Facing hundreds of "no's" from investors forced Figs to operate with extreme capital efficiency from day one. This constraint, born out of necessity, led them to build a highly profitable and sustainable business model that wasn't reliant on continuous fundraising.

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.

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.

Fresh off a major funding round, AI infrastructure firm Modal Labs is pursuing an acquisition strategy focused on small, technically excellent teams that haven't found commercial success. This approach allows it to quickly onboard deep expertise in specialized areas like reinforcement learning, accelerating its product roadmap.

By treating their initial $4M seed round as potentially their last, Deel developed a culture of extreme capital efficiency. This allowed them to scale to $1.4B+ ARR while remaining profitable for three years, a rare feat for a hypergrowth company.

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.

Venture capital syndicates are often misaligned or culturally unable to make the ruthless cuts and price hikes needed to turn a stalled growth company into a cash-flow machine. Bending Spoons acquires these assets cheaply, does the "dirty work" VCs won't, and profits from the efficiency gains.

In a tough market, companies like Bending Spoons fill a critical ecosystem role. While not the glorious exit founders dream of, they offer a viable path to liquidity for employees and investors in struggling VC-backed companies. They function as a safety net, ensuring preference stacks get paid and capital is recycled.

Despite a $50 million exit from their previous company, the Everflow founders intentionally limited their initial investment to a few hundred thousand dollars and didn't take salaries for two years. They believed capital scarcity forces focus and efficiency, preventing wasteful spending while they were still figuring out the product.