Bending Spoons acquired Airtable for $1.285B, below its $11B peak valuation, continuing a pattern of buying distressed but well-known software brands. The piece examines Bending Spoons' acquisition playbook: pay top cash for struggling products, fire most or all existing staff, migrate operations to their in-house European engineering team, re-architect for efficiency, then raise prices. The Evernote case is highlighted as a technical success story — migrating from 750 manually provisioned VMs running a Java 11 monolith to a cloud-native microservices setup in ~6 months. The bulk of the piece is an unpaywalled 2024 analysis of Hopin's collapse: from a $7.75B valuation to zero, how StreamYard was sold to Bending Spoons for ~$200M, why the board chose a buyer that would lay off everyone, and the broader lesson about the risks of raising too much venture capital.
