Bending Spoons scaled from a $10,000 first acquisition to deals costing up to $500m, using unchanged criteria.
Luca Ferrari says acquired businesses improve through accumulated insights, not because prior management was incompetent.
Matteo Danieli says focusing on the company, not one product, enables long-term investment over a quick exit.
Bending Spoons buys digital businesses, rebuilds them and never sells
Bending Spoons has built a repeatable machine for buying digital businesses, rebuilding them and keeping them for the long term. The edge Ferrari claims is technology, employer brand and a culture that gives young hires real responsibility. Scale now brings limits, since a 10x return is unrealistic and AI could make software easier for anyone to build.
Takeaways
Buy, improve and hold digital businesses. Targets must be big relative to the company, predictable and improvable, and those criteria have not changed. The first deal cost about $10,000, the largest now $500m, and at least $1.5bn is planned for 2025 acquisitions.
Culture and hiring drive the edge. Ferrari credits technology, employer brand and culture, and the company has over 50 proprietary technologies. It expects more than 600,000 applications in 2025 for about 200 hires, almost all new graduates given real responsibility. Pay is top of market.
Improvement comes from insight, not weak management. Ferrari says acquired teams are rarely incompetent. Gains come from accumulated insights and running many businesses. Staff cuts after deals do not mean less product investment, and he cites Evernote's improvements as evidence.
Permanent ownership allows long-term product investment. Danieli says focusing on the company, not one product, allows long-term investment over a quick exit. Ferrari says it has never sold an acquired business. WeTransfer has over 70m monthly users and Evernote about 140m in revenue.
A failed first startup shaped the company. Ferrari and Danieli met in Copenhagen and have worked together almost twenty years. Their first venture, Evertale, failed after more than three years of near-constant work, which Ferrari calls liberating. They then moved to Milan after studying 20 or 30 locations.
Debt and AI are the main risks. Ferrari says the company carries well over one billion dollars of debt and uses Monte Carlo simulations to assess risk. Danieli worries that AI lowering barriers to building software could erode dominance. Ferrari says a 10x return is unrealistic at current scale.
The post-acquisition playbook
A task force of experienced people spends weeks or months learning the business before changing anything.
The team rewrites large parts of the code, rearchitects cloud infrastructure and redesigns the product.
People move to roles where they can have the biggest impact, which Ferrari says about 90 percent of employees welcome.
Revenue typically improves and cost falls, with known templates balanced against exploration of new territory.
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