How Bending Spoons finds profits in the tech graveyard

Bending spoons is a parlour trick popularised in the 1970s by illusionist Uri Geller. It’s also the name of Italy’s most valuable technology firm, which earlier this summer staged a triumphant Wall Street initial public offering that saw its shares soar by 40% in a day – taking the value to $26 billion and “minting” the fortunes of its founders and a bevy of backers, ranging from US tech grandee Eric Schmidt and French telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel, to celebrities such as Andre Agassi.

The wider technology sell-off has since knocked around 20% off that valuation. But Bending Spoons’s ascent is nonetheless remarkable, says the Financial Times. The Milan-based outfit, founded in 2013, has made a virtue of scouring “the digital graveyard” in search of “paranormal returns”.

Most American investors had never heard of it before its market debut, says The Street. But many use its products. Among the 50 struggling apps and dusty vintage names this polished scavenger has acquired to overhaul are Evernote, a once hyped note-taking app; the ticket-buying site Eventbrite; WeTransfer, Vimeo, and that old internet has-been AOL.

Bending Spoons has been described as a “hybrid” of a private-equity investor and a technology firm. Yet it “operates more like a conglomerate from the mid-1900s”, says The Wall Street Journal.

The outfit’s driving force, CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari, is no relation to the Italian car-making dynasty. But he has made no bones about his intention to go places, says The Economist. He wants to “shake up” Italy’s business culture by building a company of “international calibre”.

Ferrari was born in 1985 and took an IT degree at Padua University before heading to Copenhagen to study telecommunications engineering. There he met two compatriots – Matteo Danieli and Francesco Patarnello. In 2010, the trio came up with an idea for a diary app. Dubbed Evertale, it raised $1 million, but folded within three years, notes the FT – a failure Ferrari describes as “liberating”.

Taking two Evertale stalwarts and their remaining $40,000 with them, they founded Bending Spoons. The name was suggested by Danieli who’d been inspired by the cult film The Matrix and its central idea that the mind can bend the apparent rules of reality. “We liked the silliness” of the name, says Ferrari – and it seemed apt.

How Bending Spoons found success

The firm’s Nasdaq listing tops a decade of dealmaking and word-of-mouth exposure that eventually attracted institutional investors including Baillie Gifford and Fidelity. Bending Spoons’s strategy hasn’t changed: from the start, it sought to buy struggling firms, often using debt, before gutting and fixing them – and then ploughing the earnings into new acquisitions. “Our way to generate value is to buy companies where there’s a core of greatness,” says Ferrari: whether it’s a brand, customer base, a good product or a team.

But what has always singled this operation out, says The Economist, is “the quality of execution”. Its success is down to a 700-strong army of youthful “Spooners” who infiltrate acquisitions and inject new life into them. And the selection process, as The Wall Street Journal notes, is beyond thorough. Last year, it received 800,000 applications and hired just 286 – a 0.04% acceptance rate that makes getting into Harvard or a top Wall Street firm look easy. But these go-getting graduates – given top positions early in their careers – are the firm’s heart blood. Critics may carp at the methods and “lack of financial disclosure”, says the FT. And one day all that debt might become a problem. But for now, Ferrari and his fellow Spooners are a European inspiration – and the toast of Wall Street.

This article was first published in MoneyWeek’s magazine. Enjoy exclusive early access to news, opinion and analysis from our team of financial experts with a MoneyWeek subscription.