Key Takeaways

  • Bending Spoons does not operate as a private equity fund; they acquire software assets with durable brand equity to hold and operate forever rather than flipping them on a five-year cycle.
  • Following the acquisition of Evernote, Bending Spoons shrank the team from roughly 350 people down to 50 to 60 within 18 months, eventually reaching about 20 dedicated team members.
  • Deep operational integration into a shared technological platform allows tiny teams to manage product roadmaps, bug fixes, and monetization at massive scale.
  • Long-term ownership allows management to make radical, painful architecture changes that short-term private equity funds avoid.

The Forever Hold vs The Five-Year Flip

Traditional private equity runs on a timer. A fund buys a mature software business, strips out obvious overhead, juices cash flow, and attempts to flip the company to a secondary buyer in five to seven years. Because the goal is a near-term exit, traditional buyers rarely touch core product infrastructure. They keep legacy codebases alive and maintain existing layers of management.

Luca Ferrari built Bending Spoons on the exact opposite principle. “First major difference we're not a fund. We don't buy to sell. We have never sold a material business. We buy to hold and operate forever,” Ferrari explains.

When your holding period is forever, the math on structural overhaul shifts. You do not optimize for cosmetic quarterly numbers to impress the next fund. You can afford to rebuild systems from scratch, throw away decades of technical debt, and endure short-term pain to create permanent operating leverage.

Rebuilding Evernote with 20 Dedicated Operators

When Bending Spoons acquired Evernote, the product was supported by approximately 350 employees. Product releases had slowed, technical complexity had compounded, and expenses swallowed cash flow.

Instead of managing the existing team with light-touch oversight, Bending Spoons executed a complete restructuring. As Ferrari notes, “The second very big difference is that our interventions on the business are very very deep.”

The restructuring happened in stages. “So it was roughly 350 team members. We made it substantially smaller. I think a year a year and a half after the acquisition closed, we were more around 50 to 60 team members,” Ferrari says. Today, the core product footprint is even leaner: “people wake up in the morning and fix bugs for Evernote, launch features, optimize monetization, that's about 20 people right now.”

This collapse in headcount is not simple cost-cutting. It is enabled by shared infrastructure. Bending Spoons migrates acquired apps into a proprietary technological operating system managed by central teams. When the central platform ships an improvement to payment infrastructure, AI tooling, or analytics, every app in the portfolio benefits instantly. A tiny dedicated team can focus exclusively on core product features while centralized systems handle the rest.

What to Do With This

Audit your company's product lines and identify duplicated work across independent teams. If your developers spend hours rebuilding billing integrations, auth systems, or analytics pipelines for separate features, halt non-essential feature development for one sprint and centralize those services into a shared internal stack. Force every feature to run on that single pipeline, then measure how many engineers you actually need to maintain each live product.