Luca Ferrari on Bending Spoons, Acquisitions and Learning From Risk

Bending Spoons co-founder and CEO Luca Ferrari tells Harry Stebbings he was a shy child who struggled to make friends. He later became more socially comfortable, though he says his patience and time for socializing have narrowed again. He credits early friends with helping him learn to connect with others.

Ferrari clarifies that he shared his McKinsey salary with co-founders to support an earlier startup, Evertale, not Bending Spoons. The founders agreed the person who found the best-paying job would cover living costs while the others worked on the company. McKinsey allowed him to work on it part-time until he joined full-time.

Evertale failed after roughly two and a half years. Ferrari says the founders learned to build teams more thoughtfully and to question assumptions before rushing to execute an idea. He believes they were arrogant about knowing what the market wanted; being thoughtful cannot prevent every failure, but can improve the odds.

Bending Spoons adopted a different approach: build capabilities in technology, culture and operations, then acquire products that already show market fit and improve them. Ferrari looks for an existing user base, recognizable brand or strong distribution position. He presents this as a response to the team’s earlier mistake of assuming it knew what users wanted.

The company began with about $40,000 left over from Evertale, after its investors sold their shares back rather than pursue liquidation proceeds. Ferrari says its first simple apps were built internally; an early font app earned roughly $10,000 in lifetime revenue. About six or seven months in, the team bought a keyboard app for approximately $155,000 and reinvested the proceeds.

The founders had high ambition from the start, Ferrari says, but he personally remained cautious about whether they could achieve it. Bending Spoons bootstrapped in part because the founders doubted they could raise on attractive terms in Italy with a failed startup behind them and an unusual strategy. Early positive cash flow also meant outside funding was not immediately necessary.

Stebbings compares the model to private equity. Ferrari calls Bending Spoons a hybrid: it allocates capital like an investor but operates products deeply, rewriting code, redesigning interfaces and changing marketing or monetization. He says the company buys rising, stable and declining products alike, provided price and improvement potential justify the deal.

Cash and team members are allocated centrally to whichever opportunity is expected to create the most value per unit of resource. Ferrari acknowledges that these estimates are noisy. The company can also shut projects down when evidence fails to support continued investment.

One example was PlayOn, a subscription library for mobile games on which Ferrari says Bending Spoons spent $6 million to $7 million before closing it. The team believed unlimited access would be compelling, but its metrics were poor. Apple Arcade launched around the same time; Ferrari does not think that was the principal reason PlayOn failed.

The lesson, in his view, was humility about predicting demand for a novel product. An idea can look like an obviously good deal to its creators and still fail with users. He advises lowering assumed odds when enthusiasm or unfamiliarity may bias the team’s forecast.

For Evernote, Ferrari says the company saw opportunities to improve the product, monetization and costs. He emphasizes the value of its brand and the millions of people with established workflows and notes. His positive assessment and the claim that the team has improved it are those of the acquiring company’s CEO.

Bending Spoons values acquisitions using projected future free cash flows discounted over a long horizon, Ferrari says. It generally buys to hold for decades rather than assume an exit multiple in a few years. The arithmetic is straightforward; forecasting the cash flows accurately is the difficult part.

The company aims to make a serious offer quickly and close to the maximum it is willing to pay, then lets the seller decide. Ferrari says that, to his knowledge, it had not lost a process in which it could bid and a seller was willing to sell. He suggests its operational improvements may justify a higher price, while acknowledging that poor negotiation could be another explanation.

Ferrari says acquisitions were financed primarily through retained earnings and debt, with relatively little equity before and through Evernote. More recently, he says, the company raised roughly $200 million of equity over ten months. These are his descriptions of the financing mix at the time, not an independent verification of company accounts.

Every acquisition forecast has been wrong in some respect, Ferrari says: some outcomes were better and some worse. The largest recurring downside error was overestimating future user acquisition. He calls it particularly difficult to predict because it depends on many drivers outside the company’s control, and additional advertising may not be economical.

Stebbings asks whether the product portfolio produces cross-promotion or network effects. Ferrari says it had not been a meaningful factor in their experience, perhaps because the company had not managed to use it effectively. A broader lesson from both positive and negative surprises is to build a margin of safety into each allocation and across a portfolio.

Ferrari warns that success can make decision-makers overconfident. He recommends assuming one may be biased toward a favorite idea or tempted to skip difficult analysis, then doing the work anyway. In one unnamed acquisition, his team projected declining user acquisition but failed to investigate underlying drivers closely enough; the decline was much faster than expected.

The team revisits that mistake to prevent the lesson from fading. Ferrari also thinks he may have taken too little risk in other ways, waiting too long to raise capital and accelerate because he feared disappointing colleagues and investors. He cannot test the alternative history, so his conclusion remains a retrospective judgment.

He says criticism and fear of being disliked still affect him, although repeated exposure has made him more resilient. Ferrari calls himself highly self-critical, potentially to an unhealthy degree, and would not prescribe that attitude to everyone. He also puts business difficulties in perspective and describes himself as privileged to pursue work he enjoys.

For hiring, Ferrari distinguishes talent, experience and motivation. Bending Spoons emphasizes talent and motivation over prior experience because it can provide experience but cannot simply create a person’s abilities or desires. He accepts that there is a trade-off and that some experienced hires have been excellent.

The company uses practical tests designed to simulate underlying job abilities and general problem-solving, rather than relying primarily on an interviewer’s impression. It tries to learn what motivates candidates and whether the company can provide those conditions. Ferrari says prediction remains highly inaccurate even if the process has improved.

He identifies overweighting experience as a past hiring mistake: immediate competence may come at the expense of long-term potential and motivation. On remote work, he says in-person presence correlates with higher performance in the company’s observations, but cannot establish causation. Some of its strongest people work remotely, so it continues to support remote work and uses the same salary levels regardless of location.

Asked whether Europeans lack ambition, Ferrari rejects a simple division between work and life and says he does not know whether geography predicts work ethic. He believes reaching the top of a competitive field typically takes both talent and sustained effort, but does not think everyone is morally obliged to pursue that goal.

Ferrari attributes his strong co-founder relationships partly to luck and longstanding friendship. The founders passed through a failed venture together without their relationship breaking; in his view, hardship made it stronger. He describes that experience as evidence of a foundation they could build on.

To select investors, Bending Spoons consulted trusted advisers, added existing relationships and spoke with founders who had seen prospective investors in difficult situations. Ferrari says conduct during setbacks reveals more than conduct when returns are strong. The final choice was mutual, with both sides assessing the relationship.

He would create more competition in future fundraising. Early enthusiasm can diminish during diligence, he says, leaving founders with lower commitments or changed terms if they have already dismissed alternatives. His advice is to keep a reasonable range of potential investors engaged through signing where possible.

Ferrari says one consistent negotiating priority was avoiding liquidation preferences: founders, institutional investors and employee shareholders would be on equal economic terms in a downside outcome. He wanted to avoid a situation in which employees, whose equity could represent a large personal commitment, received nothing while one or two investors were protected. This describes the terms he says the company secured, not the terms of all venture financings.

In the quick-fire round, Ferrari says he has shifted from reading as many books as possible to selecting and studying fewer books more deeply. He describes a routine with exercise, reading, substantial individual work and limited meetings. He encourages hands-on individual work throughout the company.

Ferrari predicts AI may destroy more jobs than it creates over the medium or long term, while admitting he could be wrong and cannot specify the timing. Asked about kindness, he recalls two schoolmates who patiently helped him overcome shyness. The employment claim is a forecast rather than an established outcome.

Over ten years Ferrari hopes Bending Spoons can keep improving and scaling its model, accumulating resources and capabilities to make a positive difference. He says he does not think the company currently makes the kind of positive impact he aspires to, and cites large public-health efforts as inspiration. This is a personal ambition, not a measured impact claim.