The $23bn Junkyard: What Bending Spoons Reveals About Your Portfolio Cowardice
An Italian outfit built a global empire by buying the brands everyone else wrote off. Your Board keeps writing cheques for the darlings.
Bending Spoons just capped a Nasdaq listing at $23bn by acquiring struggling brands — Evernote, WeTransfer, Brightcove — and squeezing value nobody else believed was there. The uncomfortable question for your Board isn't how they did it. It's why your own portfolio is bloated with sentimental favourites you refuse to fix or sell.
This week's Financial Times carried the story of how Bending Spoons, an Italian start-up most executives had never heard of, built a $23bn tech empire out of brands the market had already buried. Evernote. WeTransfer. Brightcove. Meetup. The digital equivalent of a scrapyard — except someone realised the parts were worth more than the wrecks.
The instinct in most boardrooms is to file this under "clever opportunistic dealmaking" and move on. That would be a mistake. Because the Bending Spoons playbook isn't a story about acquisition genius. It's a story about the discipline your own organisation almost certainly lacks: the willingness to look coldly at an asset, decide what it's actually worth, and act without sentiment.
## The Assets You Won't Look At Honestly