Luca Ferrari's Bending Spoons uses AI for market discipline
By Bram de Vries · Reporting from Amsterdam ·
Bending Spoons uses AI and strict market discipline to strip corporate waste from its acquisitions.
Luca Ferrari, CEO of Bending Spoons, told Molly O’Shea on the "Sourcery" podcast that his firm generates $4 million in revenue per core employee. Ferrari said Bending Spoons does not compete with Silicon Valley through malice, but through a centralized hub of 50 proprietary tools that automate the mundane. AI writes nearly all the code. When the firm acquires companies like Airtable, it does not milk the asset for short-term gains; instead, it strips away the layers of middle management and redundant meetings to restore startup speed.
Market Discipline
Ferrari’s philosophy favors market earnings over the subsidies doled out by Brussels. He described a system based on logic where the firm scans a vast array of targets annually and buys assets to hold indefinitely, ignoring the typical private equity flip. He demands that every acquisition prove its value through hard cash flow rather than the ephemeral hype of venture capital. Critics call these roll-ups corporate graveyards, citing legacy brands like AOL or Evernote. But Ferrari said AOL remains one of the five largest email providers in the West, moving traffic for millions of users who care more about a working inbox than a trendy interface. This is market discipline: allocating capital to wring genuine productivity out of legacy enterprise.
Does centralization kill creativity?
Critics argue that automated management crushes the originality that births great software. They ask if standardizing A/B testing and AI orchestration onto one internal system turns engineering into a factory. In this view, the engineer becomes a cog, replacing human intuition with a checklist of rote compliance.
The data suggests otherwise. In 2025, Bending Spoons hired fewer than 300 people from nearly a million applicants. Fewer than one in a hundred core employees leave the firm. Talented engineers do not flee discipline; they flee the boredom of corporate bureaucracy. Bending Spoons removes the drudgery—the hours spent chasing missing receipts, the agony of manual month-end closes, and the friction of switching between ten different tool stacks—and gives engineers a platform where an agent called "Alt Spooner" fixes production bugs in minutes. This does not kill creativity; it removes the obstacles that block it.
European prosperity once rested on the ledger, the cargo hold, and the open exchange of value across borders. It did not rely on precautionary regulations that stifle industries before they can learn to walk. If the continent wants to escape its long economic slump, it should stop apologizing for the mechanics of capitalism and start studying the Milan playbook.