Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari says going public brings cheaper capital for its capital-intensive business, but also publication burdens, share-price pressure and constant scrutiny he does not enjoy.
Ferrari says Bending Spoons chose Nasdaq because the New York Stock Exchange was the only real alternative, arguing that Europe benefits when companies hire and build skills locally, not where shares trade.
Ferrari says Bending Spoons buys under-managed digital businesses such as Evernote and AOL at fair prices, rebuilds their technology, and never sells them, unlike private equity funds.
Bending Spoons buys old tech brands and never sells them
Bending Spoons bets that old internet businesses are under-managed rather than finished. It buys them at fair prices, rebuilds the technology and the teams, and keeps them for good. A shared internal engine moves talent between products, and a hiring base in Italy plus public capital feed the model.
Takeaways
It buys old digital businesses and keeps them. The strategy is to become world class at running digital businesses, buy under-managed ones at fair prices and compound capital through acquisitions. It never sells. Integration makes resale hard, and selling a business with its team would break trust.
Evernote shows the turnaround model. Evernote had about 350 people when bought, roughly 60 a year later and now 20 to 25. Cloud infrastructure was rearchitected and monetization rebuilt. Ferrari says revenue and profit are much higher and other metrics match or beat earlier levels.
The internal engine is the real product. A shared technological foundation lets staff move between businesses such as Airtable or AOL quickly, and Ferrari says 100 great people can be put on a new idea fast. He calls the engine, not the customer apps, the most important product.
Fixable flaws in targets are good news. Ferrari says most sellers are honest but present a rosier picture. Flaws that can be fixed allow a good price and high returns, so the company looks for good businesses that could be greatly improved.
Italy gave a talent edge over California. Italy has about 60m people, strong education and few technology jobs for ambitious people. Bending Spoons received 800,000 applications last year from about half a million people and hired 286. Ferrari says team talent and culture decide success once strategy is sound.
Nasdaq was chosen for capital, not prestige. Ferrari considered London, Amsterdam and Milan, but only the New York Stock Exchange was a real alternative given liquidity and valuations. A listing brings more, cheaper capital. He says Europe needs jobs and skills built there more than local listings.
Debt is held at two to three times profit. Prescott cites an S&P Global figure of almost $6bn of debt by year end. Ferrari says what matters is debt against projected free cash flow, that leverage stays at two to three times run-rate profitability, and that investors urge more borrowing.
How Bending Spoons began
After graduating in engineering, Ferrari and his cofounders backpacked in Indonesia.
In 2010 they founded Evertale, an AI diary startup that ran until 2013 and that Ferrari calls an utter failure.
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On this episode 3
Show 1
About 40,000 left from roughly 1m raised from venture capitalists seeded Bending Spoons.
Mateo, a Matrix fan, supplied the name, which Ferrari says captures the power of the mind and is a little funny. Searches still return telekinesis, so the company built a bot to track mentions.