It’s OK to Criticize Bending Spoons — As Long As You Understand What They Do

Uri Geller, the illusionist who made spoon-bending famous (Source: official publicity photo by Nikos Vardakastanis)

As we debate layoffs and cost-cutting, we’re missing the real point: what engine turned this into a unicorn?

“Can we fix it?”
(Bob The Builder)

Bending Spoons made headlines again, taking Vimeo private in an all-cash deal for about $1.38 billion. It’s the latest move in an acquisition spree that started in 2022 with FiLMiC and rolled through Evernote, Meetup, Issuu, WeTransfer, Komoot – and now, the video platform that once dreamed of beating YouTube.

Bending Spoons had the glorious video platform in its crosshairs as far back as March 2024. After Vimeo's 2021 IPO, the stock tanked – down about 90% from its peak. The pivot to enterprise and monetization tools didn’t let it stand out in a crowded video market. Enter Bending Spoons.

This Is How They Roll

Everyone can guess what’s next for Vimeo, since Bending Spoons has a pattern of acquiring companies, then laying off staff, repricing and revamping the app. It’s a combination of aggressive cost-cutting, price increases, and genuine technical improvements, that demand tech skills and financial discipline.

It echoes what private equity has done for decades: buy a struggling company and turn it profitable through a combination of aggressive cost-cutting, followed by a relaunch. Bloomberg once called it "a new kind of private equity firm for the app store generation". The CEO Luca Ferrari prefers: "A little bit like if Berkshire Hathaway and Google had a baby."

It's a repeatable playbook and they stick to it because it works: they’ve grown revenue on essentially all acquisitions while maintaining high customer retention rates.

But the model is controversial, because it often entails layoffs. It's a calculated cruelty that draws most of the attention. As a devoted Komoot user, I get it: they reportedly laid off 85 of the people who made the app I use in my gravel bike rides.

And yet, focusing only on the layoffs misses the point. We can debate the ethics, but it’s not my focus. I'm a product manager and my point is strategic: that's not the edge that's hardest to copy.

The Overlooked Ingredient

Because the real product of Bending Spoons is talent acquisition. More specifically, they excel at hiring world-class talent at a fraction of the Silicon Valley compensation levels.

Of the few unicorns that the Italian scene can offer, this feels like the only one that truly needed to stay local: Italy can offer great talent and the lowest average wages among major European countries (when adjusted for purchasing power.) And Bending Spoons selects the best: Ferrari has said, “Out of 6,000 applications, we’ll hire about 200 people – so our selection is extremely stringent.” That’s why a crucial part of the playbook is moving operations to Milan.

What Bending Spoons offers to a struggling digital company is access to talent at scale, at a relative bargain. This is their main product, the fuel that makes the rest of the machine work. They have built an insanely talent‑dense environment, where motivation is a multiplier.

“People who don’t know us – or only know us superficially– tend to read our model as: ‘They cut costs and call it a day’”, said Ferrari. “In reality, we’ve seen time and again that a small team with very high talent density, very little managerial layering, and a lot of ambition moves 10 times faster and achieves far more.”

The first home page of vimeo.com, crafted by co-founder Jacob Lodwick, now a serial enterpreneur, then a self-proclaimed rapper.

Why It Scales

They consistently attract early‑career, high-aptitude talent, betting that talent x motivation beats experience. Struggling companies don’t. Komoot didn't receive more than 590,000 job applications in 9 months this year. Bending Spoons did. Acquired companies like Komoot gain access to that pipeline once integrated.

Then consider the platform effect that these serial acquisitions generate: every addition feeds a shared operating system – common infra, shared practices, playbook patterns. Lessons from one product roll into the next, reducing time‑to‑stabilize and time‑to‑improve. The more cycles they run, the more the engine compounds.

It’s not a mystery, it’s an overlooked element, who turns out to be key. Ferrari argues that “the narrative is sometimes misleading. Often the company we acquire is doing well and its management is competent. In most cases they were already growing; it’s just that our capabilities, platform technologies, and access to talent as part of a larger whole let us play by different rules than the previous team could. So it’s not that in their shoes we would have done something drastically different; it’s that we wear different shoes.”

It’s an advantage, but it’s also a potential fragility of the model: if Bending Spoons is, in effect, a people company in disguise, then investors are betting that not only the execution stays consistently stellar, but also that the Italian direct and indirect labor cost stays competitive over time.

Read Before You Judge

From the outside, it can look like classic private equity. Under the hood, the edge is operational: they out‑recruit and out‑operate at scale – and it's run by people who understand tech, not just finance.

So, yes: it's fine to debate whether such a cynical business model should be praised. And you can question whether this deserves to be "one of the most successful companies of all time", as their CEO puts it.

But before you do that, at least understand what they really do, and what makes them hard to challenge.

Bonus trivia: I always find it funny that Luca Ferrari isn’t just the CEO of Bending Spoons – he shares his name with an author, a former violin prodigy turned priest and the drummer of Italian indie rock band Verdena. What can’t this guy do? ;)