Bending Spoons is Eating Silicon Valley | CEO Luca Ferrari

Luca Ferrari (0:00)

We have half a billion non-active users. I mean, that's a lot. We have built over the past decade an operating system of over 50 proprietary technologies. We buy these companies and then we install them on this shared operating system. At Bending Spoons, we have been able to attract, I think, extremely strong talent. We had 800,000 job applications in 2025 We hired fewer than 300 people.

Molly O'Shea (0:18)

You guys operate very efficiently per employee. I think the last metric you mentioned was four million in revenue per employee.

Luca Ferrari (0:25)

And this has grown tremendously. It was about a million dollars just two, three years ago.

Molly O'Shea (0:29)

Right now, it kind of seems like Bending Spoons is actually eating Silicon Valley. So what's going on there? Luca Ferrari, thank you for having me at Bending Spoons.

Luca Ferrari (0:49)

Well, thank you for coming.

Molly O'Shea (0:51)

We're all the way out in Milan, Italy.

And something happened not too long ago that really shook up Silicon Valley. Right now, it kind of seems like Bending Spoons is actually eating Silicon Valley. So what's going on there?

Luca Ferrari (1:07)

I don't know that we're eating anything, but I think you're probably referring to the announcement of the acquisition of Airtable, I suppose.

I guess, I mean, Airtable is a great business, it's a great product, and you can say Airtable is something you can't say of a lot of different businesses, which is that they really were identified as a high-flying key company in Silicon Valley for quite a while, and that's very difficult to do. So great job, Howie and everybody else who built that business. So I think once the announcement of the acquisition came, that was a lot more newsworthy and interesting than maybe some other acquisitions we've done before.

Molly O'Shea (1:57)

So how did you pick that one? What was the process?

Luca Ferrari (2:02)

Well, you pick each other when it comes to acquisitions because it's something that has to be bidirectional. We look at a lot of companies. I would say actively we may look at hundreds of companies in any one year and then we try to establish a dialogue with dozens where we see the best match.

If some of these are interested in selling, then the conversation can progress. We look for businesses where we believe we can bring a lot of value. We are a very active acquirer. And so for us to be absolutely confident, we can offer a key cash price while delivering strong returns for our shareholders. We need to be able to bring a lot of value, whether it's by improving the product or the technology or monetization, the organization, ideally all of these. So that's a key criterion that we look for businesses that will believe we can, whose trajectory we can predict with confidence multiple years into the future. Otherwise, it's difficult to underwrite big investments.

And it's typically been digital businesses. So we've done consumer internet, SaaS, these are the key areas for us. We also did recently we acquired a hardware company called Tractive in Spring, which is very interesting. Pet tracking and also help monitoring for pets, pet industry is booming. So that was a very nice acquisition, a little bit outside of our usual comfort zone.

Molly O'Shea (3:41)

Because the Airtable acquisition kind of set SF, Silicon Valley, American Tech into a bit of hysteria. What do you think they get wrong about technology companies or managing them?

Luca Ferrari (3:58)

I mean, not a lot, clearly. Silicon Valley has built, I don't know, 70 percent of the most successful technology businesses of the past 25 to 50 years.

So I think Silicon Valley gets almost everything right.

I believe we have been able to do well acquiring a tiny fraction of the businesses that have come out of Silicon Valley because we bring something different and new to the table in both the way we are structured and the platform we built. That's for the most part unavailable to these businesses on a standalone basis. So for people who don't know Bending Spoons very well, unlike most serial acquirers out there, most serial acquirers out there will either buy a business because they think it's basically good as it is and they can't really improve it, but the price is low enough that they can get good returns and then they'll basically leave it alone. And that model can work. I don't think it will ever give you exceptional returns, but it can deliver reliable, potentially appealing returns if you're very good at picking businesses that are slightly undervalued. Others are more active, but they will still keep these businesses separate as they were before. But these acquirers may have an opinion on how to price the product or how to build the org and so they will go in and make changes. We are even more extreme on the being active end of the spectrum, and we integrate all of these businesses together quite tightly. So we have built over the past decade an operating system of over 50 proprietary technologies to take care of almost everything you need to run a digital business, whether it's data storage and processing, A-B testing, payment management, everything related to recruiting, credentials management, the orchestration for all the I models used in operations, and so on and so forth. So we buy these companies and then it's almost like we install them on this shared operating system, so they can be much more efficient. Also, we have a core team for R&D marketing. At this point, approaching 1,000 people, we can deploy very fluidly and rapidly across these various businesses to go after R&D opportunities. When the R&D opportunities are not as exciting any longer, we can take out the talent and move it elsewhere, so we stay very efficient. These are aspects that I believe none of the teams running these companies on a stand-alone basis really could access.