Firms like Bending Spoons provide a viable exit for venture-backed businesses that have product-market fit but stalled growth. Their playbook involves aggressive cost-cutting, implementing AI for efficiency, and running the asset for profitability, creating a new "acquirer of choice" category.

The key acquisition criteria are not growth, but the ability to confidently predict a company's trajectory and the potential for Bending Spoons to significantly improve its operations. They are willing to buy shrinking businesses if the decline is predictable.

Bending Spoons' M&A strategy came from realizing that creating a startup from scratch (zero-to-one) is heavily luck-dependent. In contrast, scaling an existing business (one-to-N) relies on functional skills like engineering and marketing that can be systematically mastered and applied across acquisitions.

The company integrates acquired businesses onto a shared platform of over 50 proprietary technologies, from data storage to recruiting. This creates massive efficiencies and offers capabilities unavailable to the companies on a standalone basis.

Unlike PE firms that flip companies, Bending Spoons acquires digital businesses to own permanently. Their model focuses on deep operational overhauls—rebuilding software, redesigning UI, and restructuring organizations—rather than making shallow management changes, creating long-term value through operational excellence.

Bending Spoons finds value in acquiring legacy brands because their user bases have survived decades of competition. These customers are 'self-selected' and highly resilient, reducing the risk of disruption compared to investing in a fast-growing but unproven company that has yet to face significant market challenges.

Post-acquisition, Bending Spoons intentionally creates smaller, high-talent-density teams. This "startup mode" eliminates bureaucracy and increases ownership, proving that a small, elite team can achieve more than a larger one. They argue the correlation between team size and quality is "mild at best."

When tasked with creating a new product line from zero, a CPO's first move can be to acquire a small company already operating in the space. This "buy before build" strategy can dramatically accelerate progress by inheriting a team that has already solved many of the foundational problems, bypassing a lengthy hiring and development cycle.

Bending Spoons' competitive advantage in M&A comes from an internal "operating system" of over 50 proprietary technologies. When they acquire a company, they replace its existing tech stack with their own, enabling superior efficiency, monetization, and operational control across their entire portfolio.