Growth Ritual #92

📋 In This Issue:

• AI Engineer in Your Pocket

• Four Thieves at the Louvre Just Taught Us a Masterclass in Building AI Products

• 68% of Your Users Hate You: The “Offline” Opportunity — 🔒

• God 2.0: Building the First “All-Knowing” Entity That Actually Answers — 🔒

• The “Dark Side” of Google’s New Self-Learning AI — 🔒

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Bending Spoons: The Quiet Italian Company That’s Buying and Rebuilding the Internet

I’ve been watching this company for years, and honestly, I still can’t quite believe what they’ve pulled off.

Four engineers from Milan, Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella, and Francesco Patarnello spent $10,000 on a niche keyboard personalization app.

Today, their company, Bending Spoons, is valued at $11 billion, has just closed a $710 million funding round (including $270 million in new capital and $440 million in secondary sales), and has purchased iconic internet brands like Evernote, Meetup, Brightcove, WeTransfer, Vimeo, and most recently, AOL.

All four cofounders are now billionaires.

This isn’t another hype-driven unicorn story. It’s something rarer: a genuinely profitable, engineering-first company that figured out how to buy neglected digital products, fix them properly, and make serious money doing it.

How It Actually Started

2013–2014. Four friends in their twenties, working from a tiny office in Milan. They’re exceptionally skilled, masters of mobile development and bold growth hacks that push every boundary.

They launch a few of their own apps, make decent money, but notice something interesting: there are thousands of apps making $1–10 million a year that are badly run, have outdated code, terrible UX, and owners who just want out.

So they start buying them. Cheap. The first one cost ten grand. They rewrite the code, fix the crashes, improve the onboarding, run proper growth experiments, and suddenly that sleepy little app is doing 3–5× more revenue.

They repeat it. Again. Again.

By 2018–2019 they’ve quietly built a portfolio that’s throwing off real cash flow, almost entirely bootstrapped.

That’s the part most people miss. This company was profitable from very early days. They didn’t need VC until 2021, and even then it was on their terms.

What They’re Doing Now (And Why It’s Working So Well)

Today the playbook is the same, just scaled up dramatically:

1. Find products with large, loyal user bases but stalled growth and technical debt.

2. Buy them (often cheap because public markets hate “no-growth” software stocks).

3. Trim anything that no longer contributes to growth, whether it’s underperforming roles, wasteful spending, or outdated processes.

4. Move everything to their internal platform.

5. Rebuild the core tech properly.

6. Add AI where it actually helps users.

7. Raise prices when the product finally doesn’t suck anymore.

8. Enjoy 40–60% EBITDA margins.

Evernote is the perfect example.

When they bought it in 2022, it was a mess. Sync was broken, apps were slow, half the features hadn’t been touched in years.

They cut staff (yes, that happened), but more importantly they rewrote huge chunks of the backend, fixed sync for good, and shipped real AI features that people actually use.

Same story with Meetup: new apps, better recommendations, leading to a 40% increase in monthly active users within 18 months.

Vimeo is the big one now. They took it private for $1.38 billion after the market had completely forgotten about it.

They’re doing the same thing: rebuild the player, improve encoding pipelines, add AI clipping and transcription, make the creator tools actually good again.

AOL is the wild card. Most people laughed when the deal was announced. “AOL? Really?” But look closer: millions of aging but sticky email users, content sites, ad tech infrastructure, and a brand people still recognize.

In the hands of a competent engineering team, that’s a huge amount of reachable eyeballs for AI-era products.

The Portfolio

It’s worth taking a tour of their full product portfolio and the short stories behind each one.

• Evernote – The once-beloved note-taking app that had become bloated and neglected

• Brightcove – Enterprise video-hosting infrastructure it snatched for $233 million

• Vimeo – The artsy video host it just took private for $1.38 billion

• AOL – Yes, that AOL. The American internet pioneer, freshly liberated from Apollo

• WeTransfer – The “send big files” site that still asks you to wait 30 seconds

• Meetup – The community-events platform that lost momentum post-COVID

• StreamYard – The browser-based live-stream studio it pried from Hopin’s fire-sale

• Issuu – The digital-publishing flip-book service everyone forgot existed

• Remini – The AI photo-enhancement hit that turns grainy snaps into HD glamour shots

• Splice – The mobile video editor GoPro couldn’t make profitable

• Komoot – The outdoor-navigation app every German hiker swears by

• Harvest – The time-tracking tool agencies love to hate

• MileIQ – The mileage logger Microsoft dumped and nobody noticed

• FiLMiC Pro – The pro-grade mobile cinema camera app that turned iPhones into Hollywood rigs

• 30 Day Fitness – The home-workout challenger that promises abs in a month

Why Acquire So Broadly? The Network Effects Play

Critics have questioned Bending Spoons’ lack of sector focus, owning everything from outdoor apps (Komoot) to video platforms (Vimeo, Brightcove) to legacy web portals (AOL). But the apparent randomness serves a strategic purpose.

Bending Spoons isn’t betting on a single vertical. It’s assembling a diversified portfolio of digital “attention hubs”, each capturing user time in different contexts (work, fitness, entertainment, community).

The real synergy lies not in cross-selling, but in shared infrastructure.

The company has quietly built an internal stack that employees call “SpoonOS”.

• Authentication

• Billing & subscriptions

• Analytics

• A/B testing

• AI models (transcription, summarization, image generation, etc.)

• DevOps & deployment

This allows Bending Spoons to:

• Rapidly deploy AI features (e.g., transcription, summarization, personalization) across multiple apps using shared models.

• Centralize ad tech and subscription management to maximize LTV (lifetime value).

• Reduce engineering redundancy: one team can maintain core services for dozens of products.

In essence, Bending Spoons is creating a multi-product SaaS operating system, a vertically integrated digital utility company for the attention economy.

One team can push a new AI feature to Evernote, Meetup, and Vimeo in weeks, not months. Most companies can’t do that across even two products.

They also have something like 500–600 engineers now (mostly in Milan) who are genuinely elite. These aren’t cheap offshore contractors. They’re the kind of people who could work at FAANG but prefer building real products with actual impact.

The AI Catalyst

The company’s latest funding round explicitly mentions AI as a key investment area.

This isn’t just buzzword compliance.

They’re sitting on training data that most AI companies would kill for:

• Video content and user behavior from Vimeo and Brightcove

• Productivity patterns and note structures from Evernote

• Community engagement data from Meetup

• Outdoor navigation and fitness patterns from Komoot

• A massive (if aging) web content archive from AOL

Bending Spoons has been training proprietary AI models on anonymized user data from its portfolio, models fine-tuned for specific tasks like video captioning (for Vimeo), route optimization (for Komoot), or meeting note extraction (for Evernote).

Because these apps serve distinct use cases, the AI training data is highly contextual, giving Bending Spoons an edge over generic LLMs.

The result?

Higher accuracy, lower inference costs, and defensible product moats.

Moreover, with AOL’s massive (if aging) user base and content infrastructure, Bending Spoons gains a potential platform to deploy AI-driven news curation, personalized portals, and ad targeting at web-scale, reviving the portal model for the generative AI era.

Financial Engine: Debt, Margins, and Optionality

Bending Spoons’ $2.8 billion debt facility —raised alongside the AOL deal— signals confidence in its ability to generate consistent cash flow.

The company reportedly targets EBITDA margins above 30% post-acquisition, achieved through headcount rationalization, pricing power, and infrastructure consolidation.

This financial discipline funds further M&A, but also provides optionality: Bending Spoons could eventually spin off or IPO individual assets (e.g., Vimeo as a standalone video SaaS play) or bundle them into a “super app” ecosystem.

The Ultimate Vision: A European Digital Sovereign

Perhaps the most understated aspect of Bending Spoons’ rise is its geopolitical significance.

In a global tech landscape dominated by U.S. and Chinese giants, Bending Spoons represents Europe’s most credible attempt to build a homegrown digital conglomerate, one that’s profitable, scalable, and technically elite.

Backed by European and U.S. investors but rooted in Milan, the company has avoided the growth-at-all-costs trap that plagued many startups. Instead, it prioritizes capital efficiency, engineering depth, and user monetization, values more aligned with European business traditions.

If Bending Spoons continues its trajectory, it could become the first European tech company to rival the scale of Alphabet or Meta, not by inventing the next social network, but by rescuing, rebuilding, and unifying the fragments of the old internet into a coherent, AI-augmented whole.

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Future Predictions: The Next 3 Years for Bending Spoons

I think they are the Berkshire Hathaway of the AI era.

Based on their recent $2.8B debt facility and the AOL acquisition, Bending Spoons is shifting gears. They are no longer just looking for “apps”; they are looking for Internet Infrastructure.

Here is what we can expect in the next 12-36 months:

1. Buy Buy Buy: They’ll keep buying “zombie” public companies—Box, GoDaddy, TripAdvisor, Yelp, maybe even something like Eventbrite or SoundCloud if the price drops enough.

2. SpoonID: They’ll launch a unified login/subscription layer across the portfolio. Imagine one account that works for Evernote, Vimeo, Meetup, Komoot, etc., with bundled pricing tiers. That’s coming.

3. The AI Pivot: They are no longer just an app aggregators; they are an AI integration lab. They are using the massive data lakes from their portfolio (video data from Vimeo, text from Evernote, location from Komoot) to train proprietary models that are far more contextual than generic LLMs. Also, heavy AI integration everywhere, but done tastefully. Think:

   • Evernote that actually understands your notes and can answer questions about them

   • Vimeo that auto-edits rough cuts into something watchable

   • Komoot routes optimized for weather, fitness level, scenery preferences

   • AOL portal that’s weirdly good again because it’s personalized by an AI that knows you from your email habits

4. The Ruthless Efficiency: They are unapologetic about restructuring. They acquire bloated companies, cut the headcount significantly, and replace human inefficiency with their tech stack. It’s brutal, but from a business physics perspective, it works. They turn break-even companies into cash cows with 30%+ EBITDA margins almost overnight.

5. AOL becomes the Trojan horse for B2B: They’ll turn AOL Mail + Yahoo (they’ll probably buy it too, just watch) into an enterprise-grade, GDPR-compliant, “European” alternative to Google Workspace + Microsoft 365. Governments and banks will eat it up.

6. IPO: At least one big spin-off or IPO. Vimeo feels like the obvious candidate once it’s clearly growing again.

7. Need GPU: Possible strategic partnership with Microsoft or Oracle for cloud/AI compute. They’ll want to stay independent, but they’re going to need serious GPU capacity soon.

They’re not trying to invent the next TikTok or ChatGPT. They’re doing the unsexy but massively valuable work of inheriting and upgrading the digital infrastructure that hundreds of millions of people still use every day.

In a world full of overfunded, money-losing “disruptors”, here’s a company that’s just… really good at building and fixing software. Profitable from day one.

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IN COLLABORATION WITH RETURN PRIME

Your Biggest Leak is Now Your Best Funnel

For those of us building in e-commerce or running a D2C brand, “returns” is the metric we hate to look at.

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