This week a software company went public on the Nasdaq and closed its first day up 40 percent. Nothing unusual there, until you look at what it does. Bending Spoons doesn't build anything new. It buys beloved, ailing internet brands — Evernote, Vimeo, Meetup, WeTransfer, AOL — cuts headcount hard, raises prices, and runs them. The market now values that at more than $18 billion.
The story isn't the roll-up. Private equity has strip-mined software before. It's the creed the founders bolted underneath it. After their own startup, a game studio called Evertale, failed, they came away with an obsession with removing luck from growth — engineering the odds instead of betting them. That is a heresy in this business, and the market just blessed it.
Venture capital is a religion of the lucky swing. You buy a spread of lottery tickets, one of them returns the fund, and the misses are the price of the hit. The whole apparatus — the power law, the enormous TAM, the founder who bends the world — exists to survive being wrong most of the time in exchange for being spectacularly right once. Bending Spoons runs the machine in reverse. Buy something whose value another team already proved over a decade, drop in a fixed operating playbook, take the margin. No new idea to be wrong about. Their favorite number is revenue per employee, which climbed from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025 — double the output per head, on brands they never had to invent.
Minimizing luck is a virtue when you operate and a warning when you allocate.
The honest objection is that this is harvesting, and not the gentle kind. The margin comes partly from firing people and partly from charging the users who stayed more than they signed up for; Evernote subscribers have been loud about exactly that. True. But calling it strip-mining misses why the market paid up. Most of these brands weren't killed by a bad product — they were killed by bad operation. Evernote was beloved and mismanaged for ten years. A company that can reliably tell a failed idea from a failed operator, and buy the second one cheap, hasn't found a trick. It's found a skill this industry mostly refused to build, because it was too busy chasing the next thing.
So that's what the 40 percent is really pricing. Not a product — a judgment that the surplus in software has moved: from inventing the next brand to running the last one properly, from the swing to the discipline. But you can engineer the luck out of your returns only when someone else already took the risk of making the thing. The founders who got unlucky built Evernote. The ones who minimized it bought Evernote. A market that would rather own the harvest than plant the field is telling you what season it thinks we're in.