The Pulse: Bending Spoons' Acquisition Strategy - The Pragmatic Engineer
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Before we start: I'm hosting the first-ever The Pragmatic Summit on 11 February, 2026, in San Francisco. Join 400 top engineers and leaders as we answer the question: How is AI reshaping software engineering, dev workflows, and the modern engineering stack?<br>Spaces are limited - don't miss out! Buy tickets here .
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Bending Spoons has announced buying Airtable for $1.285B in cash this week - which is less than the $1.4B in total funding Airtable has raised in the past, and well below the $11B valuation it had during its last fundraise in December 2021.<br>Selling to Bending Spoons is a company admitting defeat, and its inability or unwillingness to turn its business around, and wanting to get the highest possible cash for the business. Because this is what Bending Spoons is excellent at: they pay the highest cash value for a struggling business with a well-known brand, then take over operations, and operate the product with a fraction of the staff. They often let go most or all of the original team as they move over product operations to their in-house engineering team based in Italy and Europe.<br>Evernote: what happens when a new team takes over a legacy application<br>And having talked with Bending Spoons' engineering team on the podcast: they have done impressive engineering work after a takeover, in the past! For example, upon acquiring Evernote, the Bending Spoons engineering team discovered that the note-taking service was running as a Java 11 monolith (!!), with user data sharded across 750 manually provisioned virtual machines (!!!) on top of Google Cloud - in 2023! At a time when running cloud-native setups (managed databases, microservices) was common knowledge for years.<br>Evernote's existing setup was weirdly inefficient and operationally very heavy, with manual interventions needed to keep the service running. Needless to say, performance was poor because some VMs were regularly overloaded. Also, oncall was brutal!<br>The Bending Spoons engineering team rationalized the architecture:<br>Migrated user data sharded from the 750 manually provisioned VMs to a managed database<br>Split up the Java 11 monolith to microservices<br>Did all of the above without disrupting user experience<br>Improved performance of the backend by a wide margin<br>Reduced oncall load after finishing the migration to a cloud-native setup vs the previous manual provisioning setup<br>Did all the above in about 6 months.<br>It's a fair question: would long would have the original Evernote engineering team have taken to do the same changes that made the service more reliable, more performant, and cheaper to operate? I would guess it would have taken them many years: in fact, if they did not make this change until 2023, who knows if they would have ever made these pretty rational changes? And so the "shock therapy" of Bending Spoons starting with a blank page, and a new team taking over operating the full product, with a laser focus on efficiency: well, this approach can be pretty efficient, as the Evernote example shows.<br>You can listen to the full podcast episode I did with the Bending Spoons team: Twisting the rules of building software: Bending Spoons.<br>Price increases and the existing team let go: the two most typical complaints<br>Bending Spoons taking over an existing product has two major criticisms:<br>Price increases. Evernote was the biggest example of price hikes: after Bending Spoons took over operating the product - and improving its performance - price hikes followed. Being Spoons kept investing in Evernote, adding new features (including AI ones), but customers paying $37/year for the Pro plan pre-2023 were charged $250/year by 2026. My take is that this is what happens when a product starts working a business maximizing profits: lots of customers will leave for competition, while others will pay more, valuing a more reliable service that gets more investment than before. Bending Spoons keeps improving Evernote since the acquisition, alongside the price increases. Clearly, the company is optimizing for maximizing revenue, not maximizing the number of customers, though.<br>Layoffs . Bending Spoons let go most/all of the Evernote team in the US, briging operations in-house. This is part of the "usual" playbook of Bending Spoons: they buy products to operate them as efficiently as possible. The re-architecting example shows benefits of starting from scratch, and not needing to deal with internal resistance for changes that result in more efficient operations. Knowing that with a Bending Spoons...