Luca Ferrari didn’t just watch his first startup die. He dissected it. The Bending Spoons co-founder, whose company just pulled off an $18 billion IPO, sat across from me in a Milan espresso bar, thumbing a scar on his palm. “That was from smashing a laptop in 2011,” he says. “We were three weeks from broke.”
The Italian company has become notorious for buying beloved, ailing Internet brands — think Evernote, Meetup, and a dozen others — stripping them down, and rebuilding them into cash machines. Critics call it a vulture strategy. Ferrari calls it survival. And after the biggest tech IPO in European history, he’s ready to explain why most founders get luck wrong.
Minimizing Luck Is a Full-Time Job
“Success comes from minimizing luck,” Ferrari tells me, leaning forward. “Everyone chases the lucky break. I chase the unlucky ones — the things that can kill you.”
He’s not being cute. Bending Spoons’ playbook is built on identifying every possible failure point and engineering around it. When they acquire a brand, they don’t just cut costs. They run what Ferrari calls “failure scenarios” — simulations of what could go wrong in the first 90 days. Then they build countermeasures.
It sounds paranoid. It is. But the numbers don’t lie. Since 2020, Bending Spoons has acquired seven distressed companies. Six are now profitable. That’s not luck. That’s a system.
“Everyone chases the lucky break. I chase the unlucky ones — the things that can kill you.”
The Failure That Taught Them Everything
Before Bending Spoons became a $18B behemoth, Ferrari and co-founder Francesco Patarnello launched a photo-sharing app called Splash. It flopped. Hard. “We thought we were smart,” Ferrari says. “We had the right feature set, the right timing, the right investors. We were wrong.”
The postmortem was brutal. They realized they’d built a product for themselves, not for users. They’d assumed the market would care. It didn’t. “That failure cost us two years and every euro we had,” Ferrari says. “But it taught us the most important lesson: success isn’t about being right. It’s about being less wrong than everyone else.”
That lesson became the core of Bending Spoons’ culture. Every decision is stress-tested. Every assumption is questioned. “We hire people who are comfortable being wrong,” Ferrari says. “Because if you’re not wrong sometimes, you’re not trying hard enough.”
Buying Dying Brands: Smart or Ruthless?
Bending Spoons’ acquisition strategy has drawn fire. When they bought Evernote in 2022, users screamed. The company slashed features, raised prices, and cut the workforce by 40%. Within a year, Evernote was profitable for the first time in a decade. “We didn’t kill Evernote,” Ferrari says. “We saved it. The alternative was extinction.”
He’s not wrong. The brands Bending Spoons buys are usually bleeding cash, with bloated teams and no clear path forward. Ferrari’s team moves fast: they identify the core product, cut everything else, and rebuild with a lean, focused team. “Most tech companies die from too many features, not too few,” he says. “We’re the opposite of bloat.”
But the human cost is real. Layoffs. Relocations. Culture clashes. Ferrari doesn’t flinch. “I’ve been on the other side of that table,” he says. “It sucks. But a company with a year of runway that’s burning cash every month — that’s not a company. That’s a funeral waiting to happen. We give it a chance to live.”
The IPO: What It Means for European Tech
The $18B IPO isn’t just a win for Bending Spoons. It’s a signal. European tech has long been dismissed as a copycat of Silicon Valley, but Ferrari’s company is built on a distinctly European model: patient capital, operational rigor, and a willingness to buy ugly assets.
“Silicon Valley chases unicorns,” Ferrari says. “We chase cockroaches — companies that survive anything. Those are the ones that last.”
The IPO raised eyebrows for its speed. Bending Spoons filed confidentially just six months ago and priced above range. Ferrari credits the company’s “boring” metrics: consistent cash flow, low churn, and a clear growth plan. “Investors are tired of stories,” he says. “They want to see numbers that don’t need luck to work.”
What’s Next: No Rest for the Wary
With $4 billion in IPO proceeds, Bending Spoons is hunting bigger game. Ferrari won’t name names, but he hints at acquisitions in the productivity and health-tech space. “We’re looking for companies that have great products but terrible businesses,” he says. “We fix the business.”
He’s also doubling down on the “minimize luck” philosophy. The company is building an internal AI tool that stress-tests every major decision against historical failure data. “We’re creating a machine that learns from every mistake we’ve ever made,” Ferrari says. “If we can reduce luck to zero, we win.”
I ask him if he ever worries that the system will miss something — a black swan, a market shift, a competitor no one sees coming. He smiles, that scar catching the light. “Every day. That’s the point. The moment you think you’ve eliminated luck is the moment it kills you.”
He finishes his espresso, stands, and shakes my hand. “We’re not lucky,” he says. “We’re prepared. There’s a difference.”
