Bending Spoons Buys Airtable, OpenAI Hits Back at Apple Over Lawsuit, Spider-Man Ads in BMWs | Diet TBPN

**John Coogan** (0:02)
Big deal, the big one, that's tearing up the timeline right now is that Airtable, founded in 2012, and once valued at $11.7 billion, is getting acquired by Bending Spoons, founded in 2013 at 2.7 times ARR. Once hot startup, now an unfortunate victim of the SaaS bust, says Didi Das.
It raised $1.4 billion, only to be sold for $1.285 billion enterprise value, because they had almost $1 billion in cash on the balance sheet, and so the total equity value was $2.25 billion equity value. Just clearing the preference stack, so early employees, founders probably got something, later investors probably got 1x their money back, but probably had it tied up for a few years. So, not a good outcome, but there's some interesting silver linings here. Obviously, it could be good for Bending Spoons if they got a good deal and they turned it into a mammoth cash machine. Also, there's some nuance to where different pieces of the business are going, because they're sort of dividing it up.

**Jordi Hays** (1:13)
Really sort of exemplifies the current moment where a company can sell for over a billion dollars, and everyone's like, wow, that's unfortunate.

**John Coogan** (1:24)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Jordi Hays** (1:25)
And in a wake up call to the many, maybe younger companies that are at a lower revenue run rates, that are raising a much higher valuations, and basically signaling to them, like you've got some many, many years of compounding to do.

**John Coogan** (1:43)
Yeah, it's interesting.
There's a SaaSpocalypse narrative, which is like these companies are going away, software won't exist, you'll just prompt it. And I think there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But one thing that it does feel like the underwriting, the financial trajectory of these single point solution SaaS products, single player, somewhat sticky, maybe not that sticky, maybe replaceable.
It's not that they're going to zero, Bending Spoons wouldn't be buying it if everyone was churning and it was going to be a zero. But at the same time, you can't underwrite it. It's growing 20%. Yeah, yeah, but you can't underwrite it at 40x revenue, 100x revenue anymore. And it feels a little bit like what happened with DTC e-commerce, honestly. There was a moment where e-commerce brands were venture backable and you could underwrite them or they were being underwritten similarly to venture startups that had true modes, true compounding advantages. They would get the same multiple as a SpaceX or an AI company or a social media company. And that never really made sense. It was sort of just a weird quirk in the system for a couple of years. And then go forward a few years when there were some pullbacks. Some of the IPOs went out. They didn't do that well. They traded down. And all of a sudden, it was like, okay, well, if we're doing, if we're doing, you know, in my case, like food on the internet, we're going to VC back a food company, like has Nestle been disrupted? Like, no, and that would now or Unilever is Unilever trading down like crazy because they're facing so much pressure. And that's usually what happens when there truly is disruptive innovation. Like you see this with, I saw some crazy post about how people were bearish on Starlink for a while. And the company that they were competing with just went bankrupt. And you see this with, you know, social media came out. And yes, like the newspaper and the internet, actually the newspaper stocks did actually trade down. That never happened in e-commerce, B2C, e-commerce, any of that.
And we're now in this new regime. So I think that there's actually a pretty safe path if you just build the business, if you're saying, look, I am in this SaaS industry. It is going to be more competitive going forward. But I'm setting myself up to have a reasonable multiple so that at every point, if I'm trading at three times ARR, I'm happy because the cap table set up for that, right?

**Jordi Hays** (4:11)
Yeah, one thing I will say is I started using Airtable. It was 2015, right? So I probably started using it a few years in. But the way that I used the product back then for my first business, I would 100% just vibe code a solution today. Because I was using very basic dashboard functionality. I wanted dashboards that we could use internally, share externally. Now it would be quite easy to just do all of that in Codex or your favorite agent. So I do think that business is very much under threat over the long run, but still has sort of compounding that it can do just given how deep it is into the Fortune 500 and a long tail of small businesses.