The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 61 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: B2B SaaS will see Bending Spoons-style roll-ups revive legacy software
“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.”
O'Driscoll: Bending Spoons grows via price hikes and cost cuts, not users
“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”
O'Driscoll: Bending Spoons' $20B IPO valuation lacks organic growth justification
“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's 2023 price hike caused its largest subscription churn event
“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's headcount dropped from hundreds to under 100 after Bending Spoons acquisition
“Evernote was a few hundred people and now it's less than a hundred.”
Mature apps should aggressively monetize existing users, while growing apps prioritize virality
“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…”
Singlehurst: Bending Spoons targets broken VC-backed businesses
“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…”
Bending Spoons hires almost entirely for talent and motivation, disregarding experience
“In our case, we chose to focus on talent and motivation almost entirely disregarding experience.”
Bending Spoons pays identical salaries regardless of an employee's geographic location
“Currently we have the same salaries regardless of where you are.”
No shareholders in Bending Spoons have liquidation preferences
“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.”
Lemkin: Bending Spoons raised Evernote's average subscription price from $75 to $250
“If they can do what they did with Evernote, which is raise the pricing from 75 to 250 dollars a year on average, right?”
Lemkin: Bending Spoons reaccelerated Evernote growth with 20% of staff
“Evernote reaccelerate, Evernote was dead and they reaccelerated the growth of Evernote, right? With a fifth of the employees.”
Simionato: Products for millions of users require polish over speed
“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.”
Bending Spoons monetizes WeTransfer by paywalling expired file recovery
“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…”
Product designers will abandon static pixels to design directly in code
“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.”
Simionato: Deceptive price hike messaging signals product value insecurity
“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…”
Evernote now monetizes based on content creation volume, not feature gates
“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.”
Ferrari believes Bending Spoons and 99% of businesses make no positive difference
“I don't think we make a very positive difference nor do 99% of the businesses, as far as I can tell”
Bending Spoons has never lost a competitive acquisition bidding process
“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…”
Lazy due diligence caused Bending Spoons to misjudge an acquired app's growth
“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.”
Cross-promoting users across Bending Spoons' app portfolio yields zero value
“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.”
Bending Spoons acquires companies post-product-market fit to optimize them
“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.”
Stebbings: Airtable acquired by Bending Spoons for $1.285B at $485M ARR
“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.”
O'Driscoll: Airtable will reach $300M in free cash flow in two years
“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.”
O'Driscoll: Legacy consumer tech shares vertical SaaS pricing power
“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,…”
Stebbings: Bending Spoons filing US IPO at $20B valuation
“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.”
Ideal PM candidates are former entrepreneurs or deep analysts, says Simionato
“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…”
Validate features by asking users for past use cases, not future intent
“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…”
Simionato: AI tools will enable product teams to test 3-5x more ideas
“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…”
Bending Spoons will announce Evernote V-Eleven with new AI features next week
“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…”
Bending Spoons spent up to $7M licensing games for failed platform Playond
“We spent, I think like five or seven million dollars on, on licensing and it eventually didn't work.”
Simionato: Bending Spoons builds Evernote features for utility, not ROI
“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…”
Simionato: Bending Spoons currently avoids launching new in-house products
“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 …”
Simionato: Bending Spoons avoids marketing push notifications on Evernote
“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.”
Stebbings: Bending Spoons acquired Vimeo for $1.38 billion
“The European, the Italian buying the public American company for 1.38 billion dollars.”
Singlehurst: Bending Spoons' moat is M&A integration and shared services
“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…”
Bending Spoons raised roughly $200M in equity over the past 10 months
“Now, more recently, we have raised more equity roughly two hundred million dollars over the past 10 months.”
Bending Spoons acquires growing, flat, or declining assets, not just distressed
“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 …”
Bending Spoons acquired Evernote to optimize its product, monetization, and costs
“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.”
Bending Spoons manages all cash and talent centrally at the TopCo level
“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.”
Bending Spoons completely rewrites codebases and redesigns UX of acquired products
“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…”
Bending Spoons shut down mobile game subscription Playond after investing $7M
“I think we invested six or seven million dollars in it, and we completely eliminated it.”
Ferrari caps meetings at 20 hours, spending 50 hours on individual work
“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.”
Bending Spoons holds annual retrospectives on past acquisition mistakes
“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…”
Bending Spoons acquires software assets to hold for decades, never selling
“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.”
Ferrari regrets not raising capital earlier to pursue more aggressive growth
“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…”
Keep fundraising competition active until signing final investor terms
“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…”