The Pragmatic Engineer
00:00:00 · Gergely Orosz, Luca Ferrari
[00:00:00] S0: Just to confirm, like, for the products that you operate, this is kind of like a core principle of on call should not be heavy or you should not worry when you're going on call that you're gonna be flooded with notifications and alerts. [00:00:10] S1: We actually try not to have an on call scheme at all on many of our products and technologies. However, knowing that you don't have that fallback as a Software Engineer, as an Infrastructure Engineer really breeds that... Have I thought about the corner cases? Have I really looked at this and made sure it's really robust? It's really sharply engineered. If you know that the on call is there, it's not the same. Raising capital in Italy was borderline impossible. Our model is so unusual. No VC would be interested in investing. And I believe that give us an edge over some of the competitors.
00:00:43 · Gergely Orosz
[00:00:43] S0: Do not frequently hear loans from traditional banks with startups. Evernote and Meetup are two products many people have heard about. But what about the company called Bending Spoons? Bending Spoons is an eleven year old startup headquartered in Milan, Italy and they own and operate both Evernote, Meetup and a bunch of other products. Bending Spoons is a fascinating company. They started out as five developers building small mobile apps and have now grown to about four fifty people, surpassing $700,000,000 in annual revenue. What surprised me to learn about this company is that they've been profitable every single year and how they spent more than $1,000,000,000 on acquisitions. It's rare to hear about a European company buying Silicon Valley companies and I was excited to learn more straight from the source. In today's episode we do a deep dive on how the Evernote acquisition happened and why the complete backend needed to be rewritten. We'll look into how Bending Spoons typically operates and how it organizes product and platform teams. But we'll start with the elephant in the room. Addressing a pretty controversial perception on how Bending Spoons acquires companies, but then let's go a good chunk of the staff when they take over products. We'll see that the reality is a lot more grey rather than black and white in this case. So let's jump in. Hello everyone, today I'm happy to have the Bending Spoons team here with me. We have Luca, Francesco, and Federico. Luca is the co founder and CEO of the company. Francesco is the CTO, and Federico is a product lead at Bending Spoons. Welcome to the podcast.
00:02:07 · Federico Simionato, Luca Ferrari, Gergely Orosz
[00:02:07] S2: Thank you. Thank you very [00:02:08] S1: much. Nice being here. [00:02:10] S0: So I have to admit, even a few months ago, I had not heard of Bending Spoons. At the same time, things that I have heard about and used are Evernote, meetup.com, which I knew were Silicon Valley companies and I also heard they got acquired by a different company, and this turned out to be Bending Spoons. It was actually the Evernote acquisition that I first, you know, like connected the the two together. But the interesting thing is that Bending Spoons is probably the most single sought after company and the tech company in Italy. When I first tweeted about Bending Spoons and how I discovered the interesting things that you're doing, I had Italian developers ping me and telling me, oh, I actually applied to Bending Spoons. They're the hottest place to be in Italy. And I asked them, when did you apply? And they told me, oh, it was like four or five years ago. So they already knew that something really different and exciting was happening at the company. The first time you came up was when you acquired Evernote, but you operate other apps and products. Which ones are you known for?
00:03:15 · Luca Ferrari
[00:03:15] S1: You correctly mentioned Evernote as one of the most well known businesses we acquired. Meetup2. We have acquired Mosaic, which is a collection of mobile products from Interactive Corporation. And we've acquired Hopin and Streamyard, possibly the most popular recording and live streaming suite of features of product in the world. More recently, Issue for digital publishing and WeTransfer for digital file storage and transfer. We also own and operate Remini, which is an AI based photonhancer and generator, one of the top two or three most used generative AI products in the world with over 100,000,000 monthly active users. But we have been doing this for a decade and we have acquired dozens of businesses. These are just the most well known ones.
00:04:11 · Gergely Orosz
[00:04:11] S0: This episode is brought to you by the Enterprise Ready Conference, a one day event in SF, bringing together product and engineering leaders shaping the future of enterprise SaaS. The event features a curated list of speakers with direct experience building for the enterprise. Speakers include people from OpenAI, Vanta, Checkr, Dropbox and Canva. Topics include advanced identity management, compliance, encryption and logging essentially yet complex features that most enterprise customers require. If you're a founder, exec, PM or engineer tasked with the enterprise roadmap, this conference is for you. You'll get detailed insights from industry leaders that have years of experience navigating the same challenges you face today. And best of all, it's completely free since it's hosted by WorkOS. Spots are filling up quickly. Make sure to request an invite at enterpriseready dot com. That is enterpriseready.com. This episode was brought to you by DX, a platform that helps organizations measure and improve developer productivity. The DX team includes notable researchers behind the frameworks like DevEx and Space, so they're constantly asked by leaders: What metrics should we use to measure developer productivity? To help simplify the landscape, DX just recently published the DXCore IV, a unified framework for measuring developer productivity that encapsulates DORA, SPACE and DevEx. The DX Score four includes four dimensions including speed, effectiveness and quality that provide a focused set of metrics that help track productivity at all levels of the organization. You can learn more about the DX Core4 and how it's being used in companies like Dropbox, Etsy, Versal and Pfizer at getdx.com/core4. Again that's getdx.com/core4. I'd like to address the... An elephant in in the room in terms of the the perception of a bending spoon. So we've already touched on this, but I I I just really wanna, like, like, double click on it. Cause from the outside, when you search for Bending Spoons, often things in the press will come up, oh, they acquired Evernote and then they reduced the original team. Oh, they acquired Meetup and then they reduced the original team. Oh, they acquired this other company and they did that.
00:06:19 · Gergely Orosz
So there's this real perception of like, oh, Bending Spoons buys a company that is struggling or that wants to be sold, and they just reduce the the the team and and then they take it from there. But how do... And this is just one side of the story. Obviously, this is the external, I I guess, the hard numbers or or or the things that make the rounds and and make people pay attention and and, you know, form opinions. How do acquisitions really look like from the inside? Like, what what is your approach? Because I... I'm I'm gonna just assume that it's likely not like we're gonna cross off. That doesn't make sense to acquire a company when, you know, like it sounds you want to make more of this. How do you approach it?