Bending Spoons has announced a buy... a deal worth $1.3 billion. Evernote, a deal worth $500 million. Airtable for $1.25 billion. AOL for $1.5 billion.
We don't sell the companies we buy. So they know that with us the company has a permanent owner, and they've seen how much we can invest in the product.
Private equity comes in and buys a business. Generally that means that the founder needs to be involved for the next three, four, five years. And with Bending Spoons, we can take care of it from the closing date.
Within our portfolio, we have plenty of products. People that come into Bending Spoons, they don't need to come in because they want to work specifically on Evernote or WeTransfer or AOL. They can actually be exposed to a lot of different products.
AOL was a pretty healthy business when we acquired it, and it's still as of today. It has like millions and millions of users who are still very active and still very engaged.
I'm so excited to see what you acquire next. Airtable broke the internet and a lot of people's brains, so I'm excited to see what happens.
All right, we are here at Bending Spoons in Milan, Italy with CEO Luca Ferrari. We're going to go for a little walk around the office, and then later we're going to speak to the co-founders as well as Valentina, the GM of AOL. So Luca, you want to take it away?
So how many offices do you have now?
For the core team we have Milan, then we have London, Madrid in Spain, and Warsaw in Poland. And then with the acquired companies, you know, many others in the States, in Tokyo, all over the place.
All right. So you have this office here. When did you open this one?
And we're working on opening another one next door, which will be way bigger. So we're looking forward to that. Maybe next year.
How many floors is that one?
Nine, I think. It's way bigger. It's good for 500 to 1,000 people, something like that.
And so are all of the offices set up like this with open desks? Do you guys have a specific office or you...
No, everybody, you know, can pick their desk. They're all up for booking, and everybody's the same in that regard. There are no private offices. We have meeting rooms, of course, but no private offices.
I know we're recording this in reverse order, but I have spoken with everyone already, and one of the main takeaways is the density of talent that you have here, the extreme ownership culture, and I guess the quality overall. So what are the traits that you look for when hiring employees?
Well, it boils down to looking for people who are smart and who care. You know, smart means people who can learn quickly, even if they don't have the knowledge, they'll pick it up rapidly and they'll be able to develop the skills they need to succeed. And then who care means, and that's the extreme ownership trait you just referenced, it means they care tremendously about being amazing at what they do, delivering the greatest possible impact for the team and the company. So that's sort of a fire in the belly to be awesome at work.
I have to ask you, I forgot to ask this in our sit-down, but what is the biggest lesson you've learned from all the acquisitions?
Oh my goodness, that's a pretty huge question. But I'd say I guess we have confirmed, we've confirmed just how incredibly powerful it can be to have a small team of people who are very high caliber and who have almost complete autonomy and leeway in being ambitious and executing. Going from a much larger company where people don't feel as much sense of ownership, they're not as accountable, there's more process, more bureaucracy, to that small team, magic happens almost every single time. So we, you know, we've now come to believe in that formula fully. And it's really a trademark of how we operate.
And what's the key to negotiation to acquire a company?
I've never seen a transaction where the highest price didn't win.
Yeah. Basically, I mean, I think in our case what we bring to the table that's very convincing, and typically we have offered the highest price. And the reason why we've been able to do that is we as an operator are so effective through the integration by bringing our platform, our technologies, our people at generating value from businesses that we're typically capable of offering a better price than everybody else while delivering high returns for our shareholders. So that's certainly, you know, number one. But as a close second, I think something that especially founders have appreciated, not so much institutional investors but founders, is that we don't sell the companies we buy. So they know that with us the company has a permanent owner, and they've seen how much we can invest in the product and make the product better. And many founders feel a sense of attachment, even legacy, connected with the products they helped develop. And so knowing that they're selling their business, including the products, to someone who's passionate about developing digital products, has an engineering mindset, pays attention to detail, and takes pride in the craft when it comes to user experience, you know, that makes the decision of selling easier. So those are the two main things I believe.
So you recently had a big milestone. Bending Spoons went public. I heard that you did something a little unconventional. You actually weren't the one ringing the bell. You were down in Times Square, and you gave a fairly unusual speech as well. So what happened there?
Um, yeah, so we thought that generally, I think founders and executives more broadly, you know, tend to enjoy the spotlight more than they deserve. I think the world likes simple stories, and so they tend to have one or two faces at most they associate with, in this case, a company. But generally those people, yes, maybe they play an outsized role in the company's success, but many others have, you know, extremely important roles to play, sometimes even more important roles to play. And so we figured that it would be a nice gesture if I didn't take up one spot, you know, at NASDAQ on the stage, so to say, but rather enjoyed the moment with the hundreds of colleagues from the street. You know, pretty privileged in the amount of exposure I get, and so that was a very small gesture, really just a symbolic thing. And yes, the person ringing the bell is Laura, one of our colleagues from finance, one of the people who put in the greatest amount of effort toward achieving the IPO. And so we thought she deserved to be there and being, you know, the one pressing the red button.
That's an amazing story. Well, Luca, thank you so much. We're about to have a couple of interviews coming out next with the two other co-founders and Valentina, like I mentioned earlier, and then later this week as a part two we have a full sit-down with Luca that's pretty good. So watch out for that. Thank you so much.
Francesco, thank you so much for joining us. We're on a wild run here at Bending Spoons.
Thank you. Thank you for having a talk with me.
Of course. So you're head of M&A. You're also a co-founder. You've been here for 13 years from the very beginning. I have to ask you, what is the one that got away?
Well, the one that we remember the most is probably when we tried to acquire Grindr in 2019. That was a long process, actually. I still remember the day we started discussing about that. It was actually only me and Luca here at the office, or actually it was the older office, because most of the team was on the retreat, and I had a young kid, so I decided to stay home. And so it was just basically me and Luca in the office. And he heard about the Grindr sale from a friend. And the moment he heard about it, he thought, 'Hey, this must be a great opportunity because we've been looking at that space in the past. We've been looking at the dating space in the past, and we've been looking at Grindr, and we saw that despite being a product with very high retention, it was a really bad product. It was just like everyone was complaining about the app crashing all the time and this problem and that problem.' So we thought it would have been a great opportunity, and so we started really getting into that. But everyone we talked to thought we were crazy because it would have been a massive acquisition for us at the time. The equivalent would be today doing a $20 billion acquisition.
Yeah, that would have been very transformational. And also at that time we had very limited experience with raising that amount of money on the debt, that amount of money also on the equity side. So we had basically to learn everything from scratch, and it was a very long process. We started looking at that in spring 2019, and then the whole thing blew up at the beginning of 2020, after we actually managed to put together a fully financed acquisition offer. But by then it was too late because it was someone else that came in with a slightly better proposal. And so once we thought, okay, we got to get this, because until like a few months before, basically we were the only one looking at that, then no, we're not going to get that anymore because they went into exclusivity to someone else, and that's it. It just blew up. And yeah, you know, at the beginning it felt really annoying, bad, and sad because I mean you just work so much. I mean basically half of the company was fully focused on that due diligence for almost a year, right? And so that felt like, okay, we're going to get this. This is like so important. But eventually, in hindsight, probably I'm happier that we didn't acquire it because given the fact it would have been so big for Bending Spoons, then Bending Spoons would have been Grindr because we would have probably fully focused on that and we would not have developed Bending Spoons into what Bending Spoons is today. And also on top of that, while being a failure because we didn't acquire it, I think we had so much compressed learning into those nine months because I mean basically we raised half a billion dollars without actually raising it, but it was fully committed, and so that was very valuable for what then came, the need in terms of like raising debt, raising equity, and talking with investors, talking with banks. So it eventually was very valuable.
How has financing the acquisitions changed over time, and how will that change now that you're public?
Well, so historically we have relied primarily on debt, and we started, I think our first loan was at the end of 2017, so very early in Bending Spoons' history, and it was, I think we raised like one, two million dollars. And that evolution of the debt financing for Bending Spoons was gradual because, you know, it was developing relationships with banks and lending slightly more every time and paying back the debt because it was fully amortized and showing the banks that we deliver on the promises, and then raising a little bit more and then paying back and showing again, and so there was a gradual path. The big unlock was moving from just simple bank loans to term loan agreements with US lenders, and that happened at the beginning of 2025. And that had to go through, you know, rating agencies giving you a rating, and that's something new, as well as talking with different lenders that never actually worked with you. And so you didn't have, you know, that relationship of delivering against your promises, paying back, raising more, that, you know, allow you to build a very strong track record and so allow you to raise faster and better terms. So we kind of had to start almost from the beginning with lenders at that time. And equity was slightly different because we basically never raised primary equity all the way to 2023. That was our very first big institutional round. We raised a little bit, it was more secondary rounds with smaller investors primarily from Italy in previous years. But 2023 was the first big round with Bain Capital coming in, Cox Enterprises, and Durable. And so that was again something new, starting from scratch, having to educate investors about what we do. And our story, almost by construction, is a counterintuitive story. You need to learn and study Bending Spoons a little bit before really understanding the way it works. And so also for equity investors, it was a little bit of kind of showing them and teaching them before fully making them understand the way it worked. And so that was, I think that was an important moment. And then becoming public, it was a kind of continuation of that, also because many of the investors, the big institutional investors that are part of Bending Spoons' cap table today, either were already part of that as previous institutional rounds or were investors that we talked to many times in the past, and we showed them, okay, we think we're going to do this, then we showed them after six months we have done that better, and then we showed them again our plan for the following six, twelve months. And so they had already learned about Bending Spoons, so it wasn't something new for them, and so it wasn't, you know, starting from scratch. It felt like a natural continuation of where we were before as a private company.
On the acquisition side, you have a thousand potential targets, and you're doing five to ten a year. How do you think about the categories that you want and the ones you will not touch?
We've always been very agnostic to the vertical and the category. We try to do things in different worlds and constantly expand the capabilities of the things that we can do. With obviously there was a gradual process at the very beginning when we started Bending Spoons, we were much more, I would say, we had a lot more knowledge on how to manage, let's say, a mobile B2C product, and then with time that expanded into broader B2B, B2C ecosystem, and then into the B2B world, but first self-serve and then more recently enterprise. With Tractive we have done our first acquisition of a hardware-enabled digital business. So this to say that we don't want to focus in one specific vertical. We want to keep our scope relatively broad. Within this broad scope, the focus is to look for businesses that have a lot of potential to be unlocked. So we want to see our platform be able to unlock a lot of value if applied to that business. That can mean different things. Sometimes it's the ability to attract talent, sometimes it's the ability to process data and get insights, sometimes it's our ability to attract new users. Every time we look at a business and we think, how is our platform going to unlock value if applied to that business? The second thing is we want to see a big revenue scale. Every transformation almost has a fixed cost that is independent of the revenue size. And so we want to do few acquisitions every year of bigger and bigger size because we don't want to, you know, invest a team of 50 Spooners into transforming a $20 million revenue business because now that wouldn't move the needle. And so the size continuously grows with Bending Spoons' growth. And then the last thing is we want predictability. That doesn't necessarily mean a specific growth rate. We have seen predictability in businesses that were growing 20% year-over-year, as well as businesses that were flat, as well as businesses that were shrinking 5% year-over-year. We will judge predictability based on the data that we have about the company, based on the data that we have about other businesses that we own. We have a very data-driven process. But then once we see predictability, we value that a lot. We build a model around that to predict how the business will evolve with Bending Spoons' platform behind its back.
And why are you an attractive acquirer for the seller?
We are a very peculiar company, and we offer something that many acquirers are not able to. First of all, if you are a founder and you decided to sell your company, often it means that you want to do something else. So you want to start a new project, spend more time with your family. And you know, if a private equity comes in and buys a business, generally that means that the founder needs to be involved for the next three, four, five years. And with Bending Spoons we can take care of it from the closing date, and that's very valued by the founders because they know that once they sell, then they can move on to the next project. And the second thing is they know that their product legacy will be preserved with Bending Spoons because of our ability to, you know, reignite innovation, put all the Spooners behind the development of the product, the technology. And we started receiving more and more feedback from founders about this specifically, and coming to us almost proactively saying, okay, look, now I'd like to entertain a discussion with you, and I'm doing it only with you because I know that you can take care of this aspect that otherwise I wouldn't know how it would be handled by a private equity. And also we are fast, we're very straightforward. I think we start building a reputation of being very transparent. So you know what we get, we're just very open and transparent about the whole process.
What was the best question someone asked you during the roadshow?
I wouldn't, I don't know if it's not specifically a question, but it's a topic. I think most of the people have been focusing on the standard, you know, what's your organic growth, what's your retention, how you do this and how you do that. And very, very few fully understood the fact that the really secret sauce of Bending Spoons is the talent, and really dug into that. And I remember this specific investor that almost spent like an hour and a half only focusing on that, and really asked thoughtful questions about our hiring process, how we retain talent, what the culture is, how we develop that culture, why is it different. And it wasn't a specific question, but it was like a topic that made me understand, and he understood really, really well why Bending Spoons works the way it works. And so I would say probably it was the only time that happened, and so that made me think very highly of that specific investor because they probably understood well how we worked.
We were talking about talent a lot with Luca, with Valentina, with Matt. It's ever-present. We talked about it at lunch, and one of the peculiar things that I came across was that you've been running tenders. You're public now, but you'd been running tenders for many years, every year for your Spooners. So why did you make that decision? And also, why did they get vested on day one?
Dropping the vesting, it was something that we introduced more recently. I'll get to that in a second. The reason why we started offering, let's say, secondary transactions for team members to sell some of their shares if they wanted to was to really show the value of their ownership of Bending Spoons. Also showing that they were not locked into that until a specific event in the far future that they didn't know when and how it would have unlocked. And so that really allowed them to fully understand the power of being part of Bending Spoons as a shareholder, and then make better decisions when it comes to how to convert their compensation into equity versus cash. And that links well into how we actually do compensation. That is, you get specific yearly compensation, fixed non-variable components, and then you decide how much to convert into equity and how much to convert into cash. And also that specific decision is very linked to the fact that we want to show you that your equity component has a specific value at that point in time. You actually can decide to get it all in cash if you wanted to. So you know that at that point in time it's precisely that the value that you're unlocking. So that plus the fact that you can then, let's say, within a year, a year and a half, convert that back into cash and showing the appreciation of that, because every year, year and a half, when the new round was coming, then you could see that your ownership increased in value. That allowed to, you know, create the sense of ownership almost as a public company while being private. And I think that was very important and allowed us to then become a public company without that big of a step change that maybe private companies feel, because everyone is super invested and everyone feels, oh, now I'm going to be able to then sell my shares. That was already like possible before, so there wasn't that big of a change. Same thing with not creating a vesting structure that created like some weird kind of incentives, similar to not creating variable components. We want everything to be simple and straightforward. I mean, you created a value within a certain year and you're going to be rewarded for that. And then if you leave the day after, I mean, you're still being rewarded because of the work you've done before. So that's the reason for dropping the vesting. And that had no impact on retention. We still have like less than 1% churn on a yearly basis. And I think that speaks highly of how people perceive ownership of Bending Spoons.
I remember I said this would create an absolute bloodbath in San Francisco.
Yeah. I mean, of course we are also in a different context. I mean, being in Italy or in Europe more broadly is different than being in San Francisco, as well as probably San Francisco is different than being in New York versus Miami. Leaving San Francisco is a very specific context. But yeah, I think the reason why we have this churn despite the fact that we have no vesting is also the very strong culture we developed, the fact that we hire young talent that then develops within Bending Spoons. And so there is less of a, you know, if I hire only people that have already 15 years of experience, they don't have that like feeling of being part of this family, this culture, this company, and it's going to be a lot easier for them to, you know, flip to the next company afterwards. With Bending Spoons it's different.
So as we close out, what are you most looking forward to in the next six, twelve months?
Well, the previous six months were kind of out of the ordinary given the fact that we had the listing process that was unique, that happens only once. So I was a lot more detached from the daily operations. We have a ton of things we're working on on the M&A front, and our pipeline has never been so rich right now. So we have a lot of prioritization to make. So yeah, I really look forward to finding the best opportunities to focus our firepower on. And I think that's going to be very important because when you have a lot of things to choose, then picking the best is quite important.
Well, I'm so excited to see what you acquire next. Airtable broke the internet and a lot of people's brains. So I'm excited to see what happens. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Thank you, Molly.
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Matt, thank you for joining us. We are on a wild tour of Bending Spoons, and now we're with you, your VP of product. You're a co-founder. You've been with the company since the very beginning, 13 years. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you for being here.
Well, one very particularly interesting part of your story, and what we were talking about before the camera started rolling, was how much the culture thrives on meritocracy. And one of the best examples, I think, is, you know, your story of stepping down as CPO so someone else could take it. So what happened?
So some months ago, I was chief product officer at Bending Spoons at that time, and it became evident that one of our product managers, who had an incredible career and joined some years before, had matured into a professional that was definitely able to create more value in the position I was in than I was. And when I had that realization, I decided to go through the painful step of stepping down so that he could fill that role. And I'm actually proud of what he's doing in that role. I think it was a very good decision. But you know, beside the personal experience, I think that this example ties to, as you were saying, the concept of meritocracy and how much we care about meritocracy here. We try to operate when possible by first principles. And you know, I think that I'm not going to say anything controversial if I say that if you look at an organization and you hope to achieve the highest possible level of effectiveness of that organization given a certain set of people that are part of it, you need to make sure that every position will be filled by the person that's the best fit in that position. You know, everybody will agree with me when it comes to this statement. But then you need to take the principle and derive what it implies. And what it implies is that especially at a company like ours where we are constantly raising the bar of the quality and the talent of the people that we attract and we hire, you know, we become a better-known company. We acquire better-known products. So our employer brand grows, so we attract better people. And at the same time, you know, we care a lot about the selection process and making sure that we feed whatever signal from the success that people are having in the company back into the way we test people. So the natural consequence of that is that through time you'll have better and better hires, and it's going to be more and more likely that people will grow in the organization to the point that they're actually more capable than their leads. And at that point, you'll get into the situations where it becomes apparent that a lead would be better stepping down so that somebody else who would be better in that role could take on that role. Now, sounds linear, sounds rational, but if you want to make that happen as a manager, you need to have some of the toughest professional conversations that you'll ever be exposed to because going to a lead, to a professional, and telling them, look, some of the people in the organization grew so much and showed such an impressive trajectory that we believe that it's best for you to step down. That's one of the toughest things you can tell someone. But again, it's a necessary ingredient of this idea of meritocracy if you want to take it to the extreme consequences and live by it. Right? In my role previously, it happened a few times that I had to deal with this type of situations. It's always been extremely tough, but what they have in common is that I was always very proud and sure that that was absolutely the best thing to do. I believe that it's one of the highest ROI things that you could do in terms of optimizing an organization. One of the toughest, but also one of the highest ROI. And that's both because you get someone filling a high-leverage role that's more effective at that role, but it's not just the immediate result. It's also the positive externalities. You're basically communicating to everyone in the company that every position is up for grabs. That there's no position that if they work hard enough and if they're talented enough, they won't be able to fill. And this is a very powerful message. You know, one quick off topic is that something I'm very proud of is that if you take a look at some of our business units, some of our products, some of our functions, you'll find that some of the people filling those very high-leverage positions are not even 30, or maybe they've just turned 30. So especially in Italy where you have a culture whereby people that have been in a job for a long time, they will be entrenched in those positions. But I would say even just worldwide, knowing that, you know, a person who is in their early 30s are managing companies and products worth billions of dollars. That's really insane. And again, that's made possible by the openness of giving everyone a chance. And so this is something that happened before with other leads that I personally asked to step down. And at some point it happened with me as well. I realized that Lorenzo, this guy that we promoted, had what it took. And I'm proud of, you know, walking the talk. And I'm even more proud because even though we made it a point since the very early days never to look at the founder figure as something different from anybody else. We don't want to idolize it in any possible way. There might be anyway an expectation that no matter how meritocratic you are, there might be limits to that meritocracy. For example, if that meritocracy conflicts with a founder, you know, you'll stop applying it. And I think that one of the reasons why I'm proud of what I did was because since I'm a founder, that signal, that positive externality is even more powerful. And again, it's an even stronger message for everyone that any job is up for grabs, even the CEO job.
Luca also likes to live by this quite well, and every December he puts out a Google form.
Yeah. Yeah. He puts out a form where he asks people he trusts whether they believe that somebody else could take his role, that, you know, would be better positioned to lead the company. Whether, you know, anyone is dissatisfied with his performance. And, you know, it might look like some sort of performative act from outside, like, you know, nobody will really tell you that you're doing a poor job. But he actually means it. Yeah. And I think even more, even if it didn't, even if the feedback or the signal didn't come through that Google form and that process, if he realized or if anyone realized that somebody at the company could do a better job than he could in that role, he would be the first one to say there needs to be a change here. I'm absolutely sure of it. Which is why I'm saying that again, anyone, if they work intensely enough, if they're talented enough, could aspire even to that position.
Well, I definitely believe that because when we did our long-form sit-down with Luca, you know, he said a lot of the mission of the company is to become an ultimate truth seeker. And so I could definitely see him wanting all those data points around his performance and execution and how to make the organization better.
Yeah. The ultimate act of truth-seeking, right?
Yeah. And then it's really interesting to your point earlier of even if they're young, if you have younger folks, you know, 20s, 30s, doesn't matter, if they're skilled, they will excel to the top. We're having Valentina on. And I would say she's quite humble, but she's so impressive leading 90 products and is the GM of AOL. Like it's incre- it's so cool to see that kind of rise in a sense so fast within five years.
