Bending Spoons is worth $24 billion.
It trades at 8x ARR and buys B2B companies at 2.3x to 2.7x ARR.
5 learnings from its first 102 days as a public company:
#1. Revenue grew 126%. Organic growth was 3%.
Nearly all of the $393M of added revenue in Q2 came from six acquisitions. The CEO says he doesn't optimize for organic growth. He optimizes for EPS, which grew 167%.
#2. R&D is 8% of revenue. Sales and marketing is 10%.
HubSpot and Datadog each spend about 70% of revenue on those two lines. Bending Spoons spends 18.6%. About 60 people run Vimeo. The core team is under 700 people, at $4M+ of revenue each.
#3. Miro sold at 2.3x ARR, five weeks after Airtable at 2.7x.
$1.08B of ARR for $2.64B, signed 37 days apart. Miro was valued at $17.5B in 2022. Bending Spoons underwrites to a 25% unlevered return. At its 54% margin, that supports about 2.2x ARR.
#4. 1,830 people came with AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo. Only a few hundred were kept.
Airtable arrived with 935 employees, more than Bending Spoons’ entire core team. Reorganization costs were $51M in Q2 alone.
#5. AI writes 90%+ of the code. Customers pay about 10% more for the AI features.
The CEO says a customer who paid 100 will now pay about 110. The AI gain shows up as capacity: the same 60 people on a business four times the size.
If you're at $300M to $800M in ARR growing under 25%, this is the buyer most likely to at least call. But ... the only do a handful of deals a year.
Its own stock trades at roughly 7x to 8x revenue. Your revenue is worth about 3x more inside Bending Spoons than it is in your hands.
