If Berkshire Hathaway and Google had a baby.
The failed startup
In 2011, Luca Ferrari and his co-founders were building Evertale, a venture-funded photo-sharing app in Copenhagen. It failed. Their investors sold back their shares for $1, leaving the team with $40,000 and a hard lesson.
Ferrari: “We were arrogant in thinking that we knew what the market wanted.”
The pivot was fundamental. Instead of building products from scratch, they would find products that already had market fit — and make them better. They moved back to Italy, invested $10,000 in a simple iOS keyboard app, improved it, doubled their money, and repeated. Bending Spoons was born.
A decade later, the company is worth over $10 billion. The co-founders are billionaires. The portfolio includes Evernote, Meetup, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and AOL. The model that produced these results is distinctive — and divisive.
The hybrid
Ferrari describes Bending Spoons as “25% private equity, 75% technology company” — or, more colourfully, “if Berkshire Hathaway and Google had a baby.”
The private equity part: acquire underperforming digital businesses, restructure aggressively, optimise for profitability. The technology part: rewrite the code, rebuild the infrastructure, invest heavily in R&D. Most PE firms do the first without the second. Most tech companies do the second without the first.
The 10-person M&A team evaluates over 1,000 companies annually. They close perhaps six. The criteria: proven product-market fit, substantial user base, stagnant or neglected development, and — critically — untapped potential that Bending Spoons believes it can unlock.
Ferrari: “We need to believe that thanks to our platform — including our first-party data, access to talent, scale — we can make the business’s trajectory a lot better. If it’s a declining business, make it closer to flat. If it’s flat, grow. If it’s already growing, grow faster.”
Radical transformation
Where Lifco and Judges Scientific leave acquisitions alone, Bending Spoons tears them apart.
Ferrari is explicit: “We are very active and quite radical in our transformation. We often rewrite most of the code base, re-architecture the IT infrastructure, add a ton of features, even remove features, change the UI, optimise the monetisation, change the marketing strategy.”
The restructuring extends to people. WeTransfer lost 75% of its staff within a month of acquisition. Brightcove lost two-thirds of its US workforce. Evernote’s entire team was laid off and operations relocated to Europe. The pattern is consistent enough to be policy.
This is the opposite bet from the decentralised acquirers. Lifco assumes the existing team knows the business better than headquarters ever could. Bending Spoons assumes headquarters can rebuild the business better than the existing team ever did.
The results suggest both approaches can work. Every Bending Spoons business is profitable. Revenue grew from $162 million to over $1 billion in three years.
The pricing question
Bending Spoons is unapologetic about raising prices.
When they acquired Evernote, they reduced the free plan from unlimited notes to 50 and roughly doubled subscription prices. Users complained. Ferrari’s response: “Yes, a price increase will generally lead to a loss of customers. But if you can do it right, it will be a net positive when you also consider that you’re retaining some of the more committed customers, which then contribute greater revenues that you can reinvest in the product.”
The logic mirrors TransDigm’s value-based pricing, but applied to consumer software. Find the customers who genuinely value the product. Price to that value. Accept the churn from users who were never going to pay meaningfully anyway.
Evernote is now profitable — something it struggled to achieve for years under previous ownership.
Talent density
The culture is deliberately demanding. Job postings warn candidates that “Bending Spoons is a demanding environment.” The company receives hundreds of thousands of applications annually. The offer rate is below 0.1%.
The philosophy borrows from Netflix’s talent density model but goes further. No career ladders. No bonuses. Most hires are fresh graduates — “by design,” Ferrari says. The bet is that exceptional young talent, developed internally, outperforms experienced hires shaped by other companies’ cultures.
Engineering practices reflect the same radicalism. No on-call rotations — the goal is systems reliable enough that they’re unnecessary. Processes vary by product maturity: heavy automated testing for established products, lighter frameworks for newer ones. Python dominates, but teams can choose their own tools.
The Glassdoor rating is 4.7 stars. “Great Place to Work” certified. The layoffs haven’t hurt the employer brand — if anything, the selectivity signals something candidates want to be part of.
Permanent ownership
Unlike traditional private equity, Bending Spoons claims it never sells.
Ferrari: “Bending Spoons has never sold an acquired business — we’re confident we’re the right long-term steward.”
The permanent ownership positioning creates the same deal flow advantages that Heico and Lifco exploit. Founders who care about legacy — or at least about not seeing their creation flipped in three years — find Bending Spoons more palatable than PE, even if the post-acquisition transformation is more aggressive.
Whether the “hold forever” commitment survives at scale remains to be seen. The company is just over a decade old. The aggressive acquisition pace began only recently. Constellation and Berkshire proved permanent ownership over decades. Bending Spoons is still proving it.
What Ferrari built
The track record is short but steep. From $40,000 and a failed startup to a $10 billion-plus valuation. From a keyboard app to Evernote, Vimeo, and AOL. Revenue compounding at triple-digit rates. Profitable from day one.
The model is genuinely different. Not the patient, hands-off approach of the Swedish compounders. Not the systematic operational improvement of Danaher. Something closer to a leveraged buyout mentality fused with genuine technology capability — buying neglected digital assets, gutting and rebuilding them, and holding the result forever.
The controversy is part of the proposition. The layoffs generate headlines. The price increases generate complaints. Ferrari seems unbothered: “We’re trying to build one of the most successful companies of all time.”
Whether that ambition survives contact with a down cycle, a failed integration, or the inevitable CEO transition remains the open question. The thesis is clear. The execution so far is impressive. The proof will come with time.
Connects to Library: The Value Stick · Process Power · Switching Costs
See also: The Lifco Way — The opposite approach: radical autonomy, no transformation. The TransDigm Equation — Similar willingness to price aggressively, different sector.