How Bending Spoons Built a $20 Billion Compounder | Luca Ferrari

Vending Spoons has built a very different kind of technology company. Buy great products, improve them, generate more cash, and use that cash to do it again at a larger scale. At Wave by Vento, a sixteen z general partner, Anish Acharya, sits down with Bending Spoons co founder and CEO Luca Ferrari to unpack the thinking behind that model. They discuss when companies should bet on radical invention versus relentless optimization, why Luca prioritizes long term free cash flow over short term valuation, and how bending spoons approaches acquisitions, debt, and risk. They also get into whether AI really makes established software easier to disrupt. Why Luca thinks many SaaS modes remain durable, and how AI is already doing the vast majority of coding and data analysis inside bending spoons. Alright. Luca, thank you for saying yes to this. Welcome. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. Amazing. Okay. So just to contextualize for everyone, I'm sure we're all familiar with Bending Spoons. It's an absolute monster company. I think my favorite thing about the Bending Spoon story is how cool it sounds to work there. It feels like it's got the kind of intellectual diversity of a McKinsey with the technology sort of lean in of Google. So congratulations on building a phenomenal company. Well, thank you. Those are flattering comparisons. Just for the the few that may not be familiar, do you wanna give the thirty second overview of what it is exactly that you guys do and then let's get into some advanced topics. Yeah. We... It's pretty simple on the on the face of it. We we buy technology companies where we see an opportunity to to make them a lot more successful and then we integrate them into our platform, same foundational technology, same core team, and try to transform them so there are a lot more cash generative with a say ten year view, so a long long long horizon. And if we do that right, we take the extra earnings and lever them up and buy more bigger companies. Rinse and repeat. Incredible. And do you want to note a couple of the companies that you guys have acquired? Yeah. So Airtable, AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Commute, WeTransfer, more than 50 acquisitions at this point, but this would be some of the more, you know, the better known ones. Extraordinary. So you've had a really interesting sort of insider view as to how companies get built, how they plateau, and then how they start growing again. You know, Marc Andreessen has quipped before that there's no such thing as equities. Every company is either a bond, which means it generates a lot of sort of cash for a long period of time, or it's an option, you know. It's a sort of out of the money thing that may or may not happen. Do you agree with that, Luca? Do you think companies can reaccelerate once they've plateaued? What do you think? I …