After $18B IPO, Bending Spoons founder says success comes from minimizing luck
AOL is public again — sort of. Its owner Bending Spoons, the 13-year-old Italian company that has been quietly acquiring beloved but ailing Internet brands
AOL is public again — sort of. Its owner Bending Spoons, the 13-year-old Italian company that has been quietly acquiring beloved but ailing Internet brands for the past decade, went public on the Nasdaq today, opening at an over $18 billion valuation, with the stock then popping 40% by market close. Headquartered in Milan, Bending Spoons applied some of the private equity playbook to a long series of acquisitions — Meetup, Eventbrite, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and many others. But it is not a flip-and-sell scheme: it wants to transform these companies with tech and then hold onto them. “We want to place ourselves as an operator that takes beloved brands and makes them much better,” its cofounder and chief product officer, Matteo Danieli, told TechCrunch. The ‘how’ has generated controversy over the years, especially around layoffs. But the company also drove revenue growth, even more so with AI. “In the past year and a half, we’ve witnessed an incredible acceleration in the pace at which we were able to ship new features and create value for users,” Danieli told TechCrunch. That may be the right thing to say when investors, public and private, have much more appetite for AI than for aging SaaS businesses. But Bending Spoons has a case: its F-1, the equivalent of S-1 forms for foreign companies, includes a chapter called ‘AI before it was cool’ — a nod to its roots.
Before Bending Spoons, there was Evertale, “a product that would automatically create a diary of your life by leveraging what you would call AI today, and that we called machine learning then,” Danieli said. That startup failed, but it taught lessons to the cofounders and team members who now lead Bending Spoons — Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Luca Querella, and Danieli himself. “It sparked a reflection around the fact that you don’t always find perfect correlation between how talented entrepreneurs are and the success they have, especially from zero to one. Luck is a very big component of that equation. So we developed an obsession for finding a strategy that would, as much as possible, reduce the role that luck plays in growth and success,” Danieli said. The company also mentioned this philosophy in its F-1 with such lines as, “Luck plays a big role in finding product-market fit,” and “luck is irrelevant when pursuing operational excellence.” Those mantras show up in areas like pricing its products. “We try to leverage the sophisticated data tracking, analytics infrastructure and experimentation toolkit that we’ve developed.” According to Danieli, this sometimes leads the company to release more features for free to drive word of mouth. But it has also led to price increases that sparked complaints from long-term subscribers.
The BriefWire