Bending Spoons Founders on Buying Airtable, AOL, Vimeo & Eventbrite

Bending Spoons has announced it buys Miro, a deal worth $1.3 billion. Then Brighton, a deal worth $500 million.

Airtable for $1.25 billion.

AOL for $1.5 billion.

We don't sell the companies we buy, so they know that with us the company has a forever own, and they've seen how much we can invest in the product.

Private equity comes in and buys a business; generally that means that the founder needs to be involved for the next 3, 4, 5 years. And with Bending Spoons, we can take care of it from closing date.

Within our portfolio, we have plenty of products. People that come into Bending Spoons, they don't need to come in because they want to work specifically on Vimeo or WeTransfer or AOL; they can actually be exposed to a lot of different products.

AOL was a pretty healthy business when we acquired it, and it's still as of today. It has millions and millions of users who are still very active and still very engaged.

I'm so excited to see what you acquire next. Airtable broke the internet in a lot of people's brains, so I'm excited to see what happens.

Allright, we are here at Bending Spoons in Milan, Italy, with CEO Luca Ferrari. We're going to go for a little walk around the office, and then later we're going to speak to the co-founders as well as Vali, the GM of AOL.

So, Luca, you want to take it away?

Allright.

So how many offices do you have now?

For the core team, we have Milan, then we have London, Madrid in Spain, and Warsaw in Poland. And then with the acquired companies, many others in the States, in Tokyo, all over the place.

Allright, so you have this office here. When did you open this one?

About 3 years ago.

Okay.

And we're working on opening another one next door. It's going to be way bigger, so we're looking forward to that, maybe next year.

How many floors is that one?

Nine, I think.

Nine?

Yeah, it's way bigger. It's good for 500 to 1,000 people, something like that.

And so are all the offices set up like this with open desks? Do you guys have a specific office, or are you...

No, everybody can pick their desk. They're all up for booking, and everybody's the same in that regard. There are no private offices. We have meeting rooms, of course, but no private offices.

I know we're recording this in reverse order, but I have spoken with everyone already, and one of the main takeaways is the density of talent that you have here, the extreme ownership culture, and I guess the quality overall.

So what are the traits that you look for when hiring and employees?

Well, it boils down to looking for people who are smart and who care. Smart means people who can learn quickly, even if they don't have the knowledge, they'll pick it up rapidly and they'll be able to develop the skills they need to succeed.

And then who care means, and that's the extreme ownership trait you just referenced. It means they care tremendously about being amazing at what they do, delivering the greatest possible impact for the team and the company. So that's sort of the firing the belly to be awesome at work.

I have to ask you, I forgot to ask this in our sit-down, but what is the biggest lesson you've learned from all the acquisitions?

Oh my goodness, that's a pretty huge question, but I'd say, I guess we have confirmed just how incredibly powerful it can be to have multiple people who are very high caliber and who have almost complete autonomy and leeway in being ambitious and executing.

Going from a much larger company where people don't feel as much sense of ownership, they're not as accountable, there's more process, more bureaucracy to that small team, magic happens almost every single time. So we've now come to believe in that formula fully, and it's really a trademark of how we operate.

And what's the key to negotiation?

To acquire a company?

Yeah.

Price.

Price?

I've never seen a transaction where the highest price didn't win.

Really?

Yeah, basically. I mean, I think in our case, what we bring to the table that's very convincing, and typically we have offered the highest price. And the reason why we've been able to do that is we, as an operator, are so effective through the integration by bringing our platform, our technologies, our people, at generating value from businesses that we're typically capable of offering a better price than everybody else while delivering high returns for our shareholders.

So that's certainly number one. But as a close second, I think something that especially founders have appreciated, not so much institutional investors but founders, is that we don't sell the companies we buy. So they know that with us, the company has probably a forever own, and they've seen how much we can invest in the product and make the product better.

And many founders feel a sense of attachment, even legacy connected with the products they helped develop. And so knowing that they're selling their business, including the products, to someone who's passionate about developing digital products, has an engineering mindset, pays attention to detail, and takes pride in the craft when it comes to user experience, that makes the decision of selling easier.

So those are the two main things, I believe.

So you recently had a big milestone: Bending Spoons went public. I heard that you did something a little unconventional. You actually weren't the one ringing the bell. You were down in Times Square, and you gave a fairly unusual speech as well.

So what happened there?

Yeah, so we thought that generally, I think founders and executives more broadly tend to enjoy the spotlight more than they deserve. I think there is a... the world likes simple stories, and so they tend to have one or two faces at most they associate with, in this case, a company.

But generally, those people, yes, maybe they play an outsized role in the company's success, but many others have extremely important roles to play, sometimes even more important roles to play. And so we figured that it'll be a nice gesture if I didn't take up one spot on Nasdaq, on the stage, so to say, but rather enjoyed the moment with the hundreds of colleagues from the street.

I'm pretty privileged in the amount of exposure I get, and so that was a very small gesture, really, just a symbolic thing. And yes, the person ringing the bell is Laura, one of our colleagues from finance, one of the people who put in the greatest amount of effort toward achieving the IPO.

And so we thought she deserved to be there and being the one pressing the red button.

That's amazing, sorry. Well, Luca, thank you so much. We're about to have a couple interviews coming out next with the two other co-founders and Vali, like I mentioned earlier. And then later this week, as a part two, we have a full sit-down with Luca that's pretty good.

So watch out for that. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Francesco, thank you so much for joining us. We're on a wild run here at Bending Spoons.

Thank you. Thank you for having a talk with me.

Of course. So you're head of M&A, you're also a co-founder, you've been here for 13 years from the very beginning. I have to ask you, what is the one that got away?

Well, the one that we remember the most is probably when we tried to acquire Grindr in 2019. That was a long process, actually. I still remember the day we started discussing about that. It was actually only me and Luca here at the office, or actually it was the older office, because most of the team was on the retreat and I had a young kid, so I decided to stay home.

And so it was just basically me and Luca in the office. And he heard about the Grindr sale from a friend, and the moment he heard about it, he thought, okay, this must be a great opportunity. Because we've been looking at that space in the past, we've been looking at a dating space in the past, and we've been looking at Grindr, and we saw that despite being a product with very high retention, it was a really bad product.

It was just like everyone was complaining about the app crashing all the time and this problem and that problem, so we thought it would have been a great opportunity, so we started really getting into that. But it was everyone we talked about, I thought we were crazy because it would have been a massive acquisition for us at the time.

The equivalent would be today doing a $20 billion acquisition.

Oh my God.

Yeah. That would have been very transformational. And also, at that time, we had very limited experience with raising that amount of money on the debt side, that amount of money also on the equity side. So we had basically to learn everything from scratch.

And it was a very long process. We started looking at that in spring 2019, and then the whole thing blew up at the beginning of 2020, after we actually managed to put together a fully financed acquisition offer. But by the time, it was too late because it was someone else that came in with a slightly better proposal.

And so once we thought, okay, we've got to get this, because until like a few months before, basically we were the only ones looking at that, then no, we're not going to get that anymore because they went into exclusivity with someone else, and that's it, it just blew up.

And yeah, at the beginning, it felt really annoying and bad and sad because, I mean, you just work so much. I mean, basically half of the company was fully focused on that due diligence for almost a year,right? And so that felt like, okay, we're going to get this, this is like so important.

But eventually, in the hindsight, probably I'm happier that we didn't acquire it because given the fact that it would have been so big for Bending Spoons, then Bending Spoons would have been Grindr because we would have probably fully focused on that, and we would not have developed Bending Spoons into what Bending Spoons is today.

And also on top of that, while being a failure because we didn't acquire it, I think we had so much compressed learning into those nine months because, I mean, basically we raised half a billion dollars. We're not actually raising it, but it was fully committed.

And so that was very valuable for what then came

the need in terms of raising debt, raising equity, and talking with investors, talking with banks. So eventually it was very valuable.

How has financing the acquisitions changed over time, and how will that change now that you're public?

Well, so historically we have relied primarily on debt, and we started, I think our first loan was in

the end of 2017, so very early in Bending Spoons' history. And it was, I think we raised like $1, $2 million.

And that evolution of the debt financing for Bending Spoons was gradual because it was developing relationships with banks and lending slightly more every time and paying back the debt because it was fully amortized and showing the banks that we deliver on the promises and then raising a little bit more and then paying back and showing again.

And so there was a gradual path. The big unlock was moving from just simple bank loans to term loan agreements with US lenders, and that happened at the beginning of 2025. And that had to go through

rating agencies giving you a rating, and that's something new, as well as talking with different lenders that never actually work with you. And so you didn't have that relationship of delivering against your promises, paying back, raising more, that allowed you to build a very strong track record and so allowed you to raise faster at better terms.

So we kind of had to start almost from the beginning with lenders at that time. And equity was slightly different because we basically never raised primary equity all the way to 2023. That was our very first big institutional round.

We raised a little bit, it was more secondary rounds with smaller investors, primarily from Italy in previous years. But 2023 was the first big round with Bailey Gifford coming in, Cox Enterprises, and Durable. And so that was, again, something new, starting from scratch, having to educate investors about what we do.

And our story almost, I mean, by construction, is a counterintuitive story.

You need to learn and study Bending Spoons a little bit before really understanding the way it works. And so also for equity investors, it was a little bit of kind of showing them and teaching them before fully making them understand the way it worked.

And so I think that was an important moment. And then becoming public, it was kind of a continuation of that, also because many of the investors, the big institutional investors that are part of Bending Spoons' cap table today, either were already part of that as previous institutional rounds, or were investors that we talked to many times in the past, and we showed them, okay, we think we're going to do this, then we show them after six months, we have done that better, and then we show them again our plan for the following 6 to 12 months.

And so they had already learned about Bending Spoons, so it wasn't something new for them. And so it wasn't starting from scratch, it felt like a natural continuation of where we were before as a private company.

On the acquisition side, you have 1,000 potential targets?

Yeah.

And you're doing 5 to 10 a year?

Yes.

How do you think about the categories that you want and the ones you will not touch?

We've always been very agnostic to the vertical and the category.

We tried to do things in different worlds and constantly expand the capabilities of the things that we can do.

Obviously, there was a gradual process. At the very beginning, when we started Bending Spoons, we were much more, I would say,

we had a lot more knowledge on how to manage, let's say, a mobile B2C product, and then with time, that expanded into a broader B2C ecosystem, and then into the B2B world, but first self-serve, and then more recently enterprise.

With Tractive, we have done our first acquisition of a hardware-enabled digital business. So this to say that we don't want to focus on one specific vertical, we want to keep our scope relatively broad. Within this broad scope, the focus is to look for businesses that have a lot of potential to be unlocked.

So we want to see our platform to be able to unlock a lot of value if applied to that business. That can mean different things. Sometimes it's our ability to attract talent, sometimes it's our ability to process data and get insights, sometimes it's our ability to attract new users.

Every time we look at a business and we think, how is our platform going to unlock value if applied to that business? The second thing is we want to see a big revenue scale. Every transformation almost has a fixed cost that is independent of the revenue size, and so we want to do few acquisitions every year of bigger and bigger size because we don't want to invest a team of 50 spooners into transforming a $20 million revenue business because now that would have moved the needle.

And so the size continuously grows with Bending Spoons' growth. And then the last thing is we want predictability.

That doesn't necessarily mean a specific growth rate. We have seen predictability in businesses that were growing 20% year over year, as well as businesses that were flat, as well as businesses that were shrinking 5% year over year.

We will judge predictability based on the data that we have about the company, based on the data that we have about other businesses that we own. We have a very data-driven process, but then once we see predictability, we value that a lot.

We build a model around that to predict how the business will evolve with Bending Spoons' platform behind its back.

And why are you an attractive acquirer for the seller?

We are a very peculiar company, and we offer something that many acquirers are not able to. First of all, if you are a founder and you decided to sell your company, often it means that you want to do something else.

You want to start a new project, spend more time with your family. And if a private equity comes in and buys a business, generally that means that the founder needs to be involved for the next three, four, five years.

And with Bending Spoons, we can take care of it from closing date, and that's very valued by the founders because they know that once they sell, then they can move on to the next project. And the second thing is they know that their product legacy will be preserved with Bending Spoons because of our ability to reignite innovation, put all the spooners behind the development of the product, the technology.

And we started receiving more and more feedback from founders about this specifically and coming to us almost proactively saying, okay, look, now I would like to entertain a discussion with you, and I'm doing it only with you because I know that you can take care of this aspect that otherwise I wouldn't know how it would be handled by a private equity.

And also we are fast, we're very straightforward. I think we start building a reputation of being very transparent, so you know what you get. We're just very open and transparent about the whole process.

What was the best question someone asked you during the roadshow?

I don't know if it's not specifically a question, but it's a topic. I think most of the people have been focusing on the standard, what's your organic growth, what's your retention, how you do this and how you do that, and very, very few fully understood

the fact that the really secret sauce of Bending Spoons is the talent and triple dig into that. And I remember this specific investor that almost spent like an hour and a half only focusing on that and really asked thoughtful questions about our hiring process, how we retain talent, what the culture is, how we develop the culture, why is it different.

And it wasn't a specific question, but it was like a topic that made me understand that he understood really, really well why Bending Spoons works the way it works. And so I would say probably it was the only time that happened, and so that made me think very highly of that specific investor because they probably understood well how it worked.

We were talking about talent a lot with Luca, with Vali, with Matt. It's ever-present. We talked about it at lunch, and one of the peculiar things that I came across was that you've been running tenders. You're public now, but you'd been running tenders for many years, every year for your spooners.

So why did you make that decision? And also, why did they get vested on day one?

Dropping the vesting, it was something that we introduced more recently. I'll get to that in a second. The reason why we started offering, let's say, secondary transaction for team members to sell some of their share if they wanted to was to really show the value of their ownership of Bending Spoons, also showing that they were not locked into that until a specific event in the far future that they didn't know when and how it would have unlocked.

And so that really allowed them to fully understand the power of being part of Bending Spoons as a shareholder and then make better decisions when it comes to how to convert their compensation into equity versus cash. And that links well into how we actually do compensation.

That is, you get specific yearly compensation, fixed, not variable components, and then you decide how much to convert into equity and how much to convert into cash. And also that specific decision is very linked to the fact that we want to show you that your equity component has a specific value.

At that point in time, you actually can decide to get it all in cash if you wanted to. So you know that at that point in time, it's precisely that, the value that you're unlocking. So that plus the fact that you can then, let's say, within a year, a year and a half, convert that back into cash and showing the appreciation of that because every year, year and a half, when the new round was coming, then you could see that your ownership increased in value.

That allowed to create a sense of ownership almost as a public company while being private. And I think that was very important and allowed us to then become a public company without that big of a step change that maybe private companies feel because everyone is super invested and everyone feels, oh, now I'm going to be able to then sell my shares.

That was already possible before, so there wasn't that big of a change. Same thing with

not creating a vesting structure that created some weird kind of incentives. Similar to now creating variable components, we want everything to be simple and straightforward. I mean, you created a value within a certain year and you're going to be rewarded for that.

And then if you leave the day after, I mean, you still being rewarded because of the work you've done before. So that's the reason for dropping the vesting. And that had no impact on retention. We still have less than 1% churn on a yearly basis, and I think that speaks highly of how people perceive ownership of Bending Spoons.

I remember I said this would create an absolute bloodbath in San Francisco.

Yeah, I mean, of course we are also in a different context. I mean, being in Italy or in Europe more broadly is different than being in San Francisco, as well as probably San Francisco is different than being in New York versus Miami.

Being in San Francisco is a very specific context. But yeah, I think the reason why we have this churn despite the fact that we have no vesting is also the very strong culture we developed, the fact that we hire young talent that then develops within Bending Spoons.

And so there is less of a, you know, if I hire only people that have already 15 years of experience, they don't have that feeling of being part of this family, this culture, this company, and it's going to be a lot easier for them to flip to the next company afterwards.

With Bending Spoons, it's different.

So as we close out, what are you most looking forward to in the next 6, 12 months?

Well, previous 6 months were kind of out of the ordinary given the fact that we had the listing process that was unique, that happens only once. So I was a lot more detached from the daily operations. We have a ton of things we're working on on the M&A front, and our pipeline has never been so richright now, so we have a lot of prioritization to make.

So yeah, I really look forward to finding the best opportunities to focus our firepower on. And I think that's going to be very important because when you have a lot of things to choose, then picking the best is quite important.

Well, I'm so excited to see what you acquire next. Airtable broke the internet in a lot of people's brains, so I'm excited to see what happens. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you, Molly.

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That's zonefrontier.com to learn more. Matt, thank you for joining us. We are on a wild tour of Bending Spoons, and now we're with you, your VP of Product, your co-founder. You've been with the company since the very beginning, 13 years.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for being here.

Well, one very particularly interesting part of your story and what we were talking before the camera started rolling was how much the culture thrives on meritocracy. And one of the best examples, I think, is your story of stepping down as CPO so someone else could take.

So what happened is that some months ago,

I was Chief Product Officer at Bending Spoons at that time, and it became evident that one of our product managers who had an incredible career and joined some years later, some years before, had matured into

a professional that was definitely able to create more value in the position I was in than I was. And when I had that realization, I decided to go through the painful step of stepping down so that he could fill that role.

And I'm actually proud of what he's doing in that role. I think it was a very good decision. But beside the personal experience, I think that this example ties to, as you were saying, the concept of meritocracy and how much we care about meritocracy here.

We try to operate, when possible, by first principles. And I think that I'm not going to say anything controversial if I say that if you look at an organization and you hope to achieve the highest possible level of effectiveness of that organization, given a certain set of people that are part of it, you need to make sure that every position will be filled by the person that's the best fit in that position.

Everybody will agree with me when it comes to this statement, but then you need to take the principle and derive what it implies. And what it implies is that especially at a company like ours, where we are constantly raising the bar of the quality and the talent of the people that we attract and we hire, we become a better-known company.

We acquire better-known products, so our employer brand grows, so we attract better people. And at the same time, we care a lot about the selection process and making sure that we feed whatever signal from the success that people are having in the company back into the way we test people.

So the natural consequence of that is that through time, you'll have better and better hires, and it's going to be more and more likely that people will grow in the organization to the point that they're actually more capable than their leads.

And at that point, you'll get into the situations where it becomes apparent that a lead will be better at stepping down so that somebody else who would be better in that role could take on that role. Now, sounds linear, sounds rational, but if you want to make that happen, as a manager, you need to have some of the toughest professional conversations that you'll ever be exposed to.

Because going to a lead, to a professional, and telling them, look, some of the people in the organization grew so much and showed such an impressive trajectory that we believe that it's best for you to step down, that's one of the toughest things you can tell someone.

But again, it's a necessary ingredient of this idea of meritocracy if you want to take it to the extreme consequences and live by it,right? In my role previously, it happened a few times that I had to deal with this type of situations.

It's always been extremely tough, but what they have in common is that I was always very proud and sure that that was absolutely the best thing to do. I believe that it's one of the highest ROI things that you could do in terms of optimizing an organization.

So one of the toughest, but was also one of the highest ROI. And that's both because you get someone filling a high-leverage role that's more effective at that role, but it's not just the immediate result. It's also the positive externalities.

You're basically communicating to everyone in the company that every position is up for grabs, that there's no position that if they work hard enough and if they're talented enough, they won't be able to fill. And this is a very powerful message.

One quick off-topic is that something I'm very proud of is that if you take a look at some of our business units, some of our products, some of our functions, you'll find that some of the people filling those very high-leverage positions are not even 30, or maybe they've just turned 30.

So especially in Italy, where you have a culture whereby people that have been in a job for a long time, they will be entrenched in those positions. But I would say even just worldwide, knowing that a person who is in their early 30s are managing companies and products worth billions of dollars, that's really insane.

And again, that's made possible by the openness of giving everyone a chance. And so this is something that happened before with other leads that I personally asked to step down. And at some point, it happened with me as well.

I realized that Lorenzo, this guy that we promoted, had what it took. And I'm proud of walking the talk. And I'm even more proud because even though we made it a point since the very early days never to look at the founder figure as something different from anybody else, we don't want to idolize it in any possible way, there might be anyway an expectation that no matter how meritocratic you are, there might be limits to that meritocracy.

For example, if that meritocracy conflicts with a founder, you'll stop applying it. And I think that one of the reasons why I'm proud of what I did was because since I'm a founder, that signal, that positive externality is even more powerful.

And again, it's an even stronger message for everyone that any job is up for grabs, even the CEO job.

Luca also likes to live by this quite well, and every December he puts out a Google form.

Yeah, yeah. He puts out a form where he asks people he trusts whether they believe that somebody else could take his role, that would be a better position to lead the company, whether anyone is dissatisfied with his performance.

And it might look like some sort of performative act from outside. Like nobody will really tell you that you're doing a poor job, but he actually means it. And I think even more, even if it didn't, even if the feedback or the signal didn't come through that Google form and that process, if he realized or if anyone realized that somebody at the company could do a better job than he could in that role, he would be the first one to say, there needs to be a change here.

I'm absolutely sure of it, which is why I'm saying that, again, anyone, if they work intensely enough, if they're talented enough, could aspire even to that position.

Well, I definitely believe that because when we did our long-form sit-down with Luca, he said a lot of the mission of the company is to become an ultimate truth-seeker. And so I could definitely see him wanting all of those data points around his performance and execution and how to make the organization better.

Yeah, the ultimate act of truth-seeking,right?

Yeah. And then it's really interesting to your point earlier of even if they're young, if you have younger folks, 20s, 30s, doesn't matter. If they're skilled, they will excel to the top. We're having Valley on. And I would say she's quite humble, but she's so impressive, leading 90 products and is the GM of AOL.

It's so cool to see that kind of rise in a sense so fast within five years.

Yeah, yeah. We love her. And in general, I think it's an intoxicating feeling that you get in here that nothing is precluded, that this is a place where you can really grow as quickly as possible. There's many components to a person growing professionally, and one component is absolutely experience and

the way we try to give people the ability, the possibility of gaining that experience is by offering the chance to work on different products, even products that are very different from each other, all of them very relevant within the same company, which is quite rare.

Growing professionally also goes through being surrounded by highly talented people, which is something that we try to ensure through the selectivity of our hiring process. But those ingredients are not sufficient unless there's a will to recognize that if a person proves themselves, there's no limit to how quickly they can grow.

So again, all this package is necessary for everyone here to get that feeling of everything is possible. There's no limit to how fast I can grow. And one of the dreams that we had when we founded Bending Spoons for sure was to create the best company in the world.

Now, anyone will attach different meanings to what the best company in the world means, but for sure one of the meanings that's very dear to us is being a company where people can really fulfill their potential in the quickest, in the most relevant way.

One of the things you talk a lot about is startup mode. So what does that mean inside Bending Spoons?

Right. So the expression startup mode was born out of the necessity to counter some of the most frequent criticism that we get when we acquire companies, which is that given that the acquisition and the integration often entails a decrease in headcount, a profound restructuring of teams, an external observer that's not privy to what happens in here will see that the number of people working on a product decreases as a consequence of us taking over and reasonably will determine, will argue that we don't care about making the product better.

We don't care about evolving the product and that necessarily what will happen is that that product will deteriorate, the quality will go down, and customers and users will not be served in the same way as they were before.

And of course, this hinges on the fact that there must be a correlation between the size of a team and the quality of the work that's done on a specific product. Our argument is that that correlation is mild at best, and there are examples of the opposite.

And startup mode is a very good shortcut for this idea. Like anyone, like a lot of people might have experienced themselves that what happens in a company during the startup phase in the early years is very different to what happens when it grows into more of a corporate beast.

Typically, people will associate the startup phase as a period where there's a smaller team, often out of necessity. You don't have the resources to fund a larger operation, but then it's going to be all hands on deck. There's going to be a lot of fluidity in the roles and people feeling that basically everything could be their responsibility.

A sense of ownership that involves each and everyone, intensity in the work, hard work, ambition, and

what happens naturally is that, I mean, I'm not claiming that this is what happens with all companies. Matter of fact, there's a lot of companies that are able to scale and retain the startup vibe even when they grow up.

And we try to be a prime example of that phenomenon. But what typically happens is that as a product becomes more successful, both founders and investors will feel it's actually the best thing to do to actually add people, to increase the team, because naturally you'll think more people, you'll be able to pursue more opportunities, more objectives, you'll be able to do more.

Customers and users, you want to have more, you'll be able to evolve the product. There are so many things to do. It makes a lot of sense. But if you don't navigate that growth in theright way, and that's a super complicated thing to do, what naturally happens is that if you have a product and you add people, in order to operate it, you'll need to create a lot of sub-teams.

You're going to have to split up responsibility. Different parts of the product will be managed by different teams. And so you'll lose that sort of holistic approach to operating a product that you breathe so often when you see what happens in startups.

Responsibility will fragment a little bit. Even people that have bright ideas and are hungry for impact, they'll feel like they'll need to involve some other teams for something to happen. So everything kind of slows down. What used to take days takes weeks, takes months.

You need to add layers of management to handle the complexity and the increase in the communication complexity. And then you start seeing some misaligned incentives as well, because if, like during the startup days, especially if employees are involved in the ownership of the company, everybody knows that what's best for the company is best for themselves as well.

But when the organization grows larger, you start getting people that start optimizing for their own career at the detriment of what's good for the company. And so one thing that starts happening is that if I'm a manager, I understand and I feel that if I want my role to grow in importance, I'll have to grow the number of people in my team and so on and so forth.

But sometimes that growth might not be necessary. So you have all sorts of misaligned incentives. And ultimately, long story short, is that you end up with a company whose promise was we'll have more people, we'll do more things, but then everything kind of slows down and that doesn't happen.

And it's not because people are not talented. It's just a consequence of incentives being placed wrongly or organization growth and stuff like that. So this is all to say that what we really try to do when we acquire a company, we go in and we allocate a team, is we try to bring back this startup mode.

We try to bring back the sense of ownership. We try to make sure that whenever somebody has an idea, that idea can be pursued very quickly without having to involve four different teams. And as a consequence of that, you see the frequency with which we ship improvements increasing, and you even have fewer intermediaries between users and customers and the product itself.

Often when we acquire

products that are mostly sales-led in terms of their growth, we'll have one product manager that will be responsible for managing the product and at the same time managing the relationship with customers so they get an unfiltered view of what's necessary and they have all the knowledge to be able to talk to a customer knowing what's going to be easy to implement, what makes sense to prioritize, et cetera, et cetera.

So there are plenty of advantages that come down to simply undo some of that corporatification, if you can say that, of companies that happen through time. But to that, we add a lot of other things. So

for one talent, talent density, even if you believe that all other things being equal, the companies we acquire are equally attractive to talent than we are. We do have an advantage that's very hard to replicate, which is that, and we were talking about this before, within our portfolio, we have plenty of products.

So people that come into Bending Spoons, they don't need to come in because they want to work specifically on Vimeo or WeTransfer or AOL, but they need to be in love with the idea of being at Bending Spoons, and they can actually be exposed to a lot of different products, which has the nice consequence that they can have the same CV that they would get by jumping from one company to the next every couple of years, but without the need to go through another hiring process, learning the culture in a company, and learning how the company operate, proving themselves to demonstrate that they deserve certain positions or certain roles.

So we actually offer this insane combination of variety, but within the same culture, within the same organization. And at the same time, of course, we're better known because we are larger, we have scale, we're better known than every single product we acquire.

So even that contributes to being more attractive. So through that mechanism, we're actually able to attract and retain talent that contributes to our talent density being higher, typically. And so if you have fewer people where talent density is higher, the typical result is that you can do much more with less.

And then on top of that, you also add the fact that by having experience working on so many different products in different verticals, we've just learned a lot of lessons. We failed a bunch of times to the point that we now know that it's best not to try that thing again because the likelihood of success is very low.

What are the hardest lessons that you've had to learn?

As a product person, you actually need to be optimistic,right? You need to believe that if you come up with an idea, there's a possibility that that idea will be revolutionary, that will lead to great things. It's the basis of being able to generate those ideas in the first place.

If you don't have that optimism, you're going to be like, "Oh, nothing will work. What am I even doing here?" So you need to start from there. But being optimistic about a thing and a thing sounding plausible and a thing sounding like it could work is very different from actually working in practice.

And so I think the general

one of the things that you'll learn by working for decades on so many different products is how often your ideas are wrong, how often you end up failing. And again, you need to it's a sort of it's a trade-off.

It's a fine balance between retaining that optimism that at the 10th attempt or the 15th attempt will show you the way, while at the same time retaining the common sense and the knowledge of probabilities that will tell you that a lot of things will fail.

And so you avoid overinvesting in things that sound good, but maybe you don't have validation for. Or as I said earlier, you avoid investing in things that they sound pretty reasonable, pretty rational, but you see them fail a bunch of times before, and you don't think that it's just a matter of not having found theright product for them to succeed,right?

So that helps a lot. It gives you a lot more common sense. It gives you a deeper understanding of reality, and it helps you focus your resources on the few initiatives that could really move the needle rather than having a more kind of spray and pray approach.

I know we have a few minutes left, but I think it was really great to hear over lunch with you and Francesco, the team, how impactful the IPO was for you all and in many different ways. So I'd love to hear from you.

I know you gave a speech at the IPO. What was your speech about? What was different?

So it was a very emotional moment for me. One of the reasons is that

because of our culture, we don't get to pause very often and celebrate achievements and milestones and pat ourselves on our shoulders. Of course, I mean, we're happy when things go well, but we've always had this mindset like, "What's the next challenge?

What can we do better? What can we do more?" And the IPO was a sort of forced stop to that mindset so that for one day we could just look back at what we accomplished and take it in.

So for me personally,

that day was really a you know that they say that in near-death experiences, you have your whole life flesh in front of you? I haven't tried those, but that's what they say. But in a way, that IPO was like a moment where all the whole experience and all the failures, all the hard work, all the people that contributed to it, they sort of

manifested very clearly in my thoughts. So very emotional. I have fond memories of that day. And well, that speech was

substantially

showing that our take, which is impossible sometimes, is just maybe, and it's not that impossible after all. I mean, that IPO was a clear example of that. We compressed the time it typically takes to IPO to much less than it normally does.

And the banks supporting us all believed that we would never make it for the day that we had planned to make it. So again, one more demonstration that we believe in this impossible maybe tagline. And then it was just thanking everyone for the insane amount of hard work that went into making Bending Spoons.

And I also add a personal reflection that I know was shared by a lot of people about the fact that, yes, it's spooners as we call ourselves that put in the hard work, but for sure, we benefited from having some friends and family and people around us cheering on us and supporting us and believing in us and making it possible for us to focus on making this possible than on other things.

And I know that that resonated with a lot of people, so I'm happy about it. But it was super emotional. And when I started talking, it was a short speech, so only a couple of minutes. But when I started talking, I felt the burden of representing everybody's thinking and everybody's emotion.

And I also was reminded about the fact that it wasn't really something that could repeat itself. So I had to make it work with just one attempt.

Yeah.

So at the very beginning, it felt almost impossible again. But then what I wanted to say and

how grateful I was for the people there and outside for their effort was so powerful and so strong that ultimately, I just delivered this speech. And it should have been Luca delivering it if he had decided to join us on the podium.

But I admire him so much for deciding to join the rest of the team on Times Square instead. And so he fell on me, not so much because I was theright person, but because I gave a couple of speeches before.

And so I probably was the best second alternative to it. But I'm really happy that I had that opportunity. And yeah, it was definitely a moment to remember.

Incredible. So many incredible stories. I said this before, but I'm going to have to come back to Bending Spoons.

Please do.

You guys have so much going on here.

Yeah, so much to tell.

There's so much. Well, thank you so much, Matt. I really appreciate the time and all of the expertise that you shared with us.

Thank you.

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Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit deel.com/sourcery. That's D-E-E-L.com/sourcery. Vali, welcome to Sourcery. Thank you for having me here at Bending Spoons.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

You're very welcome. So I'm, one, very excited to speak with you, but also a little bit intimidated. You've been here for five years. You're the general manager of AOL now. You manage 90-plus products. And it took you three applications to get in?

That'sright. Yeah, it took me three tries. The first one was for a summer internship a few years ago. I was still probably not ready, so I got rejectedright at the CV application. CV screening, gone. Then I tried again for First Ascent, which is a great event that we run for very highly talented students.

And I got rejected after almost getting at the end. And after that, I just said, "I want to get in now." I was rejected too many times, and I was like, "Now I have to prove myself that I can get in."

So I tried again, and the third was the charm.

What age did you start applying? Because you joined when you were 25. You're five years into this.

Yes.

How did you know Bending Spoons was going to be the most legit company owner?

So for this, I have to thank my sister, who's also a spooner, fun fact. She told me, "You should check out this company. It's really great. Sounds super fun." When I was around maybe 22, and that's the first time I applied.

And by then, Bending Spoons was not, of course, as well-known as it is today. But the more I got to know it, the more I got engaged, and I understood it was probably going to become a great company just because of the people who were running it and the people who were working here.

They were all awesome, and I was like, "I want to work with these guys."

So Christy was just telling me before we started that when you joined, there was an all-hands or a meeting of some sort, and you raised your hand to speak. And you said, "How do I get involved in the largest projects here?"

And you were just 25 at the time. He was a little bit intimidated by that, but then he also said, "That was pretty badass to come in fresh and immediately want to be put on the largest projects, and now you're GM of AOL and manage 90 products."

So what was the thinking there?

I think I just wanted to be involved to really listen in to what other people were saying, how they were thinking about things. I feel like here, the biggest thing you can do is to listen to people because everyone is so great and so talented that it's really a wasted opportunity not to listen in, at least in meetings.

So that's what really that was the angle why I was asking that question back then. And I think over the years, I learned how to just listen to people, understand more about what we do, understand the vision behind Bending Spoons from Luke, from Francesco, from the other Francesco.

We have so many Francescos, but many Francescos. And I guess I just leaned into the Bending Spoons culture, and

it worked very well.

In your five-year anniversary, Luca said you are two great things. You're very empathetic, and then you're also a go-getter yesterday. So how did you develop this intense desire and, I guess, what you guys call extreme ownership?

So I think everything was very much rooted in the first years I was here. At some point, I got asked to join an acquisition. It was a pretty small one compared to the ones we are doing now. And I joined there as a data analyst initially, but I was the only non-technical person there in the sense that I was working only with another software engineer.

So I started working in many roles at once. I started doing customer support and design, product management, growth management. And I got to get a bit of everything that we do here and understand more hands-on what everything is really about.

And I think this approach was really a privilege for me because it got me to understand all the roles, all the functions here, who does what, how things link together. And this kind of attitude, I think, is what really helped me then becoming a lead and helping others develop that kind of hands-on attitude and just get things done, which in the end is what drives this company.

I think getting things done is what we like the most.

Do you think most people put kind of superficial limits on themselves? And at what point do you break through that?

Yes, I do think. And I think that's actually a great point because this is one thing that Francesco Mancone, our CTO, really did well for me because every time I told him something like, "I don't know, Francesco. I don't know if we can do this.

I don't know if we can manage to get there," he was always telling me like, "It's easy." And once you click and you think that everything is easy to achieve, then impossible becomes really, really possible. And I think having this switch in mind is really what helped me with my trajectory here.

Every time thinking nothing is too hard to be achieved, which I think is also in our motto because our motto is "Impossible, maybe." I think that's really a mindset, and it drives a lot of the impact we have here at Bending Spoons.

Because you have had such a fast ascent, walk me through that. How did that happen, and how did the AOL deal happen for you?

So it was a pretty long journey because from this first acquisition I was telling you about, basically, we started embedding a few more other mobile apps that were left without a team here and there. So it was really just collecting a lot of unattended products back then in time.

And slowly, we started understanding that there was still a lot of impact to unlock. And with more and more acquisitions coming into Bending Spoons, many other teams and many other apps and products were embedded into my team. And then there was this one big acquisition, which was Mosaic, which is a large suite of mobile apps.

Once we acquired that, the team by then was 50 people, more than 80 apps. And we started really thinking big about what we could achieve. After that, another couple of acquisitions came in, and then AOL in January this year.

When I knew about AOL and about all the technical challenges that were involved there, I almost always

laid my eyes on it, and I was like, "Hmm, that looks very fun." So I volunteered to take on AOL.

But you're still managing Mosaic while you're leading AOL?

I have other managers who support on both the Mosaic acquisition and Remini, which I'm overseeing. Most of my focusright now is on the AOL acquisition. So I would say 80% of my time is devoted to AOL.

Did you ever think that you would be managing a very large American company?

No. Absolutely not. No way. If you told me this, but even three years ago, I would say impossible. But again, impossible, maybe.

Exactly what is the process through an acquisition for you guys? How big are the teams? How long do you set maybe target dates, milestones, goals you want to reach? I have no idea. What is the process like with an acquisition like that?

So when we start an acquisition, we always start from some very solid basis on which we believe we can help the business grow, where we see very untapped potential, where we could drive impact. We usually select those targets.

But after we acquire a company, that's where we really get hands-on on understanding everything. So we usually always start by interviewing everyone at the company to understand how things are working, like what we do, like what people do in their everyday work, what we can do better.

And we really try to map out everything that there is to know about the business because unlike how many people could think about acquisitions, you don't really know everything until you really enter the door,right? So you don't understand everything there is to understand before buying a company.

You need to get in, understand how people are running things, and decide where you want it to go from there. After that, what usually starts is this transformation phase. This is the moment where we apply our Bending Spoons platform.

We start designing the roadmap for the product, for the business, and how to make it grow. This phase for AOL was a bit different because there was this carve-out to be done. We acquired AOL from Yahoo, and we had to somehow re-platform everything onto the Bending Spoons platform from the Yahoo one.

And this took many months because it's technically and operationally very challenging, but it's also, I think, the most fun part of the project itself. So I'm obsessed by operational excellence in general. So I love to see things work out and puzzles.

That's what I love.

Did you find any surprises?

Many. Many surprises. Many surprises, but again, nothing that would change our excitement about the acquisition.

So I'm going to be interviewing Jim Lanzon of Yahoo. I think in a week or so, this might come out around the same time. I don't know. You never know when these get released. But in the prep of that and speaking with their team, it's kind of underrated.

A lot of people will say, "OK, AOL is a dead brand. It's kind of like a zombie company or something like that." But talking with their team and understanding the acquisition, no, it was a very healthy company. They got it to a great place.

You guys are going to make it to an even shinier place. But what were the kind of initial observations of the company and what you wanted to change?

Yeah. So as you say, AOL was a pretty healthy business when we acquired it, and it's still as of today. I think there are many misconceptions about the brand just because it's been there for a while. People think that it's dead, but instead, it has millions and millions of users who are still very active and still very engaged.

We have the news portal where we are envisioning to improve the content we can offer to users, the way we recommend content to users. And despite many perceptions, our user base is also very interested in exploring AI, maybe having someone who can start them to this experience.

And of course, there is also the mail product. And the mail product is extremely retaining by design,right? So people are extremely engaged with their mail. We have many ideas of how to make the mail better for our user base.

And we believe that the product has been slightly neglected in the past few years. So we believe to give it a fresh start with Bending Spoons.

You have a data background. So how do you think in terms of data and kind of the measurements of what success looks like?

So we are extremely scientific. I am also, but in general, at Bending Spoons, I would say we are very scientific in the way we approach things. So everything we do for our products, everything we want to test, we really test it.

So we A/B test everything we release because we never want opinions to get in the way of success. So I'm never asking people to do something, or we never say, "Let's do this," and then we just roll it out because of an opinion or because of a hunch, because of an idea we have.

We always test what we do. So that's where data really comes in. Unless there are KPIs that are really responding to what we're doing and that are indicating clear success, we don't release anything. So that's what I love because we have the possibility to test also very bold ideas and see how numbers and KPIs roll in that direction or in the other.

And then very statistically and very rigorously, we apply the changes.

Since Bending Spoons has quite the first principles approach to software and you've worked across so many products, what are the commonalities between maybe mistakes that were embedded in initial products that you had to fix or kind of intuitive things

that were missed or some things that were overlooked within those products?

I think the issue most of the time is that while obsessing on perfection, people miss so many opportunities to get things done and testing things. So I think the analysis paralysis, especially when it comes to, for example, code deploy or infrastructural design, those things can really slow down a product.

So you need very few but very solid bases when you build something, but then you need to add a lot of flexibility and make sure that there are

not super constraining processes or approval lines and things like this because in my experience, those are the things that kill a product, the inability to act on the product. And sometimes companies, just because they become bigger and bigger, they tend to overweight themselves with these processes and approvals and inability to really run the business.

Well, when you have an extremely talented and responsible team who really feel like owners of what they do, you really get to a place where people can drive change safely and meticulously, but without ever adding too much in terms of processes and all those things.

So I think this is always reflected in the code. It's always reflected in the infrastructure, but it's also reflected in the processes people have to follow that sometimes are just overly long or overly burdensome, like cumbersome.

What are the typical compositions of the teams working on various projects?

It's very diverse. I wouldn't say there is one fits-all kind of organization. It depends on the product, but I would say there is always maybe a 30%, 40% of engineers in our teams, and the rest is divided into more business-oriented roles like product managers, growth managers, customer support managers, designers.

So I would say a 40/60 business, engineering to business.

And where do you see most people are coming from?

Yeah. So we are looking to hire talent across all Europe. So of course, we have a nucleus in Italy just because that's where the company started. So that's where our brand is very strong. But I think we are becoming stronger and stronger in Europe.

And at some point, very soon probably, we're already doing it, we will start hiring also in the US.

For someone with such drive and motivation, this is a question I'll ask in most of my interviews. People will say, "Performance is a derivative of who you surround yourself with or who you're inspired by." Where did you get that drive?

Who are the people that keep you motivated?

You know, as cheesy as it could sound, really, I think all of my team does this with me every day just because it's composed of people who are so genuinely interested in moving things forward that it's impossible not to feel driven in this company.

When I first started, for sure, Francesco Mancone, who's the CTO today, and Luca Ferrari, our CEO, they have been two of the most relevant people in my growth. But there are so many others that it would be unfair not to mention just because they have all really participated in who I am and who I became in Bending Spoons.

So I'm thinking of my software engineering lead, Martina. She's awesome. Many others, so many others. I really couldn't name them all, but so many.

Do you find this culture to be unique between your friends' cultures or people you went to university with?

I would say sadly in the sense that I wished for all my friends to have the same experience in their companies. But I feel like so far, Bending Spoons has really been a one-of-a-kind, at least in Italy. So I hope many other companies will start applying this framework and the values that Bending Spoons have.

Of course, there are many others that are rising, and that's exciting. But for our most established companies, I feel like we are not there yet. And I wish people would start realizing that this is a model that really works and that we have so much talent in Italy, in Europe that just waits for a good opportunity to make their talents grow and shine, which, yeah, that's what I really hope.

But we are not there yet.

So as we close out, I have to ask you, what are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months?

I'm looking forward to making AOL shine and to finish this carve-out process so that we can really get hands-on on focusing 1,000% on the product and making sure we can give the best experience possible to our users.

What is the opportunity for AOL?

I think there is so much. We have so many ideas on how to grow the company with synergies, also with Bending Spoons products. There are so many. Our user base on AOL is extremely engaged. So we believe we can provide a lot of value for them through many different channels, many different ideas.

We know what they like. So it's very easy for us to present them with very relevant either products or content on both levels. There is so much opportunity.

Amazing.

I really look forward to that.

Vali, thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Molly. It was great being here.

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