Reading up on Bending Spoons

While I hate that Greg is exposing this alpha publicly... He's right. The tough part is not seeing this trend anymore now that Mainstreet has scaled to 9 figures in ARR through this strategy, Bending Spoons IPO this year, Thrive and General Catalyst executing similar strategies among many others now. But execution in M&A is hard and integration is even more difficult especially in legacy services businesses. Add in debt and cyclical nature it's not full proof. In fact I would wager 50% or more of the current AI holding companies fail due to poor integration and high debt profile. Hence why we hold zero debt we can survive any macro trends or black swan events. Leverage cuts both ways and we're about to see this play out. The best buying opportunity in our lifetime will happen when the private credit bubble bursts in the next few years.

@JesseTinsley

Bending Spoons is the best thing that has happened to overvalued ZIRP companies. They give an off-ramp to founders who will never hit previous valuations with less of a reputational hit than selling to private equity.

@austin_rief

On Bending Spoons: I still think about when they bought Evernote in 2023, it had user data stored on 750 manually provisioned (!!) VMs on GCP, sharded, with ongoing performance + reliability issues, running a Java 11 monolith (!!!) Then they went ahead and fixed it in ~6 months

@GergelyOrosz

Wow. Airtable, founded in 2012 and once valued at $11.7B, is getting acquired by Bending Spoons, founded 2013, at 2.7x ARR. A once hot startup; now an unfortunate victim of the SaaS bust. It raised $1.4B only to be sold for $1.285B EV ($2.25B equity value), just clearing its preference stack. That implies common and early holders split the remaining ~$850M, a ~10x haircut from peak.

@deedydas