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Luca Ferrari

Co-founder & CEO, Bending Spoons (parent company operating WeTransfer), WeTransfer (a Bending Spoons company)

Search every verified Luca Ferrari interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Luca Ferrari, co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, has been active in media appearances discussing the company's acquisition strategy, AI adoption, and financial performance. In October 2026, he commented on Berkshire Hathaway's additional $330 million investment, which brought its stake to 4% and coincided with a 41% rise in Bending Spoons' shares. Ferrari stated that the company buys businesses it believes it can improve, citing Evernote as an example where it rebuilt the codebase, redesigned the UI, and launched more features in four years than in the prior decade. He also said that over the first six quarters after an acquisition, Bending Spoons has on average improved revenue by over 30%. Ferrari has discussed the company's reliance on AI, saying that between 90% and 100% of its software is now written with AI assistance, and that AI is used in hiring, product design, and monetization. He described current SaaS valuations as reasonable, arguing they were irrationally high before AI prompted investors to reassess assumptions. Ferrari also addressed the company's talent approach, noting that Bending Spoons received 800,000 job applications in 2025 but hired fewer than 300 people, and he expressed skepticism about the predictive power of prestigious university credentials for job performance. He has emphasized that Bending Spoons buys companies to hold them permanently, distinguishing its model from private equity, and has stated that the company targets a 65% internal rate of return on acquisitions.

Recent appearances

  • Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari: We'll buy any company as long as we think we can make it better

    Shares of Bending Spoons skyrocketed after Berkshire Hathaway invested an additional $330 million into the company. Luca Ferarri, Bending Spoons co-founder and CEO, joins 'Squawk on the Street' to discuss. Ferarri also discusses the company's acquisition strategy.

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  • Bending Spoons CEO Sees Opportunity in ‘SaaSpocalypse’

    Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari says falling software valuations are creating acquisition opportunities as AI reshapes the industry. He says the company is benefiting twice - from cheaper targets and from using AI to write code, improve products and scale its acquisition model faster. Bending Spoons says AI now writes at least 90% of its code. He speaks to Tom Mackenzie on the latest episode of "Bloomberg Tech: Europe" -------- Like this video? Subscribe to Bloomberg Tech on YouTube:    / @bloombergtech     Watch the latest full episodes of "Bloomberg Tech" with Ed Ludlow here:    • 'Bloomber…

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  • Luca Ferrari: The Operating System Behind Bending Spoons

    Luca Ferrari is co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, a serial acquirer of AOL, Vimeo and Evernote, Airtable, etc, that buys to hold forever, and whose only real edge is that it operates software companies better than almost anyone else. Bending Spoons got 800,000 job applications last year and hired fewer than 300 people. Luca runs hiring the way a quant runs a portfolio — hundreds of signals tested against future performance — and he's blunt about what the data says. Harvard and Stanford barely predict anything. Interviews are the worst signal in the process unless they're scripted. The bes…

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  • This EU Firm Made Billions Buying Up Forgotten Tech

    Today on the Prof G Markets Founder Series, Ed Elson sits down with Luca Ferrari, co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, to discuss the company’s origin story, what sets its acquisition model apart from private equity, and how it decides which companies to buy. They also discuss the role of headcount reduction in Bending Spoons’ strategy, what it’s like to build a company in Europe, and how the company uses AI to transform the businesses it acquires. Vote for Prof G Markets at the Signal Awards for Best Video Podcast https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVo... Vote for Prof G Markets at the Sign…

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  • Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons CEO: The $40K Start, Buying Product-Market Fit & Beating Private Equity

    (0:00) Luca Ferrari joins the Besties! (1:56) Crashing an AI startup, the $40,000 restart & buying product market fit (4:59) The in-house tech stack, shrinking the teams & the 10 out of 10 standard (9:55) Debt as an accelerant, what happens if rates rise & who else is bidding (14:58) Inside the deal desk: what gets acquired, why they don't build & the founder question (20:22) Building a tech giant out of Milan, Europe's talent pool & the outsider advantage Thanks to our partners for making this possible! IREN is a vertically integrated AI Cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute and…

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  • Bending Spoons is Eating Silicon Valley | CEO Luca Ferrari

    Luca Ferrari, Co-Founder & CEO of Bending Spoons, sits down with Molly O’Shea at the company’s Milan headquarters for Part II of our Bending Spoons series, going deeper into the technology, culture and operating philosophy behind the company. Luca takes us inside Bending Spoons’ centralized technology platform, including 50+ proprietary tools, 95% of code being written by AI, its internal Alt Spooner agents, and why he estimates the company is now 2–3X more productive. We also discuss the company’s extreme approach to talent, with 800,000 job applications in 2025 and fewer than 300 hires, alo…

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  • Bending Spoons Founders on Buying Airtable, AOL, Vimeo & Eventbrite

    Bending Spoons buys companies and never sells them. Since listing in July it has spent roughly $2.6B, and the pipeline has never been fuller. Bending Spoons (NASDAQ BSP) is a Milan-based technology company that acquires digital businesses, rebuilds them on its own platform, and holds them permanently. It owns AOL, Airtable, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Evernote, WeTransfer, Brightcove, Tractive, Remini, komoot, Harvest, StreamYard and Meetup, with more than 500 million monthly active users and over 9 million paying customers. It listed on the Nasdaq on July 1, 2026 at $29 a share. Sourcery visite…

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  • Inside Bending Spoons: Finding Talent, Leveraging AI & Driving Operational Excellence | Luca Ferrari

    Luca Ferrari is a co-founder of Bending Spoons, the technology company he built with his partners by rethinking how software businesses should hire, operate and allocate capital. He explains why Bending Spoons aspires to build “the best company there ever was,” why it favors raw talent and drive over experience and how a centralized talent team uses testing and more than 100 signals to identify exceptional people early. Luca describes the company’s culture of extreme ownership and relentless simplification, including why employees are given more work than they can possibly complete, why teams…

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  • BENDING SPOONS acquires Miro for $1.35 billion | Exclusive CNBC interview with Luca Ferrari

    Bending Spoons has signed a $1.35 billion acquisition of Miro, an AI-powered workspace for project development. Following the ...

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  • Before the $18B IPO: How Bending Spoons Is Buying Up Your Favorite Apps From Milan

    How do you describe a company that buys up faded but iconic tech products, runs them on debt instead of venture capital, keeps its core team in Milan instead of Silicon Valley, and now writes 90% of its code with AI? In this conversation, Jason Wenk (Founder, Altruist) talks with Bending Spoons founder Luca Ferrari on how the company buys businesses like Evernote, Meetup, Vimeo, and Eventbrite, rebuilds them from the ground up, and reinvests the cash flow into the next acquisition, never selling a single one. Read the story in Elsewhere by Endeavor: https://endeavor.org/stories/meet-luc...…

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  • Acquisizioni, Debito e Talento estremo | Intervista a Luca Ferrari, CEO di Bending Spoons

    Intervista a Luca Ferrari, CEO e co-founder di Bending Spoons: dalla nascita della startup dalle ceneri di EverTale fino al modello di acquisizione e rilancio di grandi prodotti digitali (come Evernote e Airtable), passando per la gestione della leva finanziaria, l'IPO e la selezione dei talenti. Per ulteriori dettagli e aggiornamenti, puoi seguire il loro canale ufficiale: ‪@BendingSpoons‬. Mr. RIP è in Live su Twitch   / retireinprogress   e su YouTube    / @mr_rip   ogni settimana! 🗓️Potete trovare la programmazione e gli orari delle live sul Canale Telegram: https://mr.rip/t Segui anche…

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  • A chat with Luca Ferrari During Bending Spoons’ IPO 📈

    I was at the Bending Spoons IPO on the Nasdaq, where I also sat down with CEO Luca Ferrari for an honest conversation about what's next for the company. Follow me on Instagram:   / italian.ceo   Chapters 00:00 A Conversation with Luca Ferrari During Bending Spoons' IPO 00:45 IPO Day Recap 03:33 The Next 5 Years 04:24 The 3 KPIs Luca Always Tracks 05:00 Team Quality & Company Culture 06:20 Risks & Opportunities (AI, Growth & Complacency) 07:17 Weaknesses in the Business 08:40 Radical Simplicity 10:50 IQ vs. Obsession 11:30 Learnings, Books & Inspirations 14:50 When Luca Was "Contrarian and Rig…

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I think people would be surprised by how poorly graduating from Harvard or Stanford predicts performance. Like people think, 'Oh, you must be a genius.' No, actually, yeah, you're probably a little bit stronger than, you know, people graduating in other universities, but not so much stronger. And often we find that people tend to lose some of that potential raw talent edge by being a bit more entitled and thinking to”

“We found that the market tended to undervalue the unsexy things and in our view overvalue the new and sexy sometimes to a fault in a major way. And so as we try to be rational operators, you know, you can never prove it. I'd like to think we've been rational capital allocators and operators when we're comparing after having done the qualitative screening and done the math. We were comparing the returns we would get f”

“I would say that the investment part of what we do is absolutely important. Clearly we grow primarily through acquisitions. The part that would distinguish us from any private equity I've seen, I would say there are three very important differences. One is that we are not a fund. We don't buy to sell. We've never sold a material business. So we buy to hold and operate forever. The second perhaps more important differ”

“I think the private equity is completely different because they keep these companies separate for the most part to sell them and so they could never have that technological foundation because once you plug it in in a company what do you do when you sell it to your product competitor? Do you license it to them? So that's remove that they can't have a pooled team of engineers designers because if they put them on the b”

“So, um, that is an accelerant to our growth. We would still grow pretty fast if we only use free cash flows, but definitely being able to use that is a good thing, prudent levels of debt. And I would say I will give you two parts: first the risk with the existing indebtedness. So all of our debt currently, the average cost, the blended cost is about 9% give or take, and it's fully hedged so increases in interest rate”

“We have half a billion monthly active users. I mean, that's a lot. Short of being Google or Meta you know many companies so if half a billion people using these products every month is a graveyard then sure let's call it that. These are often there they may not be like the up-and-coming sexy thing but it doesn't mean they're not incredibly useful important. You could see this at its very peak with AOL where which by ”

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