Nine hundred and thirty million dollars is what Berkshire Hathaway has put into a company that buys software businesses, cuts much of the staff, and raises the prices. Bending Spoons went public in July at twenty-nine dollars a share, and Berkshire bought six hundred million dollars' worth. On October 14, a private placement added another three hundred and thirty million at thirty-three dollars a share, bringing Berkshire's stake to four percent of the company.
Since early 2023 Bending Spoons has spent nearly six billion dollars on fifteen acquisitions, mostly software companies whose valuations collapsed after the venture boom. Airtable was valued at eleven billion dollars in 2021. Bending Spoons bought it for 1.285 billion — an eighty-eight percent markdown. On October 12, Bending Spoons laid off a large portion of the Airtable team. Product leader Federico Simionato wrote on X that it was "not a reflection of their work but a reflection of our deep belief that small teams ship more and better." The same sequence played out at Evernote, where most of the American and Chilean staff were cut within months of the 2023 acquisition, and at WeTransfer, where approximately seventy-five percent of the workforce was gone within weeks.
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Last quarter Bending Spoons reported seven hundred and four million dollars in revenue, up a hundred and twenty-six percent from a year earlier. But organic growth, the part from existing products rather than new acquisitions, was three percent — down from thirteen percent the year before the IPO, when eighty-six percent of total growth came from buying companies. The model runs a thirty-four percent operating margin and four million dollars in annualized revenue per Spooner, because each acquisition's headcount drops while its prices rise, and the cash covers interest on nearly five billion dollars in debt and funds the next deal. Last quarter that interest bill was a hundred and nine million dollars, nearly half the operating income, up two hundred and five percent from a year earlier.
Bending Spoons has already agreed to buy Miro, the collaboration platform valued at 17.5 billion dollars in early 2022, for 1.355 billion. The F-1 identifies more than a thousand additional targets representing nearly four hundred billion dollars in combined annual revenue. Each new deal adds customers who are already paying, and the cycle holds as long as enough of them stay after the cuts and the price increases to fund the next one. The nine hundred and thirty million dollars is not a bet on software. It is a bet on the users who have not left yet.
Each new deal adds customers who are already paying, and the cycle holds as long as enough of them stay after the cuts and the price increases to fund the next one.
