Bending Spoons

Executive Summary

Bending Spoons, now based in Milan, was started in Copenhagen in 2013 with $40,000 left over from a failed start-up. It is now worth about $30 billion. Its best-known products, among them Vimeo, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, Airtable and Miro, were all built by other people. It makes them more profitable after it buys them, but it has not made their revenue grow much.

In the second quarter of 2026 Bending Spoons' revenue was 126 per cent higher than a year earlier. Counting only the businesses it owns now, and comparing them with their own revenue a year earlier, it rose by 3 per cent. The rest came with the businesses it had bought since. Spending on acquisitions has risen from $194 million in the whole of 2023 to about $5.4 billion in the first ten months of 2026, and most of it has been borrowed. Interest cost $17 million in 2023 and $109 million in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

The company has been listed on Nasdaq since July 2026, and Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's company, is among its shareholders. In October it sold $1.8 billion of bonds to pay for acquisitions it has not yet chosen. Its founders, who hold about 82 per cent of the votes, must decide how fast to keep buying, at a time when each deal is larger than the last and every owner thinking of selling to Bending Spoons can look at how it ran the companies it bought before.

Zero for One, 2010-2013

In the early hours of 2 August 2010, on the Indonesian island of Lombok, three Italian engineers could not sleep. Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli and Luca Ferrari had finished their degrees and gone backpacking to celebrate, and that night they had decided to start a company together. Sixteen years later, in the letter that opened their company's prospectus for a listing on Nasdaq, they remembered being "too fired up to sleep" [1].

The three had studied engineering at the University of Padua and then at the Technical University of Denmark, outside Copenhagen [2]. By October 2010 they had set up their company, Evertale, in Copenhagen. Its app was a diary that wrote itself: it collected data from the user's phone and used artificial intelligence to tell the story of their day [3]. To pay their living costs, they agreed that whichever of them found the best-paid job would pay everyone's rent and food. Ferrari, then 25, took a job at McKinsey and told his employer from the start that he would leave [4][3].

He left early in 2012, when Evertale raised seed money from Mangrove Capital, an investment fund that had been an early backer of Skype [3][5]. In total Evertale raised about $1 million and built a team of ten [1]. The diary did not catch on. In December 2012 the team launched Wink, an app for sharing photos within a group of friends, aimed at people aged 18 to 24. TechCrunch, the technology site, reported the launch under the headline "So It's Like Color?", a reference to a photo-sharing start-up that had raised $41 million for the same idea and failed [6]. Wink did not catch on either.

By the middle of 2013 the money was running out. The founders later described where they stood:

By mid-2013, we have essentially no revenue, barely four months of runway in the bank, and a hard truth to reckon with: Evertale is a failure.

Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello and Matteo Danieli, letter to investors in Bending Spoons' prospectus, June 2026 [1]

Ferrari has been blunt about the cause:

We had this idea and we just thought we were right and arrogantly got into execution mode, and of course we crashed and burned.

Luca Ferrari, on the 20VC podcast, March 2024 [4]

Evertale had about $40,000 left, and even that was not safely the founders'. The shares held by its venture-capital investor carried a liquidation preference, the right to be paid first from whatever remained if the company closed. Rather than pay lawyers to claim so small a sum, the fund sold its shares to the founders for, as Ferrari recalls it, a euro [4]. The $40,000 was theirs to use.

Five people were left: the three founders and two of Evertale's staff (Luca Querella, an iPhone programmer, and Tomasz Greber, a designer) [1][7]. They had three years of experience of building and marketing apps, and two products that had failed. They had raised venture capital once and could try again with a new idea. Any of them could also have looked for a salaried job; Ferrari had already worked at McKinsey, and Danieli had left Nokia and abandoned a doctorate to work on start-ups [7].

By June 2013 the five had to decide what to do with $40,000.