BENDING SPOONS IPO

The Italian company that owns AOL but somehow no one has ever heard of just did something that should seriously scare Silicon Valley. Bending Spoons went public last week and didn't have to invent a single new product to do it. They're not your typical software company. The business behaves like a private equity firm that just so happens to have an engineering team. Bending Spoons was founded in 2013 by these five guys based in Copenhagen that had about 40k left from a startup that failed. They all moved to Milan and started buying up internet brands that people forgot were actual businesses. The whole playbook was to buy brands with loyal but neglected user bases, then got the cost structure, aka fire people, then let AI do all the engineering work. Your typical private equity play. Now their portfolio includes brands like Vimeo, AOL, WeTransfer, Evernote, and even Eventbrite. Last Wednesday, Bending Spoons went public at $29 a share with a market cap of around $18.4 BILLION. The stock closed up almost 40% on day one. So the company's worth something like $25 billion now. And now you're probably asking yourself, how did this pseudo-tech company just take the private equity playbook, go public, and achieve a multi-billion dollar valuation just like that? And the answer is that they don't really just buy and hold assets. They rework the pricing model, then shove free users towards paid tiers, then automate all the engineering. So headcount barely has to grow. And that all shows up in the company's P&L. Bending Spoons went from a $110 million loss to a $27.5 million profit in a single quarter. Unfortunately, the part that doesn't make the highlight reel is that a big part of that swing is driven by layoffs. The company did cut 75% of le transfers staff, but that's kind of the name of the game. They're also carrying around $4.4 billion in debt to fund these acquisitions, so it's really more of a leveraged buyout strategy. So yeah, Wall Street just publicly priced the buy, cut it, and AI'd it playbook, and it's doing pretty well. The real test will be if they can keep it up when there's nothing left to cut.