The Ledger
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Ferrari: Bending Spoons triggers CEO search if survey gets multiple no votes
“As a company, we run a survey, my direct reports, a small selection of senior colleagues and one partner from each of our institutional investors. They fill out a survey, an anonymous survey. There's only one question and it's, well, technically it's two. One …”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons outsources finding product-market fit to VC investors
“We chose to build a Benny spoons in the way I mentioned so outsourcing, finding product market fit to the market. There's plenty of people looking to do that. Plenty of VCs and angel investors investing so that bets are made and rather Benny Spoon's coming in …”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons Was the Highest Bidder on Every Acquisition Offer Made
“What I can say is that to my knowledge, every single time we have bid, we've made an offer. We've either acquired the business or the owner chose not to sell it. That's to say we have historically being by far to my knowledge, the best bidder.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons generates profits in the hundreds of millions
“Yeah, we don't disclose that, but in the hundreds of millions.”
Ferrari: Single-product companies will be more willing to sell due to AI risks
“In the imminent future, the next few years, I think it, it's an advantage for us for a bunch of reasons. First of all, it's a major threat for a lot of businesses, and if you are a single product business it makes you more willing, I believe, to sell. Because …”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons does not filter M&A targets primarily by PMF strength
“No, we don't really try to buy the product companies with the best product market fit. We do assign value to it, but ultimately something is only good to us if the price is appealing relative to the value we can let's say generate or the, you know, the value w…”
Ferrari: Remini is second most used genAI app globally behind ChatGPT
“Remini is far and away the number one product for AI-based image editing, image generation in the world. It's to my knowledge, the second most used generative AI product in the world. It has over a hundred million it's only second to chat GPT as far as I can t…”
Ferrari: 99% of European companies will struggle to attract capable AI talent
“There's only a handful of companies in Europe which have the appeal to new graduates or people in AI, as Bendy Spoons does. And so, for 99% of companies, they will struggle to attract capable people in the field.”
Ferrari: Deep product operating experience yields superior underwriting over PE
“Well, I think having operated dozens, if not hundreds of digital products deeply, Will serve you better than having seen as many or even more on a shallow level. Had we only worked on one product, then I think it would be better to have seen hundreds at a shal…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons hires almost exclusively inexperienced talent
“So we immediately geared up to hire pretty much only inexperienced people and still do to this day.”
Ferrari: Newer roll-up platforms have zero chance of outbidding Bending Spoons
“If someone built, if started Bending Spoons two years ago, I think they have zero chances of outbid us on a deal. Maybe they can do some smaller deals we're not interested in.”
Ferrari: Acquirers can profit from declining software businesses without market dominance
“We seek returns and what we need to accomplish is Do better than the price we pay entails pretty much. So we could do very well with a business that's declining as long as we are going to do better than say the previous owner ever would be able to, or the othe…”
Ferrari: Small Software Acquisitions Require the Same Painful Turnaround Effort as Large Ones
“Every time we perform an acquisition, we got our hands dirty, trying to look at the business almost from a blank slate to make a pretty deep changes that are extremely Time-consuming, challenging, even painful to do. They don't get a lot easier if the business…”
Ferrari: Remini and Evernote Each Drive 20% of Bending Spoons Revenue
“The biggest one by revenues is Remini AI-driven photo enhancer and generator. It's around 20% of our revenues. Evernote is close, also around 20%. Splice comes after maybe 12 to 14%. And then we have Meetup, StreamYard, and many others.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons generates over $600M in revenue with 150M MAUs
“Our products. I've served over a billion people. Currently we have around a hundred and fifty million monthly users and many millions of customers revenues in excess of six hundred million dollars.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons will probably list in the US
“I think we will probably list in the U S because there is really no requirement. You can list in the U S from Italy.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons Targets M&A Deals Between $50M and $1.5B
“Well, what I can say is that these days we tend to look at things in the price range, fifty million to 1.5 billion. That's the range we operate at.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons brand is strictly for investors and talent, not consumers
“We don't even try to place our brand Bending Spoons onto our product businesses. We let them be autonomous in that regard. Our brand is only meaningful toward investors and job candidates, the Bending Spoons brand. We don't want it to be necessarily meaningful…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons raised over $200M in equity across 2023 and 2024
“Yes, so up until the summer of twenty-twenty-three, we had never raised any significant amount of equity. Then, last summer, we raised about fifty million dollars in equity. Overall, the round was a little bit bigger, but there was a secondary component to it …”
Ferrari: Multi-product software models survive failures that would destroy single-product startups
“We can take risks with products, because if we make a big mistake on one, although we're not happy, we survive it. If you just have one product and you can, and you make a big mistake, you can, your project can crash and burn, perhaps irreparably. So we can be…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons was valued at over $2.5B in early 2024
“Well, the last round earlier this year, it was a little over 2.5 billion dollars.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons' first acquisition was a $10,000 keyboard app in 2014
“The first acquisition we paid for it about 10,000 dollars, and it was a an app to personalize your iPhone's keyboard. 20 14. Probably, yeah, make it eight or nine months into Bending Spoons.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons utilizes bank debt capped at roughly 3x leverage
“No, we have used debt, pretty straightforward bank debt quite a bit, never to extreme leverage ratios normally up to maybe three times at most, I would say.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons grew revenue roughly 70% annually in recent years
“In the later years, still pretty fast growth, perhaps not quite a hundred percent on average. I think the last couple of years, probably more like 70% revenue wise.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons evaluated over 3,000 acquisition targets in 12 months
“So we have a small team focused on acquisitions. They, last year, the, over the past 12 months, they have looked at over 3000 companies.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons was seeded with under $40,000 from failed startup Evertale
“Cause in the process, we had raised about a million euros in venture capital money. And we were left with about 40,000 euros. The, it was it belonged to this VC because of liquidation preferences. However, it was too little for them to bother going through the…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons grew Remini 10x after acquiring it
“I would say in some cases when the product was not mature, say Remini, for example, we tenxed it.”
Ferrari: Grew up in 900-person Italian village with no family college degrees
“I came up in this tiny village, as I mentioned, in the northeast of Italy. 900 people lived there. People there mostly were farmers, truck drivers, plumbers. My parents were hairdressers. None of my, nobody in my family had gotten, say, a university degree”