20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
This is 20Product with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20Product is the monthly show where we sit down with the best product and design leaders of our time. Today is a very special show. Bending Spoons is on an absolute tear. Last month, they acquired Vimeo for a billion dollars. Just this week, they acquired Eventbrite for $500 million. They are famed for buying the beloved Evernote previously. And today, we're joined by one of their product leads, Federico Simionato. It was such a joy to have him in the studio. And I think this is one of the best product episodes that we have ever done. But before we dive into the show today, on this show, we care about velocity. Most teams lose it in code review, not in writing code. Now, CodeRabbit fixes that. The second a PR opens, it leaves clear, line-by-line comments, calls out what the change might touch, and offers one-click fixes. You can teach your organizational standards using your own custom instructions, such as cursor or clawed rules, and enforce them on every PR. CodeRabbit has so far reviewed more than 13 million PRs, and installed on 2 million repositories used by over 100,000 OSS projects. If you want to cut code review time and bugs in half, try a free month at coderabbit.ai with the code 20VC. And while CodeRabbit keeps your code clean, WarpDev makes it fly.
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**Federico Simionato** (2:44)
Thank you, I'm a huge fan of the show actually. My favorite episode I think is the one with Nick from Revolut. I learned a lot from that episode.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:50)
Nick is phenomenal. My biggest takeaway from that episode actually was the fact that they run 26 experiments within the company and then allocate accordingly to who's winning and who's not winning. I thought it was incredible. Now I want to start a little bit on you, dentist games for kids, how did that lead to Bending Spoons and a core role in one of the most coveted companies in Europe?

**Federico Simionato** (3:15)
Yeah, so when I was at university, I knew that I wanted to start a startup. And so I just jumped at the first opportunity I got. I met a friend who was thinking about starting a startup. We were in Rome for a startup event and he had this idea. He used to be the administrator for his parents' dentistry study and he just saw that if you have to cure a child instead of an adult, you need twice the time. And so he was like, if we can reduce that, it's probably better, right? And so he thought, can we just gamify the experience a little bit? And the insight was good, but the way we implemented the result, I don't think it was great. And so I learned that you should care about what you're thinking of building.
And yeah, and so that failed, or I mean, it's still alive, but it didn't scale in a hyper-growth way. And then I just like, I wanted this hyper-growth feeling. And the way I discovered Bending Spoons was on the internet. And I just read the things that were written on their website, and they were so ambitious, so clear, so like, we know what we are. We are having great results, but we are not satisfied. We are at the scale of downloads of like Twitter or Spotify or stuff like that, and they are unknown, right? And I was like, who are these people who are getting these results while being unsatisfied by the scale they're at? And so I started studying. I just applied, as you normally do. And yeah, I brought some liquor to Matteo, one of the co-founders for my first interview. And I like to think that that's what got me the job. And yeah, and that was almost eight years ago now.