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

Bending Spoons has announced the acquisition of Vimeo, a deal worth $1.3 billion, and WeTransfer, in a deal worth $500 million.

Evernote for $1.25 billion.

AOL for $1.5 billion. We don't sell the companies we buy.

Mm.

So they know that with us, the company has a forever home, 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, or 5 years. And with Bending Spoons, we can take care of it from the closing date. Within our portfolio, we have plenty of products. People who come into Bending Spoons don't need to come in because they want to work specifically on Vimeo, 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 still is today. It has millions and millions of users who are still very active and 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. All right, 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 Valentina, the GM of AOL. So, Luca—

Let's do this.

You want to take it away?

All right.

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.

All right. 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, which will be way bigger, so we're looking forward to that. Maybe next year.

How many floors is that one?

9, I think.

9.

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

Mm-hmm.

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. Everybody's the same in that regard.

Mm.

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 the quality overall. So what are the traits that you look for when hiring employees?

1. Hiring For Extreme Ownership

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 caring means— that's the extreme ownership trait you just referenced. It means they care tremendously about being amazing at what they do and delivering the greatest possible impact for the team and the company. That's the fire in 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?

That's a pretty huge question. But I'd say we have confirmed just how incredibly powerful it can be to have a small team of 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, and there's more process and 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?

2. Price Wins The Deal

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 is that typically we have offered the highest price. The reason why we've been able to do that is that, as an operator, we're so effective through the integration—by bringing our platform, our technologies, and our people—at generating value from businesses. We're typically capable of offering a better price than everybody else while delivering high returns for our shareholders. So that's certainly number 1.

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.

Mm.

So they know that with us, the company probably has a forever home. They've seen how much we can invest in the product and make it better, and many founders feel a sense of attachment, even a sense of legacy, connected with the products they helped develop. 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 to sell easier. So those are the 2 main things, I believe.

So you recently had a big milestone. Bending Spoons went public.

Mm-hmm.

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?

3. Sharing The IPO Spotlight

We thought that, generally, founders and executives more broadly tend to enjoy the spotlight more than they deserve. I think the world likes simple stories, and so they tend to have 1 or 2 faces at most that they associate with a company. But generally, those people may play an outsized role in the company's success, while many others have extremely important roles to play, sometimes even more important roles to play.

And so we figured it would be a nice gesture if I didn't take up 1 spot at Nasdaq, on the stage, so to say, but rather enjoy 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 was Laura, one of our colleagues from finance, one of the people who put in the greatest amount of effort toward achieving the APO.

Mm-hmm.

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

That's an amazing story. Well, Luca, 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 talking with me.

Of course. So you're head of M&A, and 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?

4. The Grindr Deal That Got Away

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 it. 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.

I had a young kid, so I decided to stay home. It was basically just me and Luca in the office, and he heard about the Grindr sale from a friend. The moment he heard about it, he thought, “Hey, this must be a great opportunity,” because we'd been looking at that space in the past. We'd been looking at the dating space, and we'd been looking at Grindr. We saw that despite being a product with very high retention, it was a really bad product. 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, and we started getting into it.

But everyone we talked to thought we were crazy because it would have been a massive acquisition for us at the time. The equivalent would be doing a $20 billion acquisition today.

Oh my God.

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

It was a very long process. We started looking at it 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 someone else came in with a slightly better proposal. Once we thought, “Okay, we’re going to get this,” because until a few months before, we were basically the only ones looking at it, then it became, “No, we’re not going to get that anymore,” because they went into exclusivity with someone else, and that was it. It just blew up.

At the beginning, it felt really annoying, bad, and sad because you had just worked so much. Basically half of the company was fully focused on that due diligence for almost a year. It felt like, “Okay, we’re going to get this. This is so important.”

But eventually, in hindsight, I’m probably happier that we didn’t acquire it because, given how big it would’ve been for Bending Spoons, Bending Spoons would’ve become Grindr. We would’ve probably fully focused on that, and we would not have developed Bending Spoons into what Bending Spoons is today.

On top of that, while it was a failure because we didn’t acquire it, I think we had so much compressed learning over those 9 months. We basically raised half a billion dollars without actually raising it, but it was fully committed. That was very valuable because then came the need to raise debt, raise equity, and talk with investors and 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?

Historically, we have relied primarily on debt. We started—I think our first loan was at the end of 2017—very early in Bending Spoons’ history. I think we raised $1 million or $2 million.

The evolution of the debt financing for Bending Spoons was gradual because it was about developing relationships with banks, lending slightly more every time, paying back the debt because it was fully amortized, and showing the banks that we delivered on our promises. Then we raised a little bit more, paid it back, and showed them again. There was a gradual path.

The big unlock was moving from simple bank loans to term loan agreements with U.S. lenders, and that happened at the beginning of 2025. That had to go through rating agencies giving you a rating, which was something new, as well as talking with different lenders that had never actually worked with you. You didn’t have that relationship of delivering against your promises, paying back, and raising more, which allows you to build a strong track record and raise faster and on better terms. So we had to start almost from the beginning with lenders at that time.

Equity was slightly different because we never raised primary equity all the way to 2023. That was our very first big institutional round. We had raised a little bit through secondary rounds with smaller investors, primarily from Italy, in previous years. But 2023 was the first big round, with Baillie Gifford, Cox Enterprises, and Durable coming in.

That was, again, something new: starting from scratch and having to educate investors about what we do. Our story, by construction, is a counterintuitive story. You need to learn and study Bending Spoons a little before really understanding the way it works. So, also for equity investors, it was a matter of showing them and teaching them before fully making them understand how it worked. I think that was an important moment.

Becoming public was a continuation of that, also because many of the big institutional investors that are part of Bending Spoons’ cap table today either were already part of previous institutional rounds or were investors that we had talked to many times in the past. We showed them, “Okay, we think we’re going to do this.” Then, after 6 months, we showed them that we had done it better, and then we showed them our plan for the following 6 to 12 months.

They had already learned about Bending Spoons, so it wasn’t something new for them. 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?

5. The Acquisition Selection Formula

We’ve always been very agnostic to the vertical and the category. We try to do things in different worlds and constantly expand the capabilities of the things that we can do.

At the very beginning, when we started Bending Spoons, we had a lot more knowledge about how to manage a mobile B2C product. Over time, that expanded into a broader B2B and B2C ecosystem, and then into the B2B world—first self-serve, and then, more recently, enterprise. With Tractive, we completed our first acquisition of a hardware-enabled digital business.

This is 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. We want our platform to be able to unlock a lot of value if applied to that business.

That can mean different things. Sometimes it’s the ability to attract talent. Sometimes it’s the ability to process data and get insights. Sometimes it’s our ability to attract new users. Every time we look at a business, we think, “How is our platform going to unlock value if applied to that business?”

The second thing is that we want to see a big revenue scale. Every transformation almost has a fixed cost that is independent of the revenue size, so we want to do a few acquisitions every year of bigger and bigger size. We don’t want to invest a team of 50 Spooners into transforming a $20 million-revenue business because that wouldn’t move the needle. The size continuously grows with Bending Spoons’ growth.

The last thing is 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, and businesses that were shrinking 5% year over year.

We judge predictability based on the data that we have about the company and the data that we have about other businesses that we own. We have a very data-driven process. But 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’re a founder and you’ve decided to sell your company, often it means that you want to do something else. You want to start a new project or spend more time with your family. If a private equity firm comes in and buys a business, generally that means the founder needs to be involved for the next 3, 4, or 5 years.

With Bending Spoons, we can take care of it from the closing date, and that’s highly valued by founders because they know that once they sell, they can move on to the next project.

The second thing is that they know their product legacy will be preserved with Bending Spoons because of our ability to reignite innovation and put all the Spooners behind the development of the product and the technology.

We started receiving more and more feedback from founders about this specifically, with founders coming to us almost proactively and saying, “Okay, I’d 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, which otherwise I wouldn’t know how it would be handled by a private equity firm.”

We’re also fast and very straightforward. I think we’re starting to build a reputation for 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 wouldn’t say it was specifically a question, but a topic. Most people had been focusing on the standard questions: “What’s your organic growth? What’s your retention? How do you do this and how do you do that?” Very few fully understood the fact that the real secret sauce of Bending Spoons is the talent and really dug into that.

I remember this specific investor who spent almost an hour and a half focusing only on that and asking thoughtful questions about our hiring process, how we retain talent, what the culture is, how we develop the culture, and why it’s different.

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

We were talking about talent a lot with Luca, with Vali, and 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.

Yeah.

Why did you make that decision? And also, why do they get vested on day 1?

6. Ownership Without Vesting

Dropping the vesting was something that we introduced more recently. I'll get to that in a second.

The reason why we started offering secondary transactions for team members to sell some of their shares, if they wanted to, was to really show the value of their ownership of Bending Spoons. It also showed that they were now locked into that until a specific event in the far future that they didn't know when or how it would unlock. 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.

That links well into how we actually do compensation. You get specific yearly compensation, fixed, non-variable components, and then you decide how much to convert into equity and how much to convert into cash. 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 can actually decide to get it all in cash if you wanted to. So you know that, at that point in time, it's precisely the value that you're unlocking.

That, plus the fact that you can then, within a year or a year and a half, convert that back into cash and see the appreciation of it—because every year or year and a half, when the new round was coming, you could see that your ownership increased in value—allowed us to create a sense of ownership almost as a public company while being private.

I think that was very important and allowed us to then become a public company without that big of a step change in the private-company feel. Everyone is super invested, and everyone feels, “Oh, now I'm going to be able to sell my shares.” That was already possible before, so there wasn't that big of a change.

The same thing applies to not creating a vesting structure that created weird kinds of incentives. Similar to not creating variable components, we want everything to be simple and straightforward. You created value within a certain year, and you're going to be rewarded for that. If you leave the day after, you're still being rewarded because of the work you've done before. So that's the reason for dropping the vesting.

That has 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. Of course, we're also in a different context. Being in Italy or in Europe more broadly is different than being in San Francisco, as is probably San Francisco compared with New York or Miami. I think San Francisco is a very specific context.

But yeah, I think the reason why we have this low churn, despite the fact that we have no vesting, is also the very strong culture we developed and the fact that we hire young talent that then develops within Bending Spoons. There's less of a feeling that, if I hire only people who already have 15 years of experience, they are 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 afterward. With Bending Spoons, it's different.

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

Well, the previous 6 months were kind of out of the ordinary, given the fact that we had the listing process, which was unique and 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 rich. We have a lot of prioritization to make. 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 from, picking the best is quite important.

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

Thank you. Thank you, Molly.

Matt, thank you for joining us. We are on a wild tour of Bending Spoons, and now we're with you. You're VP of Product and a co-founder. You've been with the company since the very beginning—13 years. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for being here.

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

7. Meritocracy Has No Ceiling

What happened is that some months ago, I was chief product officer at Bending Spoons, and it became evident that one of our product managers, who had an incredible career and had joined some years before, had matured into a professional who was definitely able to create more value in the position I was in than I was.

When I had that realization, I decided to go through the painful step of stepping down so that he could fill that role. 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 the concept of meritocracy and how much we care about meritocracy here. We try to operate, when possible, by first principles. I don't think I'm going to say anything controversial if I say that, if you look at our organization and hope to achieve the highest possible level of effectiveness of that organization, given a certain set of people who are part of it, you need to make sure that every position is filled by the person who is the best fit for 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. What it implies is that, especially at a company like ours, where we are constantly raising the bar for the quality and talent of the people we attract and hire, we become a better-known company. We acquire better-known products, so our employer brand grows and we attract better people.

At the same time, we care a lot about the selection process and making sure that we feed whatever signal we get from the success people are having in the company back into the way we test people. 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.

At that point, you'll get into situations where it becomes apparent that a lead would be better off stepping down so that somebody else who would be better in that role could take on that role.

Now, it sounds linear and 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. Going to a lead or 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 it's best for you to step down,” is 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. In my previous role, it happened a few times that I had to deal with these types of situations.

It's always been extremely tough, but what they have in common is that I was always very proud and sure that it 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 it was one of the toughest, but also one of the highest-ROI things.

That's both because you get someone filling a high-leverage role who'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: something I'm very proud of is that, if you take a look at some of our business units, some of our products, and some of our functions, you'll find that some of the people filling those very high-leverage positions aren't even 30, or maybe they've just turned 30. Especially in Italy, where you have a culture whereby people who have been in a job for a long time will be entrenched in those positions.

But I would say even worldwide, knowing that people who are 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. This 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. 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 might stop applying it. 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. 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. He puts out a form where he asks people he trusts whether they believe that somebody else could take his role who would be better positioned to lead the company, and whether anyone is dissatisfied with his performance. It might look like some sort of performative act from outside. Nobody will really tell you that you're doing a poor job, but he actually means it.

Yeah.

And I think, 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 anyone, if they work intensely enough and 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. So I could definitely see him wanting all those data points around his performance and execution, and how to make the organization better.

Yeah, the ultimate act of truth-seeking right now.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then, to your point earlier, it's really interesting that even if they're young—if you have younger folks in their 20s or 30s—it doesn't matter. If they're skilled, they will rise to the top. We're having Vali on, and I would say she's quite humble, but she's so impressive, leading 90 products and being the GM of AOL. It's so cool to see that kind of rise and ascent so fast within 5 years.

Yeah, we love her, and in general, I think it's an intoxicating feeling that you get in here: nothing is precluded, and this is a place where you can really grow as quickly as possible. There are many components to a person growing professionally, and one component is absolutely experience. The way we try to give people 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, this whole package is necessary for everyone here to get that feeling of everything being possible, that there's no limit to how fast they can grow.

One of the dreams that we had when we founded Bending Spoons was to create the best company in the world. 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 and most relevant way.

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

Right. The expression "startup mode" was born out of the necessity to counter some of the most frequent criticisms that we get when we acquire companies. Given that the acquisition and the integration often entail a decrease in headcount and a profound restructuring of teams, an external observer who'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 will reasonably determine, or 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 the product will deteriorate, the quality will go down, and customers and users will not be served in the same way as they were before.

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

Typically, people will associate the startup phase with 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, with people feeling that basically everything could be their responsibility. There's a sense of ownership that involves each and every one, intensity in the work, hard work, and ambition.

What typically happens is that—I'm not claiming that this is what happens with all companies; as a matter of fact, there are 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 as a product becomes more successful, both founders and investors will feel it's actually the best thing to do to add people, to increase the team, because naturally you'll think that with more people you'll be able to pursue more opportunities and more objectives.

You'll be able to do more for 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 the right 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 subteams.

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 who have bright ideas and are hungry for impact will feel like they need to involve 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 communication complexity.

And then you start seeing some misaligned incentives as well. 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 who optimize for their own careers to the detriment of what's good for the company. If I'm the manager, I understand that if I want my role to grow in importance, I'll have to grow the number of people on my team, and so on and so forth. But sometimes that growth might not be necessary. So you have all sorts of misaligned incentives.

Ultimately, long story short, you end up with a company whose promise was, “We'll have more people, we'll do more things,” but then everything slows down and that doesn't happen. And it's not because people aren't talented. It's just a consequence of incentives being placed incorrectly, organizational growth, and stuff like that.

This is all to say that what we really try to do when we acquire a company and allocate a team is 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 4 different teams. As a consequence, 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 1 product manager responsible for managing the product and, at the same time, managing the relationship with customers. That person gets an unfiltered view of what's necessary and has all the knowledge to talk to a customer, knowing what's going to be easy to implement, what makes sense to prioritize, and so on. So there are plenty of advantages that come from simply undoing some of that corporification, if you can call it that, which happens to companies over time.

But to that, we add a lot of other things. For one, talent density. Even if you believe that, all other things being equal, the companies we acquire are as attractive to talent as we are, we do have an advantage that's very hard to replicate. As we were talking about before, within our portfolio we have plenty of products. People who come to Bending Spoons don't need to come because they want to work specifically on Vimeo, WeTransfer, or AOL. 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.

The nice consequence is that they can have the same CV 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, learn a company's culture, learn how the company operates, and prove themselves to demonstrate that they deserve certain positions or roles. We actually offer this insane combination of variety within the same culture and within the same organization.

At the same time, of course, we're better known because we're larger and have scale. We're better known than every single product we acquire, so even that contributes to being more attractive. Through that mechanism, we're able to attract and retain talent, which typically contributes to higher talent density. If you have fewer people and higher talent density, the typical result is that you can do much more with less. On top of that, by having experience working on so many different products in different verticals, we've learned a lot of lessons.

Mm.

We've failed a bunch of times, to the point that we now know 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 it will be revolutionary and lead to great things. That'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 think, “Nothing will work. What am I even doing here?”

So you need to start from there. But being optimistic about something, and something sounding plausible or like it could work, is very different from it actually working in practice. One of the things you'll learn by working for decades on so many different products is how often your ideas are wrong and how often you end up failing.

Again, you need to retain that optimism that the 10th or 15th attempt will show you the way, while at the same time retaining the common sense and knowledge of probabilities that tell you a lot of things will fail. That way, you avoid overinvesting in things that sound good but maybe don't have validation, or investing in things that sound pretty reasonable and rational but that you've seen fail a bunch of times before. You don't think it's just a matter of not having found the right product for them to succeed, right?

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

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

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 to celebrate achievements and milestones or pat ourselves on the back. Of course, we're happy when things go well, but we've always had this mindset: “What's the next challenge? What can we do better? What can we do more?”

The IPO was a sort of forced stop to that mindset so that, for 1 day, we could just look back at what we'd accomplished and take it in. For me personally, that day was really a moment where the whole experience, all the failures, all the hard work, and all the people who contributed to it manifested very clearly in my thoughts.

It was very emotional. I have fond memories of that day. The speech was substantially about showing that our take—that “impossible” is sometimes just “maybe”—isn't that impossible after all. 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 by the day we had planned. So, again, it was one more demonstration of what we believe in with the “Impossible is just maybe” tagline.

Then it was just thanking everyone for the insane amount of hard work that went into making Bending Spoons. I also added a personal reflection that I know was shared by a lot of people. Yes, it's Spooners, as we call ourselves, who put in the hard work, but we benefited from having friends, family, and people around us cheering us on, supporting us, and believing in us. They made it possible for us to focus on making this possible rather than on other things. I know that resonated with a lot of people, and so I'm happy about it.

It was super emotional. When I started talking, I felt the burden of representing everybody's thinking and everybody's emotion. I was also reminded that it wasn't really something that could repeat itself. I had to make it work with just 1 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 the speech. 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 in Times Square instead. He followed me, not so much because I was the right person, but because I had given a couple of speeches before, and 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 gonna have to come back to Bending Spoons.

Please do. Whenever you want.

You guys have so much going on here.

Yeah, so much to tell.

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

Thank you.

Vali, welcome to Sourcery. Thank you for having me here at Bending Spoons.

Thank you for having me.

You're very welcome. I'm very excited to speak with you, but also a little bit intimidated. You've been here for 5 years. You're the general manager of AOL now. You manage 90-plus products, and it took you 3 applications to get in?

8. Rejection Led To AOL

That's right. Yeah, it took me 3 tries. The first was for a summer internship a few years ago. I was still probably not ready, so I got rejected right at the CV-screening stage. 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 to the end.

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 to 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 5 years into this.

Yes.

How did you know Bending Spoons was gonna be the most legit company on earth?

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.

That's the first time I applied. 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 engaged I got, and I understood it was probably gonna 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 wanna work with these guys.”

Christie 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. You said, “How do I get involved in the largest projects here?” 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 wanna be put on the largest projects. 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 and how they were thinking about things. I feel like here, the biggest thing you can do is 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.

That was the angle behind 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, and understand the vision behind Bending Spoons from Luca, from Francesco, from the other Francescos. We have so many Francescos. Many Francescos.

I guess I just leaned into the Bending Spoons culture, and it worked very well.

At your 5-year anniversary, Luca said you are 2 great things: you're very empathetic, and you're also a go-getter. So how did you develop this intense desire and, I guess, what you guys call extreme ownership?

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. 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 do a bit of everything that we do here and understand more hands-on what everything is really about.

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, and how things link together. This kind of attitude, I think, is what really helped me then become a lead and help 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 superficial limits on themselves? And at what point do you break through that?

Yes, I do think so, and I think that's actually a great point because this is one thing that Francesco Mancone, our CTO, really did well for me. 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, “It's easy.” And once you click and you think that everything is easy to achieve, then the impossible becomes really, really possible.

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.

You've had such a fast ascent. Just walk me through that. How did that happen, and how did the AOL deal happen for you?

It was a pretty long journey because, from this first acquisition I was telling you about, basically we started embedding a few more mobile apps that were left without a team here and there. It was really just collecting a lot of unattended products back then, and slowly we started understanding that there was still a lot of impact to unlock.

With more and more acquisitions coming into Bending Spoons, many other teams and many other apps and products were embedded into my team. Then there was this one big acquisition, Mosaic, which is a large suite of mobile apps. Once we acquired that, the team by then was 50 people and 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 all the technical challenges that were involved there, I immediately set 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 me on both the Mosaic acquisition and Remini, which I'm overseeing. Most of my focus right 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 even 3 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 target dates, milestones, and goals you want to reach? What is it? I have no idea.

What is the process like with an acquisition like that?

Yeah.

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 untapped potential and where we could drive impact. We usually select those targets. But after we acquire a company, that's where we really get hands-on in understanding everything.

We usually always start by interviewing everyone at the company to understand how things are working, what people do in their everyday work, and what we can do better. We really try to map out everything there is to know about the business because, unlike what many people might think about acquisitions, you don't really know everything until you enter the door, right? 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 and 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. 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. I'm obsessed with operational excellence in general, so I love to see things work out and solve puzzles. That's what I love.

Did you find any surprises?

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

I'm going to be interviewing Jim Lanzone 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.

In preparing for that and speaking with their team, it's kind of underrated. A lot of people will say, "Okay, 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 an even shinier place. What were the initial observations of the company, and what did you want to change?

Yeah. So, as you say, AOL was a pretty healthy business when we acquired it, and it still is 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 envision improving the content we can offer to users and the way we recommend content to users. Despite many perceptions, our user base is also very interested in exploring AI, maybe having someone who can get them started with this experience.

Of course, there is also the mail product, and the mail product is extremely retaining by design, right? People are extremely engaged with their mail. We have many ideas about 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 in giving it a fresh start with Bending Spoons.

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

We are extremely scientific. I am too, but in general, at Bending Spoons, I would say we are very scientific in the way we approach things. Everything we do for our products, everything we want to test, we really test it. We A/B-test everything we release because we never want opinions to get in the way of success.

I'm never asking people to do something, and we never say, "Let's do this," and then just roll it out because of an opinion, a hunch, or an idea we have. We always test what we do, so that's where data really comes in. Unless there are KPIs that are responding to what we're doing and indicating clear success, we don't release anything.

That's what I love, because we have the possibility to test very bold ideas and see whether the numbers and KPIs move in that direction or the other. Then, very statistically and rigorously, we apply the changes.

Since Bending Spoons takes quite a first-principles approach to software, and you've worked across so many products, what are the commonalities between the mistakes embedded in initial products that you had to fix, or intuitive things that were missed—things that were overlooked within those products?

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

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 aren't overly constraining processes or approval lines and things like that. In my experience, those are the things that kill a product: the inability to act on the product.

Sometimes companies, just because they become bigger and bigger, tend to overburden themselves with these processes and approvals and an inability to really run the business. But when you have an extremely talented and responsible team who really feel like owners of what they do, you get to a place where people can drive change safely and meticulously, without ever adding too much in terms of processes and all those things.

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, which are sometimes just overly long or cumbersome.

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

It's very diverse. I wouldn't say there is a one-size-fits-all kind of organization. It depends on the product, but I would say there are always maybe 30% to 40% engineers on our teams. The rest is divided into more business-oriented roles, like product managers, growth managers, customer support managers, and designers. So I would say it's 40/60, engineering to business.

Where do you see most people coming from?

We're looking to hire talent across Europe. 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'll start hiring in the US as well.

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 who keep you motivated?

As cheesy as it may sound, I think my entire 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, Francesco Mancone, who's the CTO today, and Luca Ferrari, our CEO, were 2 of the most relevant people in my growth. But there are so many others that it would be unfair not to mention them, just because they have all really participated in who I am and who I became at Bending Spoons.

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

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

I would say sadly, in the sense that I wish all my friends could have the same experience in their companies. I feel like, so far, Bending Spoons has really been one of a kind, at least in Italy.

I hope many other companies will start applying this framework and the values that Bending Spoons has. Of course, there are many others that are rising, and that's exciting. But for our most established companies, I feel like we're not there yet. I wish people would start realizing that this is a model that really works and that we have so much talent in Italy and Europe that just waits for a good opportunity to make their talents grow and shine.

That's what I really hope, but we're not there yet.

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 finishing this carve-out process, so that we can really get hands-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 and many different ideas. We know what they like, so it's very easy for us to present them with very relevant products or content, on both levels. There is so much opportunity.

Amazing.

I really look forward to that.

Vale, thank you so much.

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