Bending Spoons Buys Airtable, Snap Rips, Ads in BMW | Grace Li, Samir Kaji, John Quinn, Nikhil Reddy, Art Levy & Russell Kaplan, Brendan Carr

**John Coogan** (0:01)
Let me tell you, you're watchin TBPN. You're watchin. You're watchin TBPN. It's Tuesday, August 4th, 2026 We are watchin TBPN Ultradome, The Temple of Technology, The Fortress of Finance, The Capital of Capital. It's August 4th. You can turn off the music.
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But we've been having fun making intro songs, mixing it up. We got John Quinn, the most feared lawyer. The lawyer, the lawyers all fear coming on the show live in person in the TBPN Ultradome. You know him from Quinn Emanuel. He's a founder, a legend, a legal legend. When John Quinn stands, everyone kneels.

**Grace Li** (0:50)
That's what they say about him.

**John Coogan** (0:52)
That's right.
No, we're very excited for the show today. Lots of guests coming on, lots of news. 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, but 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. But of course, Bending Spoons is a public company now, and if you want to back Bending Spoons, head over to public.com. Or short it. Invest in for those.

**Tyler** (2:23)
Get financial advice.

**John Coogan** (2:24)
Yeah.

**Tyler** (2:24)
Do whatever you want.

**John Coogan** (2:25)
Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Go long, go short. Whatever you do, just don't use too much leverage. That can be risky. Matt Levine has a great piece today.

**Tyler** (2:37)
Yeah, it 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** (2:49)
Yeah.

**Tyler** (2:50)
But 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.

**John Coogan** (3:02)
Yeah.

**Tyler** (3:03)
And basically signaling to them like you've got some many, many years of compounding to do.

**John Coogan** (3:10)
Yeah, it's interesting that there's a SaaSpocalypse narrative, which is like these companies are going away. The 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 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, in my case, food on the internet, we're going to VC back a food company. Like, has Nestle been disrupted? Like, no. And that would, now 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.