You remember Evernote, right? The note-taking app that was supposed to be the next billion-dollar company. Then it wasn’t. It became a zombie product — bloated, directionless, slowly bleeding users.
Then an obscure Italian company called Bending Spoons bought it. And suddenly, Evernote is profitable.
How does a near-dead app get revived by a company most people have never heard of? The answer is uncomfortable for Silicon Valley.
Bending Spoons is the most efficient vulture fund in tech history.
Most people look at Bending Spoons and think it’s a software developer. A collection of engineers who magically turn around flailing products. That’s wrong. What Bending Spoons actually does is far more strategic — and far more dangerous to the VC-funded growth-at-all-costs dogma.
Here’s the playbook: They acquire distressed, over-funded software assets. Products that were once hyped, raised hundreds of millions, then crashed. Evernote. AOL. Vimeo. These aren’t random buys; they’re trophies from the startup graveyard.
Then they don’t try to grow them. They restructure them for long-term profitability. Cut the fat. Optimize the core. Kill experiments. And they can do this because they’re not bounded by the classic 10-year time horizon of private equity funds. Bending Spoons plays a multi-decade game.
You’ve probably watched these apps slowly wither — the feature creep, the layoffs, the pivot to nowhere. Then Bending Spoons buys them, and suddenly they’re making money. It feels like magic. It’s not. It’s discipline.
Bending Spoons succeeds not by building the next big thing, but by cleaning up the mess left by the last big thing.
But here’s the twist that almost everyone misses: Bending Spoons is not a product company. It’s a private equity firm disguised as a software developer. The product is the vehicle, but the real engine is operational discipline and patient capital. They don’t build products — they rebuild businesses.
This is a direct challenge to the startup playbook. Venture capital tells you to grow fast, burn cash, capture market share, figure out profitability later. Bending Spoons says: take the failed results of that philosophy, buy them for pennies, and make them sustainably profitable without any growth. It’s the anti-VC model.
If you’re a founder, this should terrify you. Your over-funded, cash-burning darling could become Bending Spoons’ next acquisition target. But it should also teach you something: Long-term viability beats short-term hype every time.
And if you’re just a user? The next time you see a zombie app get bought by an obscure Italian company, don’t cry. It might be the smartest thing that ever happened to that product.
FAQ
Q: Isn't Bending Spoons just asset stripping – buying cheap, cutting costs, and milking the brand until it dies?
A: No. Asset stripping would mean selling off IP and dissolving the company. Bending Spoons actually invests in the product – reducing bloat, fixing the core experience, and maintaining a user base. They aim for sustainable profitability, not a quick liquidation. The difference is time horizon: they're in it for decades, not years.
Q: What can a startup founder learn from Bending Spoons' approach?
A: The most painful lesson: growth without a path to profitability is a trap. Bending Spoons profits from the failures of over-funded startups. Founders should design their business to be viable even without infinite capital – that means disciplined spending, a clear core value proposition, and a focus on unit economics from day one. Don't build a zombie that someone else will have to bury.
Q: Is Bending Spoons actually good for the tech ecosystem, or does it just exploit failed startups?
A: It's a net positive. Failed products that would otherwise fade into oblivion get a second life. Users keep their tools. Jobs remain. And the model creates a natural check on VC excess: if you overspend and crash, someone like Bending Spoons will buy you for pennies and prove you were overvalued. That's a healthy correction. The real problem is the system that creates so many distressed assets in the first place.