I sold my company to Bending Spoons(BSP), the Milan based tech roll up that went public today with a nearly 40% opening day pop. So when people ask me what to make of their IPO, I have more insight than most, which is why I was quoted multiple times in yesterday's related NYT's article. Too many people are missing the real story. The easy story is that Bending Spoons buys “old internet brands.” AOL Vimeo Evernote WeTransfer Eventbrite Meetup Brightcove Harvest komoot StreamYard Issuu But “old internet brands” is the wrong frame. These are not dead companies. They are products with enormous existing user behavior. Before being acquired: -AOL had roughly 30 million monthly very active users -WeTransfer, more than 80 million monthly active users. -Komoot had grown to 45 million users -Eventbrite supported 4.6 million events; 258 million paid tickets in 2025. -Issuu more than 1 million creators annually Bending Spoons now serves more than 500 million monthly active users and more than 9 million monthly paying customers...massive and enviable distribution, which is one of the most valuable assets in software. The real Bending Spoons insight is that many scaled digital products become undervalued when their growth slows to norms usually reserved for companies outside of Silicon Valley. In the case of the companies, Bending Spoons acquires, they no longer fit the return models that Silicon Valley VCs demand, but the paying users are still there and the products are still embedded in user workflows globally. Bending Spoons has built an operating model that takes advantage of Silicon Valley's valuation ADHD. They acquire products with real customer behavior, then integrate them into a centralized system of product, engineering, data, monetization, AI, and operating discipline. That is why this IPO matters. It is a public market test of a very specific thesis: Can you take scaled digital products that the market has started to misprice and rebuild the economics around them? And maybe more importantly: Can AI be used not just to create new software companies, but to make existing software companies flourish? That second question is underappreciated. Most of the AI conversation is about replacement. What replaces search? What replaces SaaS? Bending Spoons is asking something different: What can AI make durable again? This matters because even the shiny new highly valued AI start ups ultimately need users and revenue to scale. Bending Spoons has quietly been collecting paying users for a decade. That is the real story. Not AOL nostalgia. Not a random collection of internet logos. Not traditional private equity with better branding. There are fair questions about changes they make to the companies they buy and how they operate. But the underlying insight is powerful: Sometimes the market stops believing before the users stop caring. Often the value is still there, but the company has to be reimagined. That is what Bending Spoons does.
Erik Aronesty
2mo
Bending Spoons Priced Above Range, but the Real Bet Is their Next Deal https://share.google/ve4focH5vzZtUEhae When you buy the IPO, you're buying the promise of their future acquisitions. Because their current holdings are priced in
Mark Alexander
3mo
Traditionally, we have evaluated companies through lenses like growth, margins, market share and scale. Those will always matter. But I suspect the next generation of strategic buyers will increasingly ask a different question: How well is this enterprise architected for its next owner? That's one of the reasons I find Bending Spoons so interesting. They don't simply acquire software companies—they appear to have developed a repeatable capability for recognizing unrealized value and systematically unlocking it. To me, that signals a new M&A playbook—one that places greater emphasis on operational adaptability, integration readiness, trusted data and reducing acquisition friction, not just increasing scale. It also suggests the emergence of what I think of as Acquisition Readiness Architecture™: intentionally designing enterprises to maximize value before a transaction, not just during one. Thought-provoking post. Congratulations again.
Iain Martin
3mo
Joe Hyrkin interesting note here from Joe. There's a lot of truth here. Can you call a business like AOL that made $$183 million net income on revenues of $633 million old or over? Not really. There are shades of Benjamin Graham's Cigar Butts investing philosophy that was popularized by Warren Buffett. That AOL cash stream might have an expiry date with its OG users err aging out but Bending Spoons will certainly have several puffs left here on this cash-generative cigar butt that could last years, or even decades. After all part of Bending Spoons' pitch is that they can rewire American companies to make them run faster, and cheaper, on new tech. https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/07/01/how-bending-spoons-built-a-184-billion-empire-by-buying-internet-has-beens-like-aol/
Mark Rattley
3mo
Great post Joe. These products are wired into the fabric of thousands of companies. They are used and relied on by millions of users. As you say, they will be reinvented to integrate into the new agentic AI world.
Vipul Devluk
2mo
Have you kept tabs on Issuu since selling to Bending Spoons? Has the user experience improved, plateued, or worsended?
Cris Lenta
3mo
very good post with solid points! makes me root for the bending spoons experiment (which seems successful so far). thanks for sharing the insights!
Sifiso N.
3mo
Thank you for the insights behind the IPO. Better understanding of the premise and the operating model. User of many of the products you mentioned and was not aware of BSP's power.
Steven Cundari
3mo
Well said! 🚀
Interesting post with very clear, solid points. Thanks for sharing Joe Hyrkin
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/technology/bending-spoons-ipo-aol-vimeo-eventbrite.html