Table of Contents
How an 11-year-old Milan-based company spent over $1 billion acquiring struggling tech giants, eliminated on-call rotations entirely, and built a radical engineering culture that most Silicon Valley startups fear to attempt.
Bending Spoons operates Evernote, Meetup, and dozens of other products with 450 employees serving 200+ million users. Their controversial approach to acquisitions masks a sophisticated platform engineering strategy that prioritizes radical simplicity over industry conventions.
Key Takeaways
- Bending Spoons eliminates on-call rotations entirely, forcing engineers to build more robust systems from the ground up rather than relying on reactive fixes
- The company maintains 1% annual voluntary turnover by hiring primarily junior engineers and investing heavily in training rather than competing for experienced talent
- Radical simplicity principle requires anyone adding complexity to prove its necessity, while simplicity needs no justification—applied to everything from payroll to architecture
- Evernote's complete backend rewrite moved from 750 manually-provisioned VMs with polling-based sync to event-driven microservices with real-time synchronization
- Platform teams serve 100+ digital products through shared services, achieving massive economies of scale impossible for individual product teams
- Profitable growth without venture capital forced resourcefulness and efficiency that now provides competitive advantages over well-funded startups
- Small autonomous teams with "vast mandates" choose their own technology stacks and processes, guided by principles rather than prescriptive rules
- Engineering maturity determines tooling choices—new products use minimal automation while mature products invest heavily in CI/CD and testing infrastructure
Timeline Overview
- 00:00–30:00 — Addressing controversial acquisition strategy, team reduction perceptions, and long-term value creation philosophy
- 30:00–60:00 — Company founding story from Copenhagen AI diary app failure to Milan-based acquisition machine with $40k seed money
- 60:00–90:00 — Evernote acquisition details, technical assessment of legacy monolith with 750 VMs and polling-based synchronization
- 90:00–120:00 — Complete Evernote architecture rewrite from Java monolith to event-driven microservices with real-time sync
- 120:00–150:00 — Organizational structure with autonomous business units, platform teams, and radical simplicity principles
- 150:00–END — Hiring philosophy favoring junior talent, engineering practices varying by product maturity, and technology choices
The Acquisition Philosophy: Painful Transitions for Long-Term Success
Bending Spoons faces persistent criticism for reducing staff after acquisitions, but their approach stems from a fundamental business philosophy about sustainable value creation. When they acquire struggling companies, they implement significant organizational changes based on extensive learning phases that can last several months.
The company's leadership divides the world into two camps: those who believe businesses should survive at their current performance level without painful transitions, and those who believe in optimizing for long-term effectiveness even when it requires difficult decisions. As CEO Luca Ferrari explains, "bringing the business from a 6 out of 10 to a 9 out of 10 if it means going through a painful decision such as a layoff" represents their core philosophy.
Their acquisition strategy focuses on companies actively seeking buyers, often due to financial struggles or strategic challenges. These aren't hostile takeovers but partnerships with organizations that recognize they need fundamental changes to survive and thrive in competitive markets.
The learning phase involves Bending Spoons team members joining at all organizational levels to understand the business comprehensively. They examine code, processes, financial models, and organizational structures before developing a comprehensive vision for transformation.
After forming their vision, they execute changes rapidly across technology, organization, monetization, and user experience. This approach requires making unpopular decisions quickly rather than allowing slow decline, which they argue better serves long-term stakeholder interests.
The controversy surrounding their methods often overshadows their track record of building sustainable, profitable businesses from struggling assets. Companies like Evernote had been burning money and struggling for years before the acquisition provided a path to sustainability.
From Failed AI Startup to Billion-Dollar Acquisition Machine
Bending Spoons emerged from the ashes of Evertale, an AI-powered diary application that failed commercially in 2011 despite working reasonably well technically. The founders had raised approximately $1 million in venture capital but exhausted their options when the product couldn't achieve market fit.
The VC firm sold their shares back to the founders for $1 to avoid the cumbersome liquidation process, leaving them with $40,000 in remaining funds. This modest sum became the seed money for Bending Spoons, founded in Copenhagen in 2013 by the same team that had learned hard lessons from their previous failure.
Their first acquisition cost just $10,000—an iOS keyboard personalization app from a solo developer. By successfully improving and monetizing this simple application, they demonstrated their ability to add value to existing digital products and began building their acquisition expertise.
The compounding effect of successful small acquisitions enabled progressively larger deals. Each successful transformation provided capital and experience for the next opportunity, creating an exponential growth pattern that eventually enabled hundred-million-dollar acquisitions.
Moving the company from Copenhagen to Milan in 2014 reflected both personal preferences and practical considerations about building a sustainable business in a location with lower operational costs and different talent dynamics than Silicon Valley or other major tech hubs.
The decision to bootstrap rather than raise significant venture capital wasn't entirely voluntary—raising capital in Italy in 2014 was "borderline impossible" according to Ferrari. This constraint forced them to develop profitability discipline from the beginning, which became a competitive advantage.
The Evernote Technical Transformation: From Legacy Monolith to Modern Architecture
When Bending Spoons acquired Evernote in early 2023, they inherited a complex legacy system that had accumulated years of technical debt. The application ran on 750 manually-provisioned virtual machines on Google Cloud, with user data sharded unevenly across these instances, causing significant load imbalances.
The original architecture used a polling-based synchronization mechanism that required heavy client-side logic to handle data consistency and conflict resolution. This approach caused frequent data synchronization issues and made the system difficult to maintain and debug.
CTO Francesco Comin identified the migration strategy as particularly problematic—Evernote had moved from bare metal servers to the cloud in a "one-to-one fashion" without reshaping the architecture for cloud-native patterns. This resulted in a Java 11 monolith running on manually managed virtual machines.
The transformation began with migrating all user data from local virtual machine databases to managed database services. This fundamental change enabled the team to refactor the application logic without worrying about data consistency across physical machines.
The next phase involved decomposing the monolith into microservices while replacing the polling-based sync with an event-driven architecture called "NSync." This new system handles real-time synchronization by processing events on the backend and streaming changes to clients immediately.
Moving synchronization logic from clients to servers provided much better observability and control over data consistency. The backend can now guarantee unique state representation and propagate changes in real-time, eliminating most data synchronization issues that plagued the previous architecture.
Radical Simplicity: Engineering Culture That Eliminates Complexity
Bending Spoons implements "radical simplicity" as a core cultural principle that influences every aspect of their engineering organization. The burden of proof always lies with those who want to add complexity rather than those advocating for simpler approaches.
This philosophy extends far beyond technology decisions to organizational policies. Their compensation structure exemplifies this principle—they eliminated bonuses entirely in favor of fixed salaries plus optional equity participation, removing the complexity of performance discussions and target setting.
The principle applies equally to their approach to on-call rotations. Rather than accepting that systems will fail and organizing teams to respond reactively, they eliminate on-call entirely for most products, forcing engineers to build more robust systems from the beginning.
When engineers know they don't have a safety net of on-call support, they invest more effort in considering corner cases, handling errors gracefully, and building truly robust systems. As Comin explains, "knowing that you don't have that fallback as a software engineer really breeds that have I thought about the corner cases."
Teams regularly review existing systems to identify opportunities for simplification rather than just avoiding new complexity. This active reduction of unnecessary complexity prevents the gradual accumulation of technical debt that plagues many engineering organizations.
The radical simplicity principle enables faster decision-making and clearer communication throughout the organization. When default choices favor simplicity, teams spend less time debating architectural decisions and more time solving customer problems.
Platform Engineering at Scale: Supporting 100+ Digital Products
Bending Spoons operates a sophisticated platform engineering organization that serves over 100 digital products through shared services and infrastructure. This approach enables massive economies of scale that would be impossible for individual product teams to achieve independently.
The Foundations Technology team builds tools and expertise for analytics, monetization, user acquisition, and developer experience that can be leveraged across the entire product portfolio. These platform investments require significant upfront costs but generate returns when applied across dozens of products.
Their unified data warehouse architecture ensures all products generate data with consistent semantics and formats. When platform teams build new analytical tools or machine learning models, they work immediately across the entire product portfolio without custom integration work.
The platform handles over 100,000 requests per second across authentication, security, monetization, and data tracking services. This shared infrastructure enables product teams to focus on user experience and business logic rather than building foundational capabilities repeatedly.
Marketing automation represents another platform capability that operates at massive scale. Bending Spoons spends tens of millions of dollars annually on marketing that runs almost entirely through automated systems, enabling sophisticated campaign optimization across their portfolio.
The two-way relationship between business units and platform teams allows improvements to flow in both directions. When product teams solve problems that benefit the broader organization, those solutions can be elevated to platform services for company-wide use.
Hiring Junior Talent and Building World-Class Teams
Bending Spoons deliberately prioritizes hiring new graduates and inexperienced engineers rather than competing for senior talent in the market. This strategy stems from their belief that talent cannot be taught while experience can be provided through high-quality projects and mentorship.
Their long-term orientation means they can afford to invest in developing talented individuals over several years rather than needing immediate productivity from experienced hires. The company culture and unusual practices make it challenging for experienced engineers to adapt quickly to their way of working.
The approach requires significant investment in training, coaching, and creating development opportunities for junior engineers. However, the company's 1% annual voluntary turnover rate suggests this investment pays off through exceptional retention and employee satisfaction.
New hires receive a document called "Controversial Principles" that explicitly outlines values some people might find challenging, including their "uncompromising on excellence" standard that expects each position to be staffed with top-tier performers.
The company eliminates traditional career ladders and titles in favor of a simplified system with few levels and substantial differences between them. Engineers are called "software engineers" internally regardless of experience level, though they can choose external titles for resume purposes.
This hiring philosophy enables them to build exceptionally talented teams while avoiding the bidding wars for senior engineers that characterize much of the technology industry. By developing talent internally, they create engineers who understand their culture and practices deeply.
Engineering Practices Tailored to Product Maturity
Rather than mandating uniform engineering practices across all products, Bending Spoons adapts their approach based on each product's maturity level and specific requirements. This flexibility enables teams to optimize their processes for their particular stage of development and business needs.
New or experimental products typically use minimal automation and formal processes, allowing teams to iterate quickly and validate concepts without heavy tooling overhead. As products mature and prove their value, teams invest progressively more in sophisticated CI/CD pipelines, testing frameworks, and operational monitoring.
Quality assurance responsibilities are shared between software engineers and dedicated QA testers, with engineers handling white-box testing while QA focuses on black-box scenarios. This shared responsibility model increases engineer ownership of product quality while maintaining specialized testing expertise.
Testing strategies vary significantly based on product characteristics and user interface complexity. Teams develop end-to-end tests for critical user flows while being pragmatic about coverage levels to avoid generating false positives that waste engineering time.
Observability and monitoring systems are tailored to each product's specific failure modes and business metrics. Teams focus on capturing behaviors that matter for their users while minimizing alert fatigue through careful threshold selection and noise reduction.
The platform provides shared tools and expertise that teams can adopt voluntarily rather than mandating specific technology stacks. This approach enables innovation while providing proven solutions for common problems.
Technology Choices Driven by Outcomes, Not Conventions
Bending Spoons selects technology stacks based on specific project requirements rather than following industry trends or maintaining consistency for its own sake. Their most popular backend language is Python with FastAPI, which differs from many companies their size but works well for their needs.
Teams use TypeScript extensively to enable full-stack development capabilities, allowing engineers to work across client and server code more fluidly. They support Swift and Kotlin for native mobile development while using React and Electron when cross-platform approaches make sense.
Specialized use cases drive technology choices that optimize for specific performance or capability requirements. Their marketing attribution system uses Rust to handle massive traffic loads with optimal efficiency, demonstrating willingness to adopt new technologies when justified by concrete benefits.
The company encourages teams to evaluate different technologies when they could achieve equivalent outcomes, generally preferring tools already used across the organization to minimize knowledge silos and single points of failure.
Infrastructure decisions prioritize operational simplicity and cost efficiency. Their AI inference platform manages around 4,000 GPUs dynamically, using sophisticated algorithms to predict demand and optimize allocation between ensuring service availability and minimizing costs.
This pragmatic approach to technology selection enables teams to focus on solving customer problems rather than debating architectural purity or following external best practices that may not apply to their specific context.
Common Questions
Q: How does Bending Spoons justify eliminating on-call rotations for most products?
A: They force engineers to build more robust systems by removing the safety net, making corner case analysis and error handling essential from the start.
Q: What is "radical simplicity" and how is it implemented across the organization?
A: A principle requiring anyone adding complexity to prove its necessity while simplicity needs no justification, applied to everything from architecture to compensation.
Q: Why does Bending Spoons prefer hiring junior engineers over experienced ones?
A: They believe talent cannot be taught while experience can be provided, and their unusual culture makes it harder for experienced engineers to adapt quickly.
Q: How did the Evernote technical transformation improve performance and reliability?
A: Moving from polling-based sync to event-driven architecture reduced synchronization time to 1/10th or 1/12th of previous duration while eliminating data consistency issues.
Q: What makes Bending Spoons' platform engineering approach unique at their scale?
A: Shared services supporting 100+ products with unified data formats enable immediate cross-product benefits when new tools or models are developed.
Bending Spoons demonstrates that unconventional approaches to engineering culture, talent development, and technical architecture can create sustainable competitive advantages. Their focus on long-term value creation over short-term metrics enables investments in simplicity and quality that compound over time, creating a foundation for continued growth and innovation.
