Sourcery: Bending Spoons’ Playbook for Buying Airtable, AOL, Vimeo & Miro

**Molly O'Shea** (0:01)
When a company keeps buying iconic businesses like Mirror, Brightite, Airtable, and AOL, you have to wonder, what's the strategy here? This episode of Sourcery digs into exactly that, with Bending Spoons leaders Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli, and Valentina Jerusalmi. And what's fascinating is their acquisition playbook is totally different from what you'd expect. Instead of locking founders in for years like private equity typically does, Bending Spoons lets them leave right after closing. The pitch is straightforward: buy the business, preserve its legacy, then put serious engineering effort into improving the product. That's interesting because it reflects their broader philosophy about people and roles. Matteo Danieli actually gives this a really personal edge. He says he stepped down as Chief Product Officer when he realized a product manager on the team had become better suited for the role. Wait, he voluntarily stepped down? Exactly. He says that's what meritocracy really means. As he puts it, "Any job is up for grabs, even the CEO job." For Bending Spoons, that message matters as much as the organizational chart itself.
Valentina Jerusalmi's story shows how that culture works in practice. She applied three times before finally getting in, but once she joined, she started by listening, learning, and working across customer support, design, product, and growth. Her advice was blunt and optimistic at the same time: "The impossible becomes possible."
And now she leads AOL.
She says the mindset shift came from people around her telling her again and again that harder jobs were still doable. Which brings us to what they call startup mode. Right, the idea that as products get bigger, they often become slower, more fragmented, and buried under layers of management. Bending Spoons' answer is to reverse some of that corporatification, keep teams small, and give people direct ownership so ideas can move quickly from discussion to shipping. That structure ties directly into their obsession with talent density. Danieli says people don't join just for one product, but for access to many products and many kinds of problems. In his words, "If you have fewer people but higher talent density, you can do much more with less."
Their recent IPO is framed as a rare pause in this nonstop culture. Danieli describes it as emotional, a chance to stop and recognize years of work, failures, and sacrifice. He says the team's slogan, "take the impossible," really means "maybe," and the IPO proved that some things once thought impossible can actually happen. And Jerusalmi is now leading AOL's carve-out from Yahoo, reshaping a business with millions of users. She says the work is technical, operational, and deeply hands-on, but exciting. The plan includes improving news recommendations, refreshing mail, and using AI where it genuinely helps.
What comes through is a company trying to combine high standards with unusual humility. They prize merit over hierarchy, speed over bureaucracy, and evidence over opinion. And they keep returning to one idea, that the right people, in the right structure, can make very big things move.