Full transcript
0:00What is BendingSpoons? The Italian
0:03company that just went public. It's one
0:05of the most unheard of tech companies
0:08that operates a lot more like a private
0:10equity firm. They own Evernote,
0:12WeTransfer, Eventbrite, StreamYard,
0:15Brightcove, and last year they bought
0:17Vimeo for 1.4 billion and AOL for 1.5
0:21billion dollars. All in all, they've
0:22probably acquired more than 50 companies
0:25in total. Their playbook is pretty
0:26simple. They find these popular apps
0:28that people love but have stopped
0:30growing, likely because they're being
0:32run inefficiently. Then BendingSpoons
0:34goes in, buys it, and then makes a lot
0:36of changes including squeezing it. For
0:38example, they laid off nearly all of
0:41Evernote's staff, a large portion of
0:43Vimeo's, and around 75% of WeTransfer's.
0:47They go in and add all of these product
0:49and technical improvements, and then
0:50they typically go in and raise prices.
0:53So, for example, Evernote's personal
0:55plan went up 63% and StreamYard's went
0:57up 80%. Notably, most private equity
0:59firms acquire a company usually to flip
1:02it or just let it run on its own.
1:04However, BendingSpoons actually does
1:06neither and they buy to hold. They pull
1:09every product into this one central
1:11operation in Milan that shares the same
1:13engineering team, a lot of the same
1:14infra, payment systems across the entire
1:17portfolio. According to them, AI now
1:19also writes or co-writes more than 90%
1:21of their code up from under 10% a year
1:24ago. In terms of their business, revenue
1:25went up from 387 million in 2023 to
1:29about 1.3 billion last year. They're
1:31also currently profitable at the
1:33operating level and have identified over
1:34a thousand more companies they could
1:36buy. The reason BendingSpoons has all of
1:39these targets to choose from is because
1:41the AI boom has made this entire
1:43generation of pre-AI software companies
1:46cheap and unloved. We saw a lot of this
1:48with the SaaS apocalypse in the stock
1:50market where investors were getting
1:51scared that AI can let anyone spin up
1:54software in an afternoon, which signaled
1:56to them that all these older
1:57subscription software companies could
1:59get undercut or replaced when the cost
2:01of creation is going to zero. Yet,
2:03Bending Spoon continues to make the
2:05opposite bet, believing that there's
2:07this whole cohort of brands that still
2:09have super loyal audiences, and that the
2:11same AI that everyone's afraid of is
2:13actually the same thing that will enable
2:15them to run more efficiently.