Luca Ferrari bought digital firms for billions to trap workers in meritocracy
By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit ·
Bending Spoons masks a private equity model of extraction behind the jargon of a radical meritocracy.
Luca Ferrari, CEO of Bending Spoons, does not believe in synergy or strategic fit. On the podcast "Sourcery," he told host Molly O'Shea that the highest bidder always wins. This blunt logic explains how the Milan-based firm captures household digital properties like Airtable, AOL, Vimeo, and Miro.
Is this craft or extraction?
Ferrari and his co-founders, Francesco and Matt, pitch Bending Spoons as a permanent home for founders tired of the corporate grind—the endless cycle of quarterly reviews, performance pips, and slide decks. The firm listed on the Nasdaq at $29 a share. Since July, it has spent $2.6 billion—roughly the cost of a new aircraft carrier—to buy digital businesses. They promise a passionate, engineering-led culture of "extreme ownership." But beneath the Silicon Valley jargon lies a private equity model with an Italian accent.
The founders admit these takeovers require firing staff and merging departments. They justify this by claiming that large software companies bloat with bureaucracy and that a lean team ships code faster. What executives call "eliminating corporification" means cutting middle managers and increasing the workload for those who remain. When the firm buys a brand like AOL, which still serves millions, it immediately carves up the infrastructure and deletes redundant servers. The cost falls on employees in zip codes that never appear in a glossy investor deck.
The meritocracy trap
Matt, the VP of Product, describes the firm as a radical meritocracy. He notes that Luca Ferrari circulates a Google form every December, a digital ballot asking trusted employees if he should be replaced. It is a corporate fairy tale, built on the tech industry's hope that a high-intensity culture can erase a rigid hierarchy.
This internal competition, paired with direct cash offers instead of standard equity vesting, extracts maximum effort from young workers before they burn out. The firm recruits professionals who have not yet learned to set boundaries—the twenty-somethings who answer emails at midnight. Bending Spoons boasts that fewer than one in a hundred employees leave. But running a software mill in open-plan Milan offices is not a labor revolution; it is a younger, hungrier version of the same old grinder.
The pattern repeats
Financial engineers always promise that consolidation unlocks hidden value. But firms that buy and strip do not build the ability to create new tools. They squeeze cash flows, centralize operations, and monetize users by running leaner ships and raising subscription fees. By scooping up Evernote, WeTransfer, and Meetup, Bending Spoons bets that users have nowhere else to go.
For a generation that watched private equity gut Main Street, this is the final frontier of financialization. The firm turns digital utilities—the digital warehouses where we store our notes and send our files—into cash cows for institutional lenders and Nasdaq shareholders. Follow the money downward and you will not find magic. You will find a balance sheet designed to win auctions by squeezing the people who write the code.