uh some of the pipelines most of them were on uh self hosted Jenkins uh just to give you a sense uh

and we moved to uh circle sayi with our orbs the orbs that we built in the years that we you know polished a lot we know what to expect what not uh that

definitely help the team also uh ship faster I'd say um on top of that uh switching to uh the next uh exciting

challenges for for the for the platform of OTE technologically speaking I believe we're closer than ever now to

the complete dismissal of the monolith the infamous monolith you know like oh the engineers in the team now they refer to it as

a as an entity from the yes it's a it's a villain something to be uh afraid of really to fear uh we we worked a lot to

piece by piece remove uh all the dependencies that uh didn't allow us to Sunset it uh we're closer than ever now we just uh

completed the rent effort to move everything on the um on the event uh based interactions that I were me mentioning to you

before and as soon as we get to the Finish Line I believe that's going to be one of the most exciting moment for the Evernote engineering team because at that point will be ready to finally

reshape the system entirely to make it much more efficient at the moment uh let's say uh for instance just to

mention a few uh there is in our opinion many more microservices that are actually needed uh you know the what's the tradeoff with microservices you you

need them of course uh but sometimes can get out of hands it can be hundreds uh sometimes uh like the only the boiler plate of shipping a microservices to a

microservice to just handle very tiny portion of the application logic uh can become uh you know uh too much simply uh

we want to consolidate uh the responsibilities and the numbers of microservices out there in the architecture now it's just not the right moment because we first need to get rid

of the huge Legacy uh so everyone is looking for that all the people are you know the engineers are keep thinking about what's going to be the next The

Proposal that you want to do uh for what's going to be the next architecture of the UT system uh we just need to

finally sunet the monolith we're very close to it we committed ourself to uh completely sunet it by the end of the

year uh we're doing our best I think we're pretty close and so far uh everything is on track yeah it's it's it's awesome because I remember when we suned a

monolith back at Uber and it's it's so hard to tell externally I mean I mean assuming you know your um your your product team or or your leadership team has empathy for engineers they'll

understand why it's so important but it is not something you can really tell the users like oh as update we've Sunset the mods because for them literally like a good model sun is nothing changes right

absolutely although we try we try to explain the importance of it but yeah understandably people care more about like uh their their experience although

that influences it greatly I think federo is doing an amazing job on that uh but I think it's also worth mentioning that uh probably the toughest

part is actually to making it understand usually in my opinion uh to the management team to the product team internally rather than to the users

outside so I believe we're uh we're very lucky here to to be able to voice engineering needs and uh you know put them at the center of the road map for

the product and and what are some of the the product uh things that you're looking forward to yeah we recently released um

what I believe from my tests at least is the best uh AI transcription feature available on any uh not taking product

uh it basically allows you to upload a video audio or image file uh and hit the button and like basically one click transcribe it um so you get some a bunch

of text as output um it's pretty fast super accurate like I was honestly surprised myself by by how accurate it is um and one thing that that is coming

soon is that we um are trying to build this into a standalone tool so outside of Evernote uh which is kind of unusual I guess but but uh we are so proud of it

that we want to use it as a as a as a tool to show people um that ever note is Cutting Edge again in a sense um so that's one thing that that we're

doing okay thank you and switching to a different topic although somewhat related so we talked about how you built Evernote how you acquired it how how you how you've Balan architecture and and

and features but within bending spoons how do you typically get projects done and you know like what I'm interested in is how typical is Evernote versus not and maybe we could talk about an example

of of of a project that you got done recently inside the company and do you even have a typical kind of almost like template or run book or like here's for us what a well executed project looks

like well I guess it helps to describe how we're organized uh so we have different business units one you know ever not being one

um and and these business units have uh dedicated management teams and uh and resources um you know such software Engineers uh data analysts uh scientists

product designers so on so for depending on the on the needs specific of that product in business uh and we we encourage them to operate largely

autonomously um and then we have a shared platform including uh several platform teams and and what the platform

does is it supports and serves uh the different business units with um tools services that are relevant

generally speaking to most of them some of this is as basic as you know accounting Finance so on and so forth uh and some of it is as advanced and

technically exciting as uh all sorts of uh uh data storage and processing um tools and layers uh um a machine

learning models to uh forecast a particular user cohort uh behavior and and value um AB testing uh system

um automations for marketing we spend tens of millions of dollars in marketing each year and it's almost entirely run by

machines um so Within These framework the principle we try to follow is to create uh small

teams of exceptional Talent density and give them a very vast mandate in what to do so we we try people to set

intelligent objectives and and try their very best to to achieve them and this really is not limited to engineering it's uh it's a cultural trade at the

company um and so uh it it it works uh at every scale you look at um for example if you look at Evernote as a unit as a business unit the whole team

knows they don't have to follow any mandated Direction they can make their own decisions on their mistakes on their their failures um but also wein Evernote

the the smaller squads um taking care of the various uh missions or objectives also will have a broad mandate on how to to pursue them we will not impose any

particular technological stack on them we will not impose any particular type of process on them there are guidelines there are Lessons Learned and people at the platform level are experts at the

platform level are always available to coach help support ultimately we trust people to to take full responsibility for for their actions awesome and in

terms of engineering approaches uh which ones do you use I mean we mentioned cicd uh and we mentioned that you're aiming to not have on call but for example

what's what's your approach to to releasing uh QA testing these areas I'd say following the lines of what luk already said uh it's important for us to

not be Pres descriptive and the tools and the methods that we want to follow across the different business units or across the different teams um tools are tools they're meant to you know achieve

a certain help to achieve a certain objective processes have the same uh objective let's say some teams are more used to follow certain processes than

other uh we we give the team the freedom to choose whatever they believe is the most effective approach um we give them principles uh we help them shape what is

the responsibility of the team uh and then of course uh we work together to understand what technology tool or process can be the most suitable one to

to work effectively uh generally speaking I'd say uh for uh for QA for instance we we try to to give that responsibility to sh to share that

responsibility among all the different software engineers and also of course QA testers uh but in in bending spoons I'd

say software Engineers really care about the product and the the end result of it so doing white boxing uh QA is something that they take very seriously they

dedicate a lot of time of course it's also about building the right developer experience otherwise it become very cumbersome we know very well uh but uh

on top of that then of course blackbox QA instead is is done by the QA testers uh we make sure that everything that can

be tested by software Engineers before is properly tested and we we found that approach to to give a lot of let's say to make the engineers more responsible

for the end result and in turn in turns more productive and also happy about uh what's upen next because uh it's let's

say it's more rare to uh ship Pags into production if you if you buildt the right developer experience and also um

gave shared responsibility to everyone about testing their code base yeah and and how how big are you on automated testing in terms of like you know unit integration end to endend some some of

these things you mention manual testing which obviously is is important but like or or is it more more per per app per product whatever makes sense for the maturity of the product yeah that that's

that's uh the point I think it it depends a lot of the maturity on the product and also what's the the real estate for instance for that product um

if the core part is about uh the UI or if it's about some critical features uh I'd say we we develop a lot of uh endtoend tests for sure we try to reach

the right level of coverage we try also to be pragmatic meaning uh understanding what are the uh let's say the use case

worth building the right uh set of tests uh and that can be generalized enough to be to be effective more than

uh manual testing for instance or to be sure that those tests can be General enough to capture behaviors and not generate false positive I believe also

in terms of observability and monitoring uh uh in addition to QA something that we have spent a lot of effort is to be

sure to tailor uh metrics or what we test and how in such a way that we're sure that we have the highest coverage but we're also very uh careful to not

trigger false positives we have seen multiple times in the past we improved a lot in time of course uh but uh that has been some of the things that you know uh

we've seen improving a lot the life uh of Engineers uh after not fighting let's say not finding themselves fighting with false positive all the all the day am I

guessing correctly because you mentioned you have about 100 products and you mentioned you have internal teams for for some of these shared things you must have platform teams right yes and then what kind of platform teams do you have

what what do those plat platform engineering teams that is we have a a team we call it foundations technology uh it builds all the tools expertise and

knowledge uh to to make sure that we have the right developer experience that we have uh analytics uh tools uh

monetization user acquisition tools uh and we make sure that uh these utilities uh can be used by the the business units

if they want typically uh these are tools and technologies that requires a lot of investment to be to be done and if you don't have a wide portfolio

product that's usually you don't um you don't find it a good investment or like it's a it's a big investment that you might not uh experience returns in the

right time Horizon in our case we have this luxury let's say that uh when we build a platform tool it can be applied at scale so we uh we we have the let's

say the opportunity to build to make such Investments and to see the results uh at large uh so the the foundations technology team builds tools that allow

us to for instance do proper AB testing to um let's say manage infrastructure um in an efficient way

the that allow us to for instance collect and Define uh metrics uh for the different products uh we

can um we can uh track all the data cord um among the different products with the same let's say formats data pipelines and stuff that has proved to be

extremely extremely useful because when you have the let's say when your data wehous is built in such a way that all the products produce data with the same

kind of semantic and format every tool that you build on top of it is out of the box ready for all the other digital products when you build it for one it's

a two-way street by the way so if a business unit has a need um that's uh incremental to whatever shared Technologies available they can improve

it and uh and so they can pass up let's say toward the platform improvements that they can then be propagated to benefit any other business unit in the future we had s such situations with

whether you know whether it's knowledge or an actual uh Improvement of the software we've had plenty such cases whether it's authentication being made

more resilient against abuse whether it's our payment processing systems uh handling um more extreme loads or Corner

cases in certain particular types so all those sort of things uh becomes a shared benefit across the whole company awesome and speaking of Technologies uh what type of Technologies Frameworks do you

use inside the company or just the most popular ones at least yeah uh so uh I'd say well the most popular backer language that we use is python we use

fast API for instance to to ship apis uh we also use typescript a lot especially because uh we've been investing a lot in

making Engineers uh let's say full stock as much as possible typescript in that regard is particularly useful because they can move from uh clients to back

end easily um we it's on no JS uh we uh we use Swit and cing to build native uh

IOS and Android apps uh typically but we also uh rely on react when it makes

sense we use electron uh what else um I'd say we we actually have a quite wide uh

Tool Set uh these are the most uh useful the most uh widespread among the organization but uh um as I said we're not prescriptive about the tech rather

let's say the technology that one can use so we found ourself uh frequently uh evaluating if uh there is a a different technology that can work better to

achieve a certain goal of course if a certain goal can be achieved uh with different uh tools uh they're equivalent in terms of output we tend to prefer

tools that have uh have been used uh the most already across the organization because that allows everyone you know to contribute to that more effectively uh

uh it help us avoid single point of failures in terms of knowledge uh but uh apart from that case we tend to prefer

um the right technology that help us achieve the highest quality of output for a certain goal can you tell me an interesting technology or like maybe a one-off technology that one of the teams uses because it's great for for their

fit but is not mainstream across the company do you have a like a fun example of that um let's say uh let's see uh we

have our tool our tool for attribution for uh marketing attribution uh we build our own internally usually most of the player outside rely on mobile

measurement Partners you know such as adjust kava or ABS flyer at a certain time uh over uh let's say of

the when it was the right moment we decided to build our own internal Tool uh the as you and as you can imagine uh

that must be able to handle uh huge loads with a very high efficiency uh we we have seen that uh rust was the right

language nice uh it's a peculiar let's a un rust is good for for performance isn't it exactly yeah we loved it uh it was clear that it was uh making

everything better uh much than the the backend language that we used the most which was python but for that aim it was not the right one it was clear from uh let's say an engineering perspective

just looking at the numbers uh so yes we went for rust and at the moment our internal tool for attribution XA we call it uh it's uh still on R and uh it's

working that's awesome yeah be careful the popular might be spreading inside the company oh yeah I mean I would be happy about it personally we talk about it another time one thing that is really

unusual about bending spoons I went to your career page and most career Pages you know you're hiring and a lot of companies are hiring and most career pages I I would see senior engineer hiring staff engineer this or or just

software engineer and I saw Junior Engineers I saw internships posted actually most of a lot of them were typ clearly entry-level Engineers which is

refreshing to see how's this always been the case and what is your philosophy behind this because a lot of companies especially in your position would be um a little bit afraid to hire less experienced Engineers given all the

complexity and all the you know Revenue that you're talking about we always have favored hiring um new

graduates or inexperienced people um and the there are two reasons for it one is when you hire there's a tradeoff between

a few things certainly Talent uh and experience uh and so the more you want to optimize for talent the the less experienced people will be on average

and vice versa experience we can provide a new hire with over time particularly high quality experience being surrounded by great colleagues working on really

challenging projects at a high Pace Talent we cannot teach and so given that we're so long-term oriented and we want to maximize our level of competence our

success with a 5 10 20 year View we favor uh hiring individuals who are more talented even if uh we have to be patient for a couple years or how long

is needed uh for them to ramp p in terms of experience uh that means we need to invest heavily in training coaching but we do that we do that eagerly um given

the great benefits involved um for not just bending SPS but also the the people who we hire uh the second reason is our approach our culture are so unusual and

we we only learn this over time as we interface more and more with the external world that it's proven challenging for highly experienced

individuals to adjust to them um sufficiently quickly so we we do hire experienced people but we now have a a preference for for um inexperienced ones

awesome and when people join Bing spoons what does career go look like do you have a concept of levels or or titles or because again you did mention that you

you you do optimize you have this principle of of Simplicity I'm curious how career fits fits in here from a software engineer's perspective yeah it's it's a it's it's very simple

relative to our understanding of what's standard out there we don't have any titles so if you're hired as a software engineer you are and always will be will be as long as you know that's what you

do a called softare engineer internally and you can uh choose your own title for whatever external reasons you like your CV LinkedIn we only ask that you don't

do something that would embarrass us like calling yourself the CTO if you're a new hire something like that but yeah if you want to use senior staff uh triple senior any any of that is fine by

us internally or just a software engineer uh all managers are simply called leads super simple um we we have

a few levels they're very few uh the difference is pretty substantial and so we don't try to resolve finer Deltas in in a in in your contribution and if you

need very frequent very specific adjustments we're not the company for you if you're happy to look at working at Ben SPS with a multi-year very longterm View and uh and you're looking

for big jumps when you have made big improvements then that's great because we don't have to uh discuss every six months uh whether you have made a 5%

Improvement in your ability to contribute so I'm I'm here you know a lot of things are just quite different to how most companies uh operate and usually I find that a big difference that you know we can we can we could we

could talk a lot more about the differences but what I often find is these differences often come down to the people because you can do certain things with a certain group of people and I'm

wondering what are the what are traits that you're hiring for and what does an engineer a software engineer who is thriving at the company look like how would you describe them because I think

this could help understand a little bit of you know what makes what makes your culture possible yeah that's a good point I think by the way hiring primarily

inexperienced individuals helps uh because they don't come with a baggage of how it's done and they will look at it from a blank slate uh and I think it's also be

helpful for us to not having had and there's there are pros and counts but we haven't had a whole lot of advisers early on because we were a bit at the fringes of the technological Empire as we were building bending spoons

and so we made a ton of mistakes we could have avoided but also I think we did some things that in hand side have been so powerful uh simply because they seem to make sense and we didn't know

any better you know so um you know as usual not pros and cons but uh but yeah what we look for in people I would say it's really simple on the face of it we look for people who are very strong

problem solvers who can learn very quickly uh people who are um have a strong sense of ownership so they really want to own their objectives their work

you don't have to check on them they'll do their very best every single day um in fact we have essentially zero process no micromanaging it's it's a really high

autonomy environment for you know with a with a good and the bad depending on what you like um and and third I would say a trait we really big on is uh team

spirit we have refrained from hiring or retaining brilliant people who had too high an opinion of themselves uh when

that disrupted collaboration we we are a company where we trumps eye all the time again for better or worse um I think if those things are true of someone and

they they really want to they see their role in an expansive or horizontal way they're they're not in in this for just becoming the most expert python

programmer in the world but they want to be a great 360 degree engineer who understands the P impact of what they do who has a an interest in that I think

they that such a person will probably do really well at Ben spoons and and love it aome do I do I understand correctly that like if I paraphrase it you're hiring for things like Drive motivation

and like getting things done are like Talent of of being able to to get things and learn quickly does that kind of yeah I think Drive let's say Pro reasoning problem solving learning ability for

lack of better term and uh coll collaborativeness too I think very important oh collaborativeness yeah a awesome thank you so I'll I'll

close with uh this question why do you think no one else is attempted this really unconventional bold strategy of acquiring companies improving their their efficiency turning into turning it

into a better version and and looking at at the long term do you have any idea that someone try it that you're aware of or not really we're not aware of any company

doing what we do [Music] um well I think it's first of all it's it's pretty difficult we've been working at this for 11 years so you know pretty

hard the platform we built the the the company culture the Technologies the know how it's it's taken just a

ridiculous amount of investment um so it's not like something someone would just set out to do and oh I did it nice you know um even today sometimes I

wonder if I had to redo it from scratch I think even with infinite Capital it would take me maybe not 11 years but maybe six years like it's it's really hard to build a culture an employer

brand and 50 plus Technologies like it it's it takes forever and it's not at all just about the money um so that part

is just a big beer to entry um I think uh it's probably the main reason um other than that I don't know uh but

really the barrier to do it it's it's hard it's a lot of work it takes a long time and it's interesting because what I'm putting together is you know you had a bit of an unconventional start as far as a startup as because you are a tech

company you're a tech startup you you hire the type of people who want to work at Tech startups but most of these companies just contrasting it they raise a lot of venture capital early on they

got the momentum they didn't have to worry about being profitable and they want in fact they probably were were not even profitable much later on so I wonder if you mentioned how difficult it

was to raise in Italy I I wonder if this might have contributed to putting you in this unique position of struggling for a long time and building of this culture

where where you you focus on you know these things that most companies don't need to focus on and you just had this need and then now now that the world is actually turning into a lot more efficient place and and everyone's looking for efficiency you've been

sounds like you've been doing this for quite a while now yeah I guess there's always a lot of uh process and path dependency you know

you can go even back even earlier than that uh but yeah I think our the particular conditions are failed startup

before what we learned there um where we built bending spoons certainly have helped shape this view for sure you could say probably that seven years ago we were the company

everybody's trying to build now in a sense oh interesting so so now you've evolved since then exactly so thank you very much for sharing all these details

with me and and with all the listeners where can folks find you and uh reach out and learn more they can they can send us an email there's an email address uh they can find uh on the

website they if they want to apply there's a jobs page we are available on most uh social media platforms too uh always happy to have a conversation

um so do reach out and if you want to witness the great Evernote reboot uh you can subscribe to our YouTube channel awesome it's also linked in the

show notes below so be sure to check it out well thank you very much thank you very much G thank you pleasure thank you thank you to co-founder and CEO Luca Ferrari CTO Franchesco manone and

product lead federo Simon for sharing all these Insider details with us you can find all of them on LinkedIn on other social media channels as Linked In the show notes below here are my three

biggest takeaways from this conversation takeaway number one even inside a single company you should choose engering processes based on the maturity of the product you're working on the CTO of bending spoons found it completely

normal that each team decides on their approach for example on testing more mature products have more automated tests like unit or integration or UI tests and new products or less mature ones will have less same goes for

releasing an experimentation so more mature products will have more stages of releases and experimentation but products that are just being built will not necessarily invest in this takeway

number two the concept of radical Simplicity now this is something that could be applicable far beyond bending spoons bending spoons believes as a principle that they should seek out the

most radical simple solution and approach when adding complexity the person or team approaching should build proof why this complexity is beneficial those who retain the simpler stateus should not have to defend this unless

there's evidence and data that adding more complexity truly helps with whatever you're trying to do all of this sounds pretty common sense so it could be worth trying it out at your workplace or team takeaway number three you don't

need to copy popular approaches in order to become successful as a product or engineering team bending spoon seem to have come up with how it makes sense for them to operate and didn't copy common approaches from other companies here are

a few examples their most popular language is python it's pretty rare for most companies but not for bending spoon at the same time teams can choose what they use so for example team uses rust and they have plenty of no and

typescript usage another example is how they do not have career ladders like most companies their size would do at least for now they do have some concept of levels but for example they have no

bonuses because they figur it doesn't work as efficiently for them in some ways bending spoons didn't follow any particular approach because they didn't really get too much advice in the early years they struggled to even attract

investors still they figured out on their own what is it that works for them now if a small company in Italy what five developers could do this and they kept figure out what works for them even as they grew what is stopping you and

your team from doing the same figuring out what works for you and not just copying approaches that you see that work for others thanks for listening and watching if you enjoyed the episode I'd

appreciate if you subscribed and love the review Thanks and see you in the next one