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 33 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Ferrari: Most software R&D is a waste of money
“I think people in general overestimate the value of R&D. Let me qualify. They think that generally pouring money into building stuff pays, pays off. It's really not true at all. What we find is that there's a very small number of things that pay, pay off hands…”
Ferrari: Recreating Bending Spoons with $1B Would Take 7–8 Years
“It's the tip of the iceberg, but then from there to actual day-to-day, make it work, but even if I started over with all I know, and even if someone said, oh, I trust you'll do super well, here's a billion dollars, to get to where we are now, say, 12 years aft…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons offers near maximum upfront to avoid negotiating up
“We try to make an offer that's sometimes the maximum will to pay or close to it because we think although we could probably get a better deal in the moment if we started lower, Then we don't want to establish a reputation for people you can push around and get…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons Holds Far Superior Advantages Over Private Equity
“I think we have far superior competitive advantage, advantages than a private equity because essentially a private equity, every single, every acquisition is, is almost a, we start afresh in a way. In our case, we do well because of the platform and the struct…”
Ferrari: AOL is the fifth most used email inbox in the West
“AOL is actually, I believe, a top five, the fifth most used email inbox in the Western world.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons forbids viewing P&L outputs while setting acquisition assumptions
“We have You know, many assumptions each as a probability distribution, and we debate assumptions extensively without ever looking at what the model will spit out as a consequence. That's forbidden, because we think that if you see the P&L, basically the busine…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons uses AI to predict job candidate performance
“So we have a massive investment in AI applied to predict future performance based on CVs, cover letters, test results.”
Ferrari: Zero-to-one startup success depends on luck, not talent or work ethic
“We saw almost no correlation between the teams we considered more talented and more hardworking and those who came out on top, and so we concluded probably, I mean, it's not a huge sample, but probably to go from zero to one, Luck plays a huge role. There are …”
Ferrari: Evernote retention reached all-time highs despite 60% price hike
“Retention is at an all-time high, despite prices being higher, because now Evernote is substantially more, it varies by country, and, but it's probably an average, say, 60% more expensive, so it's substantially more expensive than before, but actually retentio…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons paid 50% over the next best bid for Evernote
“My guess is that we paid, like, 50% more than the next best offer, so it was really a win-win, which is the way I believe you should try to, any good strategy needs to be somewhat win-win, otherwise it will not go far.”
Ferrari: KPI-based incentive plans are guaranteed to produce perverse outcomes
“It's absolutely guaranteed to create at least some perverse incentives, because nobody can set perfect incentives. The world is too complicated. It changes too fast. For sure. So, even if you are a genius whatever you set as incentives will be imperfect.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons will hire 250 of 800,000 applicants in 2025
“This year alone, this twenty-twenty-five, it's almost at the end of the year, we'll be receiving About 800,000 unique job applications will be hiring 250 people.”
Ferrari: Most Bending Spoons GMs running $50M–$100M businesses are under 30
“Most of our general managers who run businesses, on average, 50, a hundred million in revenue, so if they were a scale-up, they would be considered a large scale-up. Many of these people are like 27, 28. Most of them are, I think, very few are above 30.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons prefers permanent capital over fixed-term funds
“All else equal, we do prefer a permanent capital, and it's not so much because you, even permanent capital could ask you to liquidate. It's just that they don't have to. And I think the fact that they don't have to reduces the probability that you'll find your…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons acquires 100% of targets to hold forever
“A hundred percent acquisitions, no minorities, like and then, unlike a private equity, which would typically look to sell them three, five, seven years down the line, We buy off our balance sheet to own and operate forever”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons wins through operational execution, not forecasting predictions
“We don't win because we're good at predictions, we win because we can run them better, so we can offer a good price”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons grew per-share revenue 75% annually to reach $1.3B
“If you look at our per share revenue or EBITDA growth over the past four years, Where we are a decent scale, I guess, like I said, about 1.3 billion this year. It's still about 75% per year.”
Ferrari personally reviews every candidate and extends offers at Bending Spoons
“I check each candidate before we extend an offer. I extend the offer. I talk to many of the new hires. I help with talent density.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons raised $700M at an $11B equity valuation
“And like we said, we raised seven hundred million dollars at an eleven billion dollar valuation in equity.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons Attempted to Acquire Grindr in 2019 but Was Outbid
“We actually went after a grinder The LGBTQ plus dating app in 2019. So the app was owned by a Chinese firm and Sifuse was forcing it to sell. It was a big bite for us at the time. We're much smaller. It would have quadrupled the company. We didn't have an equa…”
Ferrari: Acquisition integration effort does not scale linearly with target revenue
“And the time investment and the effort does not scale linearly with revenue. So for us to do an acquisition that will bring in half a billion in revenue is not five times as time consuming as one that will bring a hundred million.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons added free Meetup tiers while raising advanced prices
“Meetup, historically, you could only use it as an organizer. You could only use it if you paid for it. We introduced a free tier, so you could organize quite, we actually do quite a lot for free, which kind of qualifies as a price decrease in a way, like we ga…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons radically transforms acquired companies' tech and organization
“Unlike a private equity, which typically would make relatively shallow interventions, maybe change the management team, rethink the entire company, try to come up with a vision for the most successful version of that company, and then work as hard as we can to…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons Offers No Variable Pay, Lets Employees Buy Discounted Equity
“From the beginning, we enabled people, we pay just cash, no variable pay of any kind, and people can choose, though, to receive some of their cash pay in equity at a discount.”
Ferrari: Companies must treat job offerings as their primary product
“We think about the jobs we offer as our most important product. So you need to know what your customer is, what you're offering, how you're differentiated, and have the courage of really focusing on that sharply.”
Ferrari: Software Acquisitions Must Rely on Retained Users or Predictable Acquisition Drivers
“Either we buy businesses where almost all the value lies in existing customers or users, like people, ok, these have been acquired, it's just about now managing them as well as possible. Or if a lot of the value is predicated on substantial additional user acq…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons is targeting acquisitions of $1B or more
“Today, we're actually hoping to invest easily a billion plus, but conceptually the same thing.”
Ferrari: Evernote codebase rebuild reduced note sync times by up to 99%
“We rebuilt almost entirely the code base, the cloud infrastructure. There's almost nothing, at least nothing of the core components. It's now far higher performance. Notes sync up in less than 10% of the time. In some cases, one percent of the time.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons' first acquisition was a €10,000 iOS keyboard app
“The first acquisition, I think we closed it within the year, so pretty quickly, and we paid 10,000 for it, and I don't remember what it was called, but it was a, an iOS app to personalize your keyboard.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons was seeded with €40k leftover from failed startup Evertail
“We had about 40,000 euros left. The, that money belonged to the VC because of liquidation preferences, but it was too little for the size of that fund, and they told us, look, it's just too much hassle and legal cost for us to go through this administrative pr…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons aims for one to ten acquisitions annually
“We will do maybe five acquisitions a year. Could be one, could be 10 max. I mean, if it's really a stretch.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons shipped roughly 250 significant Evernote improvements in 2.5 years
“I think in two and a half years, we have released
But not probably about 250 significant product improvements.”
Bending Spoons hosts 7-to-9-day annual company retreats to exotic destinations
“Another one we do is a yearly retreat where we bring everybody
to a remote, exciting, typically exotic destination for seven, eight, nine days on the company's time and dime.
it's just a vacation, but with colleagues.
The last one, so I don't remember in whi…”