Bending Spoons Operating Manual: Be Good. Not Lucky.

This is part of my operating manual series, which opens up the playbook of private equity and company building luminaries. Check out past ones with Mark Leonard, Andrew Wilkinson, Robert F. Smith, ESW Capital, and many more.

Hiring? South helps US tech companies build high-performing teams in Latin America. Interview top candidates for free.

What is Bending Spoons?

Bending Spoons is an Italian technology company, founded in 2013, that acquires digital businesses, rebuilds them, levers them up, and reinvests the cash flow into more acquisitions. It is the clearest European answer to Constellation Software (their operating manual here), though as you will see, the two run very different plays under the hood.

I have called them "private equity hipsters" before, and the label still fits: a new kind of perpetual owner built for the app store generation. They buy past their prime but financially sound consumer and prosumer apps, cut deep, switch the monetization to subscriptions, raise prices, modernize the product, and keep the business forever.

The 2026 IPO filing finally gives us audited numbers instead of press leaks. The company did $1.31 billion in revenue in 2025, up 95% year over year, and roughly $1.6 billion on a trailing twelve month basis through Q1 2026. It owns more than 50 businesses, including Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Eventbrite, AOL, StreamYard, Meetup, Brightcove, komoot, and Remini. It serves more than 500 million monthly active users and 9 million paying customers. Its core team, the people it calls Spooners, is only about 620 strong (total headcount is around 2,300 once you include the acquired teams it is still transitioning), and it is headquartered in Milan. It has applied to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker "BSP."

Ferrari has described the company as "like private equity had a baby with Google," which is about right: world class operations applied to neglected software, with a financial structure underneath that looks a lot more like private equity than tech. The detail is in the Playbook below.

Bending Spoons is going public. What does the IPO tell us?

On June 8, 2026, Bending Spoons filed its Form F-1 with the SEC (the foreign issuer equivalent of an S-1). Reports peg the target valuation at around $20 billion, with a raise that could exceed $1.5 billion. That is a remarkable mark up: the company was last valued privately at $11.7 billion in October 2025. Its earliest backers have done extraordinarily well. Tamburi Investment Partners, which invested in 2019, is reportedly sitting on roughly a 20x return.

A few things the filing makes clear that prior coverage did not:

• Founder control is locked in. The IPO uses a dual class structure. The four co-founders (Matteo Danieli, Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, and Luca Querella) hold class A shares carrying five votes each, while public investors get one vote per ordinary share. They keep control after listing.
• They use leverage deliberately. Total debt sits at $4.36 billion against $741 million of cash as of March 31, 2026. Interest expense was $143 million in 2025, and $93 million in the first quarter of 2026. This is closer to a private equity capital structure than a typical software balance sheet, and it is central to how the returns are generated.
• They told investors they may buy back their own stock. In the founder letter they nod to Henry Singleton and Tom Murphy and write that perhaps their best acquisition opportunity will be the shares of their own company. That is a Teledyne style signal.
• Profitability is improving fast. They swung from a $4.6 million operating loss in Q1 2025 to $120 million of operating income in Q1 2026. Adjusted operating income margin reached 51% in Q1 2026.

Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Allen & Company are leading the offering. Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, and Neuberger Berman are among the blue chip outside holders.

How did Bending Spoons get started?

The origin story is in the founder letter, and it is better than the version that has circulated for years.

It starts on the night of August 2, 2010, in Lombok, Indonesia. Three engineering graduates backpacking after school, Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli, and Luca Ferrari, decided to start a company together. Two months later they launched Evertale, a smartphone app that used AI to automatically generate a user's diary (unrelated to Evernote, which they would buy more than a decade later).

They raised about a million dollars, built a team of ten, and worked themselves to the bone. It did not work. By mid 2013 they had almost no revenue and roughly four months of runway. Evertale was a failure. They liquidated it and kept the leftover $40,000.

Two lessons came out of that wreckage, and they became the entire strategy:

1. Luck dominates the search for product market fit. They watched brilliant founders fail and mediocre ones succeed. If luck mattered that much early on, then a lot of decent businesses were being run badly, and a better operator could fix them.
2. Luck is irrelevant to operational excellence. Getting world class at running a digital business is about talent, dedication, and tight feedback loops. The problem was that their hard won operating skill was being wasted on a product nobody wanted.

So they decided to stop hunting for product market fit and buy businesses that already had it, then apply world class operations. They took the leftover $40,000, brought along two Evertale standouts (Luca Querella and Tomasz Greber), and started Bending Spoons.

The name is a nod to the scene in The Matrix where a boy bends a spoon with his mind. Founded in Copenhagen as Bending Spoons ApS in 2013, they relocated to Italy through a cross border merger (becoming an Italian S.r.l. in 2015) and converted to a joint stock company, Bending Spoons S.p.A., in 2017. Their first acquisition was a $10,000 iOS keyboard personalization app. They improved it, roughly doubled their money, and reinvested. Thirteen years later they are buying businesses in the billions. They have never sold a material business.

What is the Playbook?

The prospectus describes a clean three step Playbook (acquire, transform and optimize, reinvest) that has not changed since 2013. That is true at the altitude of a founder letter. But the operating reality, pieced together from the credit reports, the acquisition post mortems, and Ferrari's own interviews, is more concrete and more interesting. Here is what actually happens.

Step 1: Buy fair, buy fast, buy on adjusted EBITDA. They target financially sound but neglected consumer and prosumer apps. They put what they consider a very fair price on the table immediately and are not willing to negotiate much from it. They underwrite to adjusted EBITDA, meaning EBITDA after the cost cuts and price increases they already know they will make. They want to be the disciplined, reliable counterparty that wins clean processes, not the bidder who gets dragged up in an auction.

Step 2: Cut costs hard. Two levers. First, right size the workforce, often dramatically, frequently by structuring the deal as an asset purchase so the existing team is simply left behind. Second, centralize everything that can be centralized: product, payments, marketing, SEO, and general and administrative functions all get absorbed into shared teams.

Step 3: Fix monetization. Switch the business from one off or lifetime purchases to recurring subscriptions, and raise prices, often by 2 to 4 times. Some customers churn. Revenue usually goes up anyway.

Step 4: Recycle the cash. Pour the resulting cash flow into two things: building out the proprietary technology platform (they describe roughly 50 in house technologies), and buying more businesses. Then repeat.

The philosophical core, stated plainly in the filing: they decide on expected returns, not organic growth. Growth assumptions feed the price they will pay, but once those are set, the buy decision is driven purely by return, assuming they never sell. This is the same instinct I run on at Verne, and the same returns first discipline Mark Leonard preaches at Constellation.

Multiple arbitrage: the math under the playbook

None of the underlying math is unique to Bending Spoons. It is the ordinary multiple arbitrage that rewards any disciplined serial acquirer, Constellation included: buy a neglected business cheap, somewhere around 3 to 5 times adjusted EBITDA, carry sensible debt against it, roughly 5 times, and hold it inside a company the market values far higher (Bending Spoons was worth close to 13 times EBITDA at its late 2025 financing). That re rating, amplified by leverage, is what produces the 65% levered and roughly 25% unlevered return hurdles the filing cites. The only real question, as for any acquirer, is whether they can keep clearing those hurdles as the deals get bigger and the capital base grows.

What is the Platform (people, technology, data)?

The most important idea in the whole filing is what they call the Platform. Their argument is simple: the Playbook itself is not a moat, since anyone can say "buy, fix, reinvest." The moat is the machine that executes it. The Platform has three parts:

• People. A talent dense core team they call "Spooners," deployed flexibly across the portfolio and moved between businesses on short notice.
• Proprietary technologies. A suite of integrated internal tools (data infrastructure, a lifetime value predictor, an experimentation toolkit, a payments system, a recruiting system) dropped into every business they buy.
• Proprietary data. Data from 50 plus acquisitions, including 3,000 experiments run in 2025 and 3.8 billion data points processed per day on average in Q1 2026, used to benchmark what an acquired business should be able to achieve.

Here is the key nuance, and it is the engine room of the whole cost model. Their internal analytics platform plugs deep into each acquired app, every product change is A/B tested, and a central engineering team can iterate on the product directly. In some cases this lets them develop a product with very little direct customer input, which is part of how they run so lean. It is a powerful capability, and as the FiLMiC example below shows, the team has learned to pair it with deeper customer research for specialized professional audiences.

How has Bending Spoons performed financially?

Here is the audited picture from the filing (figures in USD).

Revenue: $387 million (2023), $671 million (2024, up 73%), $1.31 billion (2025, up 95%), $601 million (Q1 2026, up 132% year over year). Roughly an 84% revenue CAGR from 2023 through 2025. On a pro forma basis including full years of AOL, Vimeo, and Eventbrite, the run rate is meaningfully higher again.

Operating income (GAAP): $84 million (2023), $127 million (2024), $278 million (2025), $120 million (Q1 2026), at margins around 20%.

Adjusted operating income (their preferred metric, which strips out amortization of acquired intangibles, transaction costs, and reorganization costs): $137 million (2023), $299 million (2024), $613 million (2025), $308 million (Q1 2026), at margins of 36%, 45%, 47%, and 51%.

The gap between those GAAP and adjusted numbers is the whole game, so do not take the headline margins at face value. Reported net income was roughly break even in 2025, dragged down as interest expense ballooned to $143 million. Adjusted net income was $376 million.

A few of the metrics that matter most for this kind of business:

• Net revenue retention: 93% (2023), 91% (2024), 95% (2025), 94% (Q1 2026), or about 96% on the blended basis the company cites. Note these sit below 100%, so the portfolio grows through acquisition and price increases, not pure net expansion of the existing base.
• Organic growth: 7% in 2024 and 13% in 2025 (6% in Q1 2026). Healthier than skeptics assume, though it varies year to year, and the headline growth is still powered mainly by continued M&A.
• Subscription mix: 93% of 2025 revenue.
• Subscriber tenure: revenue weighted average of 8.0 years, with 48% of subscription revenue from customers of 5 plus years. That long tenure is the foundation of the predictability they underwrite to.
• Scale: monthly active users went from 111 million (Dec 2023) to over 500 million (Mar 2026); paying customers tripled from 3 million to 9 million.

What deals has Bending Spoons done?

They have completed more than 50 acquisitions. The pace: one deal in 2023, five in 2024, six in 2025, and two in Q1 2026 (2017 was the only year with more than ten, and 2020 had none because they diverted resources to build a COVID contact tracing app for the Italian government, pro bono). Aggregate enterprise value deployed scaled from $194 million in 2023 to $876 million in 2024, $1.92 billion in 2025, and $2.01 billion in Q1 2026 alone. The deals are getting much bigger, by design.

The current main businesses, which together are more than 80% of revenue: AOL (Jan 2026), Brightcove (Feb 2025), Eventbrite (Mar 2026), Evernote (Jan 2023), Harvest (Jul 2025), komoot (Mar 2025), Remini (Jun 2021), StreamYard (Apr 2024, via Hopin), Vimeo (Nov 2025), and WeTransfer (Jul 2024). Other names in the filing include Issuu, Meetup, Loomly, MileIQ, Mosaic Group, FiLMiC, Splice, and the May 2026 addition Tractive.

The reported economics of the two largest recent deals tell you where this is heading. AOL came at roughly a $1.5 billion price for a business reported to generate around $400 million of EBITDA on more than $500 million of revenue, under 4 times EBITDA. Vimeo cost roughly $1.4 billion for a business generating only about $50 million of free cash flow, a bet entirely on the transformation. As Ferrari has put it, the strategy now is fewer acquisitions, but bigger.

Case studies: Evernote, StreamYard, Remini, Mosaic, komoot, and FiLMiC

The prospectus showcases three flagship turnarounds. Independent reporting fills in the deals that show the model's full range, including the ones they learned the most from (RollUpEurope has a great report on them). Together they are the real curriculum.

Evernote (2023, the flagship turnaround). At acquisition Evernote had more than 200 million accounts created and an average customer tenure of 7.2 years, on dated technology. Within a year they cut headcount from 341 to 60 (an 82% reduction), brought management layers from four to two, tore the monolith apart into microservices, and moved from a polling to an event driven model. Product release cadence rose 50% in 2023 and doubled in 2024. They later moved about half the remaining Evernote team onto Harvest, and still shipped Evernote v11 in early 2026, the biggest update in years.

StreamYard (2024). They cut headcount from 154 to 44 in under a year (a 71% reduction), folding general and administrative work into shared teams. They paused all paid advertising and rebuilt acquisition with their own tooling, generating an estimated 142% more new registered users in 2025 versus 2023 despite spending 11% less. More than 140 monetization tests lifted organic to paid conversion by 66% and average revenue per active user by 64%.

Remini (2021). An asset deal with no team transferring, staffed initially with about 30 Spooners, scaled to a peak of 64, then pulled back to roughly 20 as priorities shifted. They rewrote the codebase, then added AI features in 2023 that drove a surge. By 2025 Remini had more than five times the monthly active users and more than nine times the revenue versus pre acquisition.

Mosaic (2024, the bargain). A watershed deal that showed how cheap they can buy. They acquired 40 plus mobile apps from IAC for $160 million, about 1 times trailing revenue and only 2 to 3 times adjusted EBITDA. Mosaic had been declining (revenue fell from $199 million in 2019 to $156 million in 2023, a 13% EBITDA margin) and had roughly half its team in Belarus, a hard place to operate after 2022. Because it was an asset deal, the existing team did not transfer with the apps. Three months in, they raised prices 2 to 4 times. RoboKiller's annual plan went from $39.99 to $89.99, and revenue jumped as much as 30% even as the number of paying customers fell.

komoot (2025, paying up for quality). The German outdoor routing app grew revenue at a 20% CAGR from 2020 to 2024 and was tracking toward €50 million. Bending Spoons reportedly paid around €300 million, roughly 6 times sales and 25 times EBITDA, a full price. What made it attractive: six founders who had spent fifteen years building komoot and were ready for the right long term home for it, a product with around 45 million users, and clear room to improve monetization and efficiency. The founders moved on shortly after closing and the team was streamlined while keeping the sales function largely intact. Bending Spoons is now testing subscription pricing (weekly plans around €4.99 to €7.99, annual around €59.99 to €99.99) and guiding one off map buyers toward subscriptions. So far the company reports no degradation, with monthly active users at all time highs.

FiLMiC (2022, a learning moment). A useful example of how the team refines its approach. FiLMiC was a professional video app for smartphones. The same playbook that worked beautifully for the broad consumer base of Splice (their 2018 video acquisition from GoPro) was a less natural fit here. Moving FiLMiC from a one off lifetime price to a weekly subscription did not resonate with its smaller community of professional filmmakers, and the product lost momentum. The takeaway Bending Spoons carried forward is a valuable one: a professional niche needs a different, more consultative touch than a mass consumer audience. It is a good reminder that even an excellent operating machine keeps learning which approach fits which user base.

How does Bending Spoons source and price a deal?

The Business Acquisitions team, led by co-founder Francesco Patarnello, runs deals end to end and includes engineers and data scientists to improve automation and forecast accuracy. The funnel is brutal: in 2025 they sourced over 2,500 opportunities, ran in depth analysis on about 200, and closed six.

The valuation process is unusually disciplined:

• They build assumptions as probability distributions across dozens of dimensions, informed heavily by their proprietary data.
• They do not run any simulations or look at the projections until the assumptions are locked, a deliberate guard against nudging assumptions to justify a price.
• Then they model expected returns across price points and probability weighted scenarios, using both levered and unlevered IRR.

Four principles guide the offer: Spooner capacity is the scarce resource (every deal is weighed against the opportunity cost of pulling talent off other work); margin of safety (no major investment unless it returns acceptably even in bad scenarios); patience (decline good deals when better ones look likely soon); and reputation (best offer up front, little movement after). They also run a retrospective on every closed deal against the pre close assumptions.

What does Bending Spoons look for in businesses to buy?

The target profile: digital (consumer or enterprise), with significant room for improvement, a large revenue base (the transformation effort does not scale linearly with revenue, so bigger is better and bigger businesses are often no better optimized), and predictable earnings (strong retention, revenue supported by existing customers rather than constant paid acquisition, clean multi year data, and limited risk of AI disruption once integrated). They are largely neutral on organic growth trends and ignore pre acquisition profitability, because they expect to transform both.

How does Bending Spoons operate day to day?

The operating model is built around talent density, autonomy, and radical simplicity:

• Talent over experience. They hire high potential students and new graduates and put them in big roles fast. Nearly all businesses are run by people in their twenties or thirties. In 2025 they received about 800,000 applications and hired 286 people, under 0.04%, which makes getting hired there tougher than getting into Harvard.
• Lean teams. Productivity falls as teams grow, so they keep teams small on purpose. Same human scale insight as Constellation, applied through a central talent pool rather than autonomous units.
• Limited hierarchy. Usually no more than three management layers between the CEO and an individual contributor.
• Centralized, dynamic staffing. Spooners are reallocated across businesses constantly.
• Platform teams. Central teams (Talent, Foundations Technology, and others) build shared services and are staffed only by Spooners.

The headcount math tells the story. Total full time equivalents grew from 405 (end 2023) to 2,284 (Q1 2026), but the vast majority of that came from acquired teams, not hiring: they added 1,830 people through AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo alone, and expect only a few hundred to remain once those transformations finish. The core team is far smaller, just 621 Spooners at the end of Q1 2026, about 27% of total headcount. Revenue per Spooner climbed from $1.12 million (2023) to $2.57 million (2025).

Bending Spoons concentrates its talent in Europe (Milan, London, Warsaw, Madrid) and has won repeated best workplace awards, with a Glassdoor rating around 4.8. Worth correcting a common myth here: this is not a cheap labor play. They reportedly pay salaries on par with London and bet that a few exceptional people beat a big team. The transferable lesson for the rest of us is that talent density, not headcount, is what drives results.

That lesson is exactly the one I think about most. If you are building your own lean, talent dense team and want to do it without US salary costs, South helps US tech companies hire and retain top engineers, designers, and operators across Latin America. Interview candidates for free.

What are Bending Spoons' proprietary technologies?

The filing names the internal stack for the first time. This is the connective tissue dropped into every acquired business:

• Pico, Lumen, and Abacus: the data infrastructure (ingest, transform, serve metrics), processing 3.8 billion data points per day on average in Q1 2026.
• Minerva: an AI system, in development since 2019, that estimates user lifetime value in real time.
• Juno: a payments system built in 2023 that lets them migrate a newly acquired business off third party billing quickly.
• Janus and Orion: the experimentation toolkit that ran more than 3,000 experiments in 2025.
• Role Model: a recruiting system trained on hiring and post hire performance data.

They run on AWS and Google Cloud, distribute through the Apple and Google app stores, and process payments through Adyen, Apple, Google, PayPal, and Stripe.

Bending Spoons built Role Model because sourcing and screening great hires at scale is genuinely hard, even with 800,000 applications coming in. Most companies do not have a system like it. If recruiting is your bottleneck, South does the nearshore sourcing, screening, and hiring for you, connecting US tech companies with top Latin American talent. Start interviewing for free.

What is Bending Spoons' AI thesis?

AI is the throughline of the filing, and the main reason public investors are being asked to pay a premium multiple for what is structurally a roll up. The headline stat: the share of code pull requests authored or co authored by AI went from under 10% in Q1 2025 to over 90% by the end of Q1 2026, with about 70% authored by AI alone. They pull models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, plus open source and their own narrow models.

The argument is three pronged: a capability advantage (AI adds features across the portfolio), a productivity advantage(run a bigger portfolio with fewer people), and cheaper targets (as more companies struggle with AI, more owners sell at lower prices). It is a clever wrapper: an AI story around a cash generative, recurring revenue base, where AI is both the product upgrade and the cost lever.

How has Bending Spoons been financed with debt and equity, and who are its investors?

For most of its life, Bending Spoons was self funded out of cash flow, bank loans, and small Italian investors. That changed as the deals got bigger.

• Equity. They view their cost of equity as high and have been deliberately stingy with it. The filing shows just $549 million of primary equity (new capital into the company) raised over its entire history, 99% of it after 2023. The widely reported $710 million October 2025 financing that set the $11.7 billion valuation was therefore mostly a secondary sale, existing shareholders selling to new investors rather than fresh money going onto the balance sheet.
• Debt. They lean on leverage as a core tool, tapping the term loan A market repeatedly since 2017 and the term loan B market for the first time in 2025. They have never issued a bond. Total debt is $4.36 billion, and the term loan B carries a B+ (high yield) rating, which is typical for an acquisitive, levered company.

How levered they actually are depends entirely on which EBITDA you use, and the spread is wide. The prospectus reports a leverage ratio around 2.2 times, on an adjusted EBITDA that includes a full year of acquired businesses plus expected cost savings. The company has separately cited roughly 2.7 times pro forma. Rating agencies, which haircut that adjusted margin from around 50% toward 30% to account for the heavy restructuring spend across the recent deals, model net debt to EBITDA closer to 4 to 5 times. Same balance sheet, very different ratios depending on how much credit you give the adjustments. The good news: they throw off real cash. Net cash from operations was $205 million in 2024 and $291 million in 2025, and reported leverage stays well under its covenant. Rating agencies also note that consumer and prosumer apps can churn more than enterprise software, which is why the model leans on continued growth and disciplined acquisitions as the capital base expands.

Institutional holders include Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, and Neuberger Berman. On the celebrity front, earlier backers reportedly included Ryan Reynolds, Andre Agassi, Eric Schmidt, and Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd); Ferrari has been candid that their operational impact is minimal and the value is visibility.

The leadership team named in the filing: Luca Ferrari (co-founder, CEO), Francesco Patarnello (co-founder, Head of Business Acquisitions, Vice Chair), Matteo Danieli and Luca Querella (co-founders, class A holders), Francesco Mancone (CTO, joined 2019), and co-CFOs Enrico Martinelli and Davide Scarpazza.

How big is the opportunity ahead?

They claim to have identified more than 1,000 digital businesses, public and private, that could be attractive targets, representing nearly $400 billion in aggregate 2025 revenue. The current screen: estimated annual revenue between $50 million and $5 billion, headquartered in Europe or North America, with a self serve subscription, sales led subscription, or advertising model. They expect to eventually pursue businesses above $5 billion in revenue.

The strategic shift worth watching is fewer, bigger deals in a different category. The mobile apps that built Bending Spoons' reputation, like Remini and Splice, are a long way from a $1.5 billion email and advertising business like AOL, or a public, enterprise heavy platform like Vimeo. The core skills should travel: lean teams, sharp monetization, fast product iteration. But the checks are far larger and the businesses less familiar than anything they have transformed before, so this is the real open question in the thesis.

How is Bending Spoons different from Constellation Software?

Because my readers will inevitably compare the two, here is how I think the plays differ.

What they share: a buy and hold forever mentality, a returns first mindset, rigorous post merger discipline, a belief in small human scale teams, a bias toward talent over experience, and a habit of studying the great capital allocators who came before them.

Where they differ is execution style:

• Touch. Constellation buys a business and largely leaves management in place, sharing best practices with a light hand. Bending Spoons reimagines the business and integrates a shared technology Platform. Constellation is radically decentralized with no central engineering team; Bending Spoons is centralized and hands on.
• Customer and deal type. Constellation buys small, specialist B2B vertical market software with very low churn. Bending Spoons buys large consumer and prosumer software with broader appeal and somewhat higher churn.
• Deal size and cadence. Constellation does many small deals a year (a $2 to $4 million average across 100 plus deals). Bending Spoons does a handful of increasingly large deals, deploying around $2 billion of enterprise value in a single recent quarter.
• Leverage. Constellation has historically carried modest debt. Bending Spoons treats prudent leverage as a core part of its returns.

Constellation is about five times the revenue (around $11 billion trailing) and trades above 20 times EBITDA, so it is also a useful benchmark for where a disciplined, perpetual software compounder can be valued over time. In short, Constellation is a patient federation of independent businesses, and Bending Spoons is a single, highly skilled operating machine that brings each business inside it. Two different roads to the same destination: owning great software forever.

What does this mean for the rest of us?

A few lessons I am taking from this, as someone running a smaller version of the model through Verne, buying venture orphans:

• Start small. Bending Spoons paid $10,000 for its first app and reinvested its way up to billion dollar deals. You do not need a fund or a big first check, just one good acquisition, the discipline to improve it, and the patience to compound. It is the same path I describe in how we ran a 41 day micro deal.
• Do not be afraid to raise prices. Most founders underprice. Bending Spoons buys businesses with loyal, long tenured users (an eight year average) and then raises prices, often 2 to 4 times. Some customers leave; revenue almost always grows. A sticky base is permission to charge what the product is actually worth.
• Small, talented teams win. Maybe the most transferable lesson here. Bending Spoons buys a business, lets most of the existing team go, and runs it better with a fraction of the people: Evernote went from 341 to 60, StreamYard from 154 to 44, and the whole company operates on a core of about 620 Spooners. A few exceptional people beat a big org almost every time. This is close to the playbook I run at South, with one addition Bending Spoons does not need: you can build that same talent density at a much lower cost by hiring brilliant engineers and operators in Latin America instead of only in San Francisco.
• Execution wins. They paid a full price for komoot and still expect great returns, because the value is created after the deal: rebuilt products, leaner teams, sharper monetization. The deal is the easy part. The transformation is where the money is made.
• Better to be good than lucky. Their founding epiphany was that luck dominates the hunt for the next big thing, but operational excellence is a skill you can compound. So they stopped gambling on new ideas and got world class at running businesses that already worked. For most operators, that is the higher percentage game.

If you know of anything I should add, reach out @ColinKeeley or Colin@ColinKeeley.com. I will keep updating this as I learn more.

Continued Reading

• Mark Leonard & Constellation Software Operating Manual
• Robert F. Smith (Vista Equity Partners) Operating Manual
• Andrew Wilkinson & Tiny Operating Manual
• John Malone (Cable Cowboy) Operating Manual
• Felix Dennis Operating Manual
• Brunello Cucinelli Operating Manual (the other great Italian operator)
• Pieter Levels Operating Manual (one man, $27M ARR)
• The Ultimate Vertical Software Operating Manual
• Venture Capital Orphans: What We Buy, How We Price It, and Advice for Founders
• We Bought a Bankrupt Software Company