Bending Spoons Founder Luca Ferrari: Buy and Never Sell, Following the Same "Buy, Improve, Keep" Process
David Senra released excerpts from a conversation with Bending Spoons co-founder Luca Ferrari. Ferrari stated that comparing the company to private equity is a shallow view: they buy and never sell, never divesting important businesses; they transform targets to the point of being unrecognizable; and then use the same platform and operating system, with core "Spooners" handling development, marketing, and operations. Private equity funds typically sell after about five years, usually only adjusting costs and pricing, rarely redoing products, organization, and underlying technology, and certainly not integrating businesses into a unified platform, as doing so makes them difficult to sell separately.
The Milan-based company started around 2013, with four co-founders still at the helm. It has a NASDAQ listing with a valuation of approximately $18.4 billion, having raised about $1.7 billion, with over 80% of voting rights retained by the founding team. Revenue in 2025 is projected to be around $1.31 billion, compared to approximately $387 million in 2023, with a compound growth rate of about 84%; monthly active users claim to exceed 500 million, with over 9 million paying users. The target list includes over 1,000 digital businesses, totaling about $400 billion in revenue.
Evernote was acquired for about $200 million in early 2023, with over 200 million accounts. Within 12 months, the workforce was reduced from 341 to about 60, management layers were cut from four to two, the monolithic backend was broken into microservices, the free tier was shrunk, and the annual fee was raised from about $100 to approximately $249. The company claims that by 2025, the average revenue per monthly active user will be about 2.5 times that before the acquisition, and it launched its largest version 11 during its own period. WeTransfer, Meetup, Vimeo, AOL, Eventbrite, Brightcove, and Airtable, acquired for about $1.285 billion in cash, follow the same "buy, improve, keep" process.
AOL was acquired for about $1.45 billion, with standalone operating profits of about $334 million, approximately 4.4 times; Eventbrite was about $500 million, and Vimeo about $1.36 billion, both still reporting operating losses at the time. The combined pro forma net profit for 2025 is only about $22.4 million, corresponding to about $2.6 billion in revenue. Organic growth is projected at about 13% for 2025, with half of the revenue coming from AOL. The Italian export credit agency guarantees a loan of about €500 million for continued acquisitions of U.S. assets. The core team of about 620 operates over 50 acquisitions.
Internal systems are designed to scientifically recruit, with over 100 signals, no bonuses, no job titles, uniform job definitions for all, extreme ownership, and continuous simplification. Capital allocation prioritizes acquisitions over quarterly profits. Bloomberg early on characterized them as private equity of the app store generation; Ferrari uses "never exit" to shift the valuation from harvesting options to perpetual operating companies.
In market mechanisms, buyers are mature subscription cash flow and markup user holding platforms, while sellers are old internet brands with stagnant growth and valuations dropping back to single-digit profit multiples. This is the narrative hedge post-IPO: the market discounts private equity for snowballing, while founders use Berkshire-style tech companies to demand growth multiples. Funds flow from IPO fundraising and sovereign guaranteed loans to the next U.S. software deal; beneficiaries are those who can cut their workforce by 80% while retaining paying users, while the pressured parties are old users facing price increases and the closure of free tiers, as well as new shareholders who only see $22 million in profit from $2.6 billion in revenue.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Ferrari scaled Bending Spoons from a $40,000 seed and a $10,000 first order to a $10 billion acquisition machine, not by inventing new categories, but by repricing entry points that others had invented, fattened, and stagnated. The story of Evernote is a template: the brand remains, technology is stagnant, and people are more expensive than code. Cutting down to 60 people is not a financial engineering garnish; it is reclaiming product rights back to the Milan operating system. Private equity must submit reports every five years; they canceled the report date to sink microservices and unified platforms in — this is precisely what he means by "once welded together, it cannot be sold": if it cannot be sold, it qualifies for perpetual revenue sharing.
The capital path is debt plus public equity to exchange for cash cows in the U.S. recession. AOL's 4.4 times operating profit is a cheap printing machine, while Vimeo and Eventbrite are still bleeding brand shells. The pro forma profit of $22 million indicates that the accounting reality of snowballing is still thin; the organic growth of 13% suggests that the story must rely on the next acquisition for survival. The Italian state-guaranteed loan for buying U.S. assets connects low-cost European funds to dollar subscriptions. The target pool of $400 billion in revenue signals to the market: there is enough inventory for another ten years.
The analogy is not KKR splitting and selling factories, but Constellation Software adding a bit of consumer brand price increase tactics, plus a bit of Berkshire's "never sell" rhetoric. The industry position has shifted from application growth to application harvesting and platformization: as app store traffic becomes more expensive, having old users is more valuable than having new downloads. Airtable's $1.2 billion cash is the first shot post-IPO, testing whether public shareholders can accept the same knife method for cutting collaborative software.
Structural judgment belongs to the concentration of capital and the transfer of pricing power. The mechanism is: the marginal cost of software approaches zero, while organizational costs do not. Whoever can compress a 300-person company into a 60-person platform plugin will capture the price difference. Private equity must keep assets separable, so they dare not truly rebuild; perpetual holding must be inseparable, so they dare to rebuild. The day it becomes inseparable, users will no longer face a product market, but a single landlord.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Never selling allows for assets to be welded shut.
Cutting the workforce is not cruel; it is reclaiming product rights back to the platform.
The migration cost of old users is the pricing power of the new landlord.