Note di Matteo

Non bastava l'assurdo meccanismo degli acconti per società e partite IVA, ora arriva anche la "ritenuta B2B". Se fatturo a un cliente aziendale, il cliente dovrà fare da sostituto d'imposta e versare l'1% al fisco anziché a me fornitore, come sorta di "caparra" che poi può eventualmente essere recuperata. L'obiettivo per lo Stato sarebbe incassare anche anche nel caso in cui il fornitore fallisca (partite IVA "apri e chiudi", ecc.), ma l'effetto burocratico è folle. Dal 2028 0,5% e dal 2029 1%, speriamo cambi qualcosa prima. E per fortuna che era il governo della flat tax e delle imprese. Finora solo patch e complicazioni aggiuntive senza una mezza proposta sui problemi di fondo.

Building WhatsApp with Jean Lee. I primi anni di WhatsApp sono ancora un esempio unico di scalabilità con un team minuscolo: 450 milioni di utenti con meno di 30 ingegneri. Workflow estremamente lean senza code review. Erlang per il backend e 7 piattaforme native, con un focus sulla stabilità e poche nuove feature. I costi (1/3 server, 1/3 salari, 1/3 SMS) erano interamente sostenuti dall'abbonamento di 1$ all'anno, richiesto solo in alcuni paesi per rallentare la crescita, e l'investimento di 8 milioni di dollari di Sequoia non è mai stato utilizzato. Finché Facebook non ha acquisito l'azienda per 19 miliardi di dollari, e tutto il team è diventato improvvisamente ricco.

Ecco la proposta ufficiale della Commissione Europea per un 28esimo regime per la costituzione di società a responsabilità limitata:

Main features of EU inc. include:

• Faster registration: Entrepreneurs, founders, and companies will be able to found an EU Inc. company within 48 hours, for less than €100 and with no minimum share capital requirements.
• Simpler procedures: EU Inc. companies will only need to submit their company information once, via an EU-level interface connecting national business registers together. In a second step, the Commission will establish a new central EU register. EU Inc. companies will obtain their tax identification and VAT numbers without having to resubmit paperwork.  
• Fully digital operations: Corporate processes will be digital by default throughout a company's lifecycle.
• Helping founders restart faster and cheaper: EU Inc. companies will have access to fully digital liquidation procedures. Innovative startups will have access to simplified insolvency procedures to facilitate the winding down of operations. This enables founders to try and test innovative ideas and start again if needed.
• Better conditions to attract investment: Today's proposal will remove in-person formalities, provide digital procedures for financing operations, and simplify the transfer of shares. There will be no more mandatory involvement of intermediaries for share transfers, and liquidation procedures.The proposal will also allow Member States to give EU Inc. companies access to the stock exchange.
• Better means to attract talents: EU Inc. companies will be able to set up EU-wide employee stock option plans. The stock option will only be taxed on the income generated once it is sold. This is a crucial factor in ensuring attractiveness, particularly for innovative startups.
• Full access to the Single Market: EU Inc. companies will be free to choose the Member State in which they incorporate. The proposal includes a blacklist of prohibited practices to ensure that EU Inc. companies are treated the same way as any other national companies.
• Strong safeguards against abuse: National employment and social laws are not affected by the proposal. They will apply to EU Inc. the same way they apply to any other business under national company law. The applicable safeguards of the Member State of registration will apply in full to the EU Inc. company, including when it comes to rules regarding co-determination.  
• Flexibility of shares: EU Inc. companies will have the flexibility to create different classes of shares with varying economic or voting rights. This can, for example, help founders protect their business against hostile takeovers.

As a CEO, you're basically the waste bin. Everything that other people don't manage or can't do or mess up, you have to fix. And it's also quite lonely because you can't openly talk about a lot of things. I structured the company to be quite open, but still you can't be negative, even if really bad stuff happens.

Burnout doesn't necessarily come from working too much. It comes more - at least for me - from when you work on something but you don't believe it anymore or you have too many conflicts. We also did fight a lot in the team, with the management team, and I made this mistake of thinking you have to lead a company more democratically.

Peter Steinberger, fondatore di PSPDF/Nutrient e di OpenClawd in un'intervista a The Pragmatic Engineer.

Jet HR ha pubblicato un articolo con qualche dettaglio e qualche numero sui processi di selezione di 10 aziende italiane, tra cui Bending Spoons, Il Sole 24 Ore, Satispay, Il Post, Octopus Energy, Will Media/Chora e Serenis. Intessante che il canale principale di primo contatto sia sempre LinkedIn, che «pesa per il ~ 90% delle candidature per tutte le aziende intervistate».

We live in an age where capital and data can cross Europe in a second. And business must be able to move just as freely. But as things stand, too many companies have to look abroad to grow and scale up – partly because they face a new set of rules every time they expand into a new Member State. So while on paper the market of 450 million Europeans is open to them, it is far more complicated in reality. And that acts as a handbrake on the growth and profit potential of companies. This is why we need a new approach. We will soon put forward our 28th regime. The ultimate aim is to create a new truly European company structure. We call it EU Inc., with a single and simple set of rules that will apply seamlessly all over our Union. So that business can operate across Member States much more easily. Our entrepreneurs, the innovative companies, will be able to register a company in any Member State within 48 hours – fully online. They will enjoy the same capital regime all across the EU. Ultimately, we need a system where companies can do business and raise financing seamlessly across Europe – just as easily as in uniform markets like the US or China. If we get this right – and if we move fast enough – this will not only help EU companies grow. But it will attract investment from across the world.

Ursula von der Leyen nel discorso al World Economic Forum.

DatoCMS è un CMS headless in cloud e ha festeggiato i primi 10 anni. L'azienda è italiana! (Dato srl - 06969620480 - Via Uberto Visconti di Modrone 2 - Milano). Bootstrapped, e se ne vantano:

We're not bragging (okay, we're bragging a little) but it turns out that not burning through VC cash on ping-pong tables and "growth at all costs" actually works.

I risultati:

• 6,5 milioni di euro di fatturato con crescita annuale del 10%;
• margine EBIT del 65%;
• 13 dipendenti.

Qualche dettaglio tecnico di scala:

This year, DatoCMS handled an average of 3.5B API calls/month (+80%), while serving 500TB of traffic/month and 4.5M optimized video views/month. At the same time, we executed the most ambitious engineering project in our history: a complete migration from Heroku to a custom Kubernetes cluster on AWS.

The Bottom Line: We lowered overall infrastructure costs by over 25%, reduced Content Delivery API latency by 50%, expanded Realtime API capacity by 10×, and gained full control across every infrastructure layer. And we kept our sanity. Mostly.

Hanno internalizzato il commercialista, apparentemente:

While liberating ourselves from managed hosting, we made another quiet move: we fully internalized our accounting. For years, we outsourced this to external firms — the typical setup where you hand over receipts and hope for the best. But as we grew, flying blind between quarterly reports became untenable. Now we run everything in-house with full visibility into our finances at any moment.

Sui 13 dipendenti, da un post di tre anni fa quando i dipendenti erano 8:

Marketing. In the last 8 years, we have spent literally zero energy on marketing. Believe it or not, we still mainly function through word of mouth. Are we leaving huge amounts of money on the table? Absolutely. But it allows us to be few.

Sales. We have built a company designed for small businesses and self-service purchasing, with our focus on usability and documentation. Our sales team consists of 2-3 people. This means far less enterprise clients than we could have. But it allows us to be few.

Insourcing. We delegate everything that's non-core outside of our company. Billing system, servers, CDNs, database management, you name it. We pick best-of-breed external services, and we pay them what they deserve, without reinventing the wheel. Again, we're probably loosing some money, but it allows us to be few, and only focused on what really matters.

Utile sempre ricordare gli unici tre esiti possibili per una startup VC-funded:

1. andare molto bene e quotarsi in borsa;
2. essere acquisiti da un'azienda più grande che raramente prosegue la visione originale;
3. fallire e chiudere perché non si è raggiunta una profitability tale da poter ripagare l'investimento (che magari era esagerato).

Viva le aziende bootstrapped.

Confermato che Bending Spoons compra AOL:

Bending Spoons said its approach for AOL and other investments is to revamp and retain businesses. AOL has around eight million daily active users and a high customer retention rate, it said. Its main business lines include software for internet privacy and protection and the AOL.com website and email domain.

AOL generates around $400 million in annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, the Journal previously reported. Revenue is north

Me l'ero perso: Bending Spoons vuole acquisire anche Typeform ed Elysium (che non so cosa sia):

The Milan-based company has submitted a $255 million offer for Typeform, an app designed to streamline customer data management, the newspaper reported, without disclosing how it got the information. It’s also in talks to buy Elysium for $240 million.

In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. [...] Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one.

Tom Watson, fondatore di IBM.

Qualcomm compra Arduino, il team resta in Italia ma il cofondatore Massimo Banzi lascerà l'azienda:

Una volta andata in porto, la exit sarà per gli investitori e per i cofondatori. Anche Massimo Banzi lascerà Arduino. «Avrò un ruolo di accompagnamento in questa transizione, poi, dopo 20 anni, è giusto che l’azienda cresca per la sua strada» conclude.

Su Rai Play c'è un documentario recente sulla storia di Arduino dal punto di vista di Banzi, include le controversie sul "marchio rubato" e le varie scissioni.

Bending Spoons sta per comprare anche AOL per 1,4 miliardi di dollari, pazzesco! Lo stesso importo con cui ha comprato Vimeo poche settimane fa. Secondo Reuters nel portfolio AOL ci sono anche prodotti come LastPass, ma non ne trovo riscontro cercando online.

The deal would add AOL's vast user base to Bending Spoons' portfolio of mobile applications. AOL generates revenue from advertising and through its subscription services, including LifeLock identity theft protection, LastPass password management, and McAfee Multi Access malware protection.

In generale AOL non è sicuramente nota per prodotti digitali rilevanti, almeno in Europa, infatti Reuters la chiama "legacy media brand".

Some of the biggest businesses we’ve built might not be as relevant going forward. Our industry is full of case studies of companies that were great once, that just disappeared.

Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft.

Meglio costruire in cinque anni con meno equity, piuttosto che impiegare vent’anni mantenendo il pieno controllo: “Il tempo risparmiato vale inestimabilmente di più”, dice Ogliengo. Per lui la motivazione principale non è economica, ma intrinseca: “Voglio sentirmi intelligente, vedere che ce l’ho fatta davanti a una sfida difficile”.

Marco Ogliengo, fondatore di Jet HR, nel podcast Actually.

Una intuizione preveggente e brillante oggi è più facile che venga sviluppata dentro Google, Meta o al New York Times piuttosto che in un garage o in un blog. E questo scenario sta entrando nelle consapevolezze delle generazioni più giovani, che a differenza di quelle che le hanno precedute non si trovano davanti mondi da inventare e opportunità inedite da sfruttare ma una situazione simile a quella di quarant'anni fa: in cui ambizioni e creatività possono svilupparsi quasi soltanto al servizio di progetti e strutture esistenti e forti. Sono progetti e strutture diversi, ma hanno ricostruito una condizione di forza che per un periodo era stata terremotata, e sulle cui macerie erano cresciute non solo imprese impensate, grandi e piccole, ma una sensazione di poter sperimentare, costruire, inventare, con grandi libertà e autonomie.

L'inclinazione a inventarsi cose proprie e inesistenti si è attenuata, per saturazione e perché molte acque si sono richiuse. Niente di drammatico: il mondo era così anche prima, e anzi, c'è da rallegrarsi di avere attraversato una ricreazione tanto straordinaria e fertile. E poi magari succederà di nuovo, di nuovo imprevisto.

Luca Sofri nella newsletter Charlie del 28 settembre 2025.