Bending Spoons

“Now, more recently, we have raised more equity roughly two hundred million dollars over the past 10 months.”

“I don't think we make a very positive difference nor do 99% of the businesses, as far as I can tell”

“Historically we have never lost a process. Meaning every single time there was willingness to sell, And we had a chance to bid, because sometimes you don't get to know about the opportunity and you only hear about it after the deal is done. Every single time T…”

“By the way, we don't acquire I don't necessarily acquire distressed assets. I know that people, some people have characterized it that way after Evernote, because Evernote, some people thought would qualify as such, but we have acquired a lot of products that …”

“Had we done our homework more thoroughly, I think we would have spotted that some of the underlying factors were waning and dropping quickly, and that consequently the rate of user acquisition was likely to shrink faster than we had anticipated.”

“The company, we funded it with around 40,000 dollars, which was the leftover capital from Evertail.”

“We thought we could improve the product. Monetize it more efficiently and also run the company more efficiently in terms of costs. So we felt all three levers were offered a little bit of space for improvement.”

“The, yeah, the cash is managed at the top company level. Yes. Not just that all resources also, or our team team members and, you know, we were very fluid in that regard.”

“In our case, we are incredibly hands-on, so unlike a private equity, we generally rewrite the whole software, or at least the most critical parts of the code base. We completely change the IT architecture, we redesign the user experience and the user interface…”

“The reason why we took that route, I think, is precisely because we crashed and burned by being arrogant in thinking we knew what the market would want and we could build it for them.”

“Made our first acquisition, I think early 2014, so we're talking maybe six or seven months into The startup at the time, it was for a keyboard app paid 15,000 dollars for it”

“We never grew by 300% in a year, ever.”

“I think we invested six or seven million dollars in it, and we completely eliminated it.”

“I probably have no more than 20 hours of meeting a week. And I squeeze in maybe 40, 50 hours of individual work each week doing those sorts of things.”

“No, not a factor. No, at least maybe it's because we have failed to leverage it, but in our case, no, no value coming from that.”

“Every year or so, we try to spend an hour reminiscing that particular situation, like a repeated retrospective. We have dissect, dissected our mistakes, ad nauseum, so it's not that we're gonna learn anything new, but I think it's healthy to remind yourself ju…”

“The other big difference is that we acquire to hold forever. We never sell. I won't say it will never happen. It may occasionally, but it's never happened to any of our significant assets. And so we buy to retain for potentially decades.”

“In our case, we chose to focus on talent and motivation almost entirely disregarding experience.”

“I feel I am too concerned, scared even of disappointing others, colleagues, investors, and as such, I believe we have waited a little bit too long to raise capital. We've waited a little bit too long to push on the You know, on the accelerator to implement our…”

“Big mistake is to just base your selection on the early feedback. And then wave goodbye to all those who don't plan to take on board and proceed only with the one or two that you plan to take on board. You shouldn't do that. Just keep a broader spectrum of par…”

“We let others seek market fit, and then we, if they will sell it to us, we will acquire their company and try to make it even better than they have made it up to that point.”

“In our case, out of 400 people, at least 300 are software engineers, AI researchers, data analysts, data scientists, a product manager.”

“Currently we have the same salaries regardless of where you are.”

“And the relationship didn't fracture, but actually got stronger in those lowest moments. And that is the best proof that you have something to build upon.”

“There hasn't been a single one we have priced correctly.”

“Up until Evernote included, which is a year ago, I can, on first approximation, I can say that All of what we have done through our own earnings and debt.”

“All our share owners, myself, our institutional investors, our colleagues who got equity through their working at the company, nobody has any liquidation preferences, so we're all on equal terms economically.”

“It's a business strategy, and it's, ah, it's an approach to how you are able to integrate a business that you've acquired into a shared set of services and tools that you've built out to enable those businesses to grow and become even better products, and, you…”

“I think that's an amazing example of this company that was largely bootstrapped Has created the most amazing scalable business model profitability like most companies would give an arm for. And they did it by sort of circumventing that, that world of over capi…”

“And their addressable market basically is the broken parts of the venture capital ecosystem, which is companies that are good products, but really bad businesses. And they can take these good products and make them amazing businesses. By virtue of being part o…”

“The European, the Italian buying the public American company for 1.38 billion dollars.”

“I think the best background to enter as a PM is either being an entrepreneur, which teaches you to think about things that matter, or being a very good analyst of some kind, like somebody who's done very deep, thoughtful analysis over how something works at Mc…”

“Speed matters when you're trying things and you're trying to find your way and you're probing the area around you, but then it's all about polish when you actually need to build something that, that millions of people use. You cannot half ass an experience.”

“The things that people actually do are different from the things that they say, and so you should ask people, instead of do you like this feature or would you use it, you should ask them, what's a use case that you had in the last month for which this would ha…”

“The thing we did on Evernote that produced the biggest churn was when we raised prices in 23, which is something that we thoroughly analyzed, and we ultimately made the decision to do it nonetheless.”

“Evernote was a few hundred people and now it's less than a hundred.”

“So today we have a backlog of a hundred ideas and we know that we can only try 10 of them in a few months. You know, I think that we'll reach a point where we can actually try 2030, 40, 50. Both because people will be faster, but also because the manual work t…”

“Offline is a big one, like offline availability of notes and notebooks used to be a premium feature and now it's free.”

“On WeTransfer, we built a feature that allows you to recover expired transfers, which wasn't available before. We noticed that many people were hitting this page where basically would tell you the transfer has expired. You cannot download anymore because of co…”

“I think our teams use Lovable more than Replit. I personally use Replit more than Lovable though.”

“Next week, we are announcing Evernote V-Eleven, and it's going to be a significant change compared to what Evernote is today. It's mostly a reflection of all the work that went through in the last three years, but it's also containing three advanced AI feature…”

“It has been the case often where we've made the paywall more visible than in the past, just because acquiring products that have already grown and that already have a large user base, then you have more to unlock by monetizing people who are already there. Ins…”

“I think so, to be honest. I think that the role of a designer will be as important as it is today, maybe even more, but I think that the tools that we use will evolve. And so you won't work on pixels and then code, but you will likely merge the two things.”

“Just this week, they acquired Eventbrite for five hundred million dollars.”

“We spent, I think like five or seven million dollars on, on licensing and it eventually didn't work.”

“Many of the things that we do on Evernote are not because we want to increase revenue, but it's because we want to make the product more useful. And in a very unquantifiable way, we just trust that by making the product more useful, people will keep choosing t…”

“I'm not sure what it makes today. I think it's still in the several millions a year.”

“No, we don't launch new products. I mean, we probably would if we were decently convinced that we have a good shot at making something very good, very useful, successful, impactful. I'm not saying that we wouldn't, but no, it's been a while since last time we …”

“If you're trying to like shy away and like, should we like use bullshit language and not really tell people that we are increasing their prices? That's a bad move, and I wouldn't, it means that you're not confident that your product is delivering value to peop…”

“So on Evernote, I think we don't use them at all. I mean, we use them for reminders for people who set a reminder for a note or for calendar events, but we don't like use them as a marketing strategy just because we think it would decrease the user experience.”

“Last month, they acquired Vimeo for a billion dollars.”

“Instead we monetize based on Content. So based on how much you have on the product. And so if you want to create a lot, then you pay more. If you don't create much, then you can use it for free.”

“What these guys realize is there's similar opportunity in the consumer side, which, you know, just as, you know, the whole idea was in these verticals, no one's going to change their car dealer accounting system because they put prices up 20%. In the same way,…”

“If they can do what they did with Evernote, which is raise the pricing from 75 to 250 dollars a year on average, right?”

“Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, AOL, Eventbrite, a very massively executed roll-up strategy, a 1,000,000,003 in revenue, and they're filing to go public at twenty billion dollars on in the US from Italy.”

“Should it go public at 20 times revenues or 15 times revenues? Maybe not, because you are relying on the acquisition for, I mean, you're not getting organic growth. You're getting a profitable business and, you know, you probably have to look at the sustainabl…”

“Evernote reaccelerate, Evernote was dead and they reaccelerated the growth of Evernote, right? With a fifth of the employees.”

“And I think there's also going to be another bending spoons in B to B that's going to nail this. They're going to buy these horrific products like Marketo and others, put a few smart people in it and just boost the NRR.”

“When you read the S one, you realize they don't get organic growth. They don't get new users. They have raised prices, cut costs, and suddenly that's being valued at You know, eight, nine, 10 times revenue”

“The company was doing four hundred and eighty five million ARR, growing 20% year on year, ultimately at a 1.285 billion dollar acquisition price.”

“I bet you two years from now it's doing 600, not 900, but I bet you it's three hundred million of free cash flow.”