Luca Ferrari says Airtable was a great business whose roughly $1.3bn enterprise value still returned investors their money plus more despite a high 2021 valuation.
Bending Spoons buys digital businesses to hold forever, rebuilding their code, infrastructure and pricing on an operating system of over 50 proprietary tools that it says saves at least $100m a year.
Bending Spoons says revenue per core team member has risen to about $4m from $1m, and it is not considering buying AI startups now, expecting most to fail.
Bending Spoons Rebuilds Old Software Businesses and Keeps Them Forever
Bending Spoons buys mature digital businesses to keep forever and rebuilds them on a shared platform of in-house tools. Because the tools are shared and the team is small and selective, revenue per person keeps climbing. Ferrari argues that old products still have large audiences, and that AI is best used internally without depending on outside vendors.
Takeaways
Bending Spoons buys mature software to keep forever. It must predict a business's trajectory at least five years ahead and see where technology, product, talent, revenue or costs can add value. It reviews hundreds of companies a year and prefers five or ten larger deals to fifty small ones.
A shared in-house platform drives the economics. Acquired businesses are rebuilt on an operating system of over 50 proprietary technologies. Ferrari estimates that building these tools in house saves at least $100m a year and makes the company two to three times as productive.
A small, selective team lifts revenue per person. Revenue per core team member rose from about $1m to about $4m in two or three years. The company received 800,000 applications in 2025 and hired fewer than 300. Unwanted churn in the core team was 0.6% last year.
Airtable deal returned investors roughly their money. The enterprise value was about $1.3bn. Ferrari says investors got back roughly their money plus more despite a very high 2021 valuation. He defends Silicon Valley's funding model, and says excess appears when investors are paid for managing capital rather than for returns.
Old brands still hold large, loyal audiences. AOL, around for about forty years, is still the main inbox for tens of millions of people. Bending Spoons' products have about 500m monthly active users, and Ferrari says retention at acquired teams has not fallen. He says the company does not care about being cool.
Self-hosted AI keeps it independent of vendors. AltSpooner, an internal Slack agent with its user's access, handled tasks such as a same-day Evernote bug fix. Mostly self-hosted open-weight models serve it, with frontier closed models used for about 1% of requests. It is not buying AI startups now.
Ferrari fears AI misuse and opposes protectionist rules. He says AI could be a great boon or cause awful outcomes, and could be easier to misuse than nuclear weapons. He calls the EU AI Act harmful to industry and protectionist AI regulation an awful idea.
How it differs from other acquirers
Serial acquirers mostly leave the businesses they buy alone.
Private equity funds hold companies for about five years and rarely rebuild them.
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On this episode 2
Show 1
Bending Spoons holds forever and rebuilds code, cloud infrastructure, features, pricing and marketing.
It has mostly bought digital businesses, including consumer internet and SaaS companies, and recently bought the pet-tracking hardware company Tractive.