Unlike PE firms that buy to sell within 5 years, Bending Spoons holds assets forever. They conduct deep operational transformations, rebuilding technology and integrating businesses onto a shared platform. This tight integration makes a future sale structurally difficult.

Bending Spoons' core strategy acknowledges that finding product-market fit is difficult and luck-based. Instead of building new products, they acquire ones with established user bases and then leverage their platform of engineering, monetization, and marketing expertise to dramatically improve performance.

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.

Bending Spoons' strategy is inherently defensible against private equity. PE firms must keep portfolio companies separate for future sale, making it impossible to build a shared tech platform or pool expert teams. Bending Spoons' integrated model allows these synergies, creating value PE can't replicate.

Bending Spoons' acquisitions of Miro and Airtable signal a strategic shift. Previously known for buying standalone brands with strong cash flow, the company now appears to be assembling a portfolio of modern productivity tools, potentially creating a bundled offering to compete with suites like Google Workspace.