Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Brought to you by:
• The Enterprise Ready Conference on October 30th — For B2B leaders building enterprise SaaS.
• DX — DX is an engineering intelligence platform designed by leading researchers.
• ByteByteGo — Ace your next system design interview.
—
You may not be familiar with Bending Spoons, but I guarantee you’ve encountered some of their well-known products, like Evernote and Meetup. In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, we sit down with three key figures from the Italy-based startup: cofounder and CEO Luca Ferrari, CTO Francesco Mancone, and Evernote product lead Federico Simionato. Bending Spoons has been profitable from day one, and there's plenty we can learn from their unique culture, organizational structure, engineering processes, and hiring practices. In today’s conversation, we discuss:
The controversial acquisitions approach of Bending Spoons
How Bending Spoons spent more than $1 billion in buying tech companies
How the Evernote acquisition happened
How Bending Spoons operates and how it organizes product and platform teams
Why engineering processes are different across different products
How ‘radical simplicity’ is baked into everything from engineering processes to pay structure.
And much more!
Takeaways
1. Even inside one company, you choose engineering processes based on the maturity of the product. The CTO of Bending Spoons found it completely normal that each team decides on their approach to testing: e.g. more mature products have a lot more automated tests like unit, integration, UI tests in place. New products or less mature ones will still have less. The same goes for releasing and experimentation – e.g., more mature products will have more stages of release and experimentation, but products that are still just being built will not necessarily invest in this.
2. The concept of radical simplicity: this could be applicable far beyond Bending Spoons.
Bending Spoons believes, as a principle, that they should seek out the most radically simple solution and approach and. When adding complexity, the person or team approaching should bring proof why this complexity is beneficial. Those who retain the simpler status should not have to defend this, unless there is evidence and data that adding more complexity truly helps.
3. You don’t need to copy popular approaches to succeed as a product or engineering team. Bending Spoons seems to have devised a way that makes sense for them to operate, and they did not “copy” common approaches from other companies. A few examples:
Their most popular language is Python. This is a relatively rare choice for most companies, but not for them! At the same time, teams can choose technologies they use: and there are teams onboarding to other languages like Rust.
They do not have career ladders like most companies would do – at least for now. No bonuses either.
The concept of radical simplicity.
In some ways, they didn’t follow any approach because they didn’t really get much advice in the early years (they struggled to even attract VCs!) So they figured it out on their own.
If a small company in Italy with five devs could do this and keep figuring out what works for them as they grow: what is stopping you and your team from doing so?
Timestamps
(2:09) Welcome, Luca, Francesco, and Federico from Bending Spoons
(03:15) An overview of the well-known apps and products owned by Bending Spoons
(06:38) The elephant in the room: how Bending Spoons really acquires companies
(09:46) Layoffs: Bending Spoons’ philosophy on this
(14:10) Controversial principles
(17:16) Revenue, team size, and products
(19:35) How Bending Spoons runs AI products and allocates GPUs
(23:05) History of the company
(27:04) The Evernote acquisition
(29:50) Modernizing Evernote’s infrastructure
(32:44) “Radical simplicity” and why they try for zero on calls
(36:13) More on changes made to the Evernote systems
(41:13) How Bending Spoons prioritizes and ships fast
(49:40) What’s new and what’s coming for Bending Spoons
(51:08) Organizational structure at the company
(54:07) Engineering practices
(57:03) Testing approaches
(58:53) Platform teams
(1:01:52) Bending Spoons tech stack and popular frameworks
(1:05:55) Why Bending Spoons hires new grads and less experienced engineers
(1:08:09) The structure of careers and titles at Bending Spoons
(1:09:50) Traits they look for when hiring
(1:12:50) Why there aren’t many companies doing what Bending Spoons does
References
The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
Where to find Luca Ferrari:
• X: https://x.com/luke10ferrari
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luca-ferrari-12418318
Where to find Francesco Mancone:
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesco-mancone
Where to find Federico Simionato:
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/federicosimionato
Mentions during the episode:
• Evernote: https://evernote.com/
• Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/
• Bending Spoons: https://bendingspoons.com/
• Bending Spoons Acquires Mosaic Group Digital Assets From IAC: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240110239723/en/Bending-Spoons-Acquires-Mosaic-Group-Digital-Assets-From-IAC
• StreamYard: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240110239723/en/Bending-Spoons-Acquires-Mosaic-Group-Digital-Assets-From-IAC
• Issuu: https://issuu.com/
• WeTransfer: https://wetransfer.com/
• Remini: https://remini.ai/
• Netflix’s Famous 'Keeper Test': https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-new-culture-memo-keeper-test-changes-2024-6
• Bending Spoons Values: https://bendingspoons.com/values
• Splice: https://splice.com/
• GoPro: https://gopro.com/
• Thirty more exciting improvements in Evernote: https://evernote.com/blog/30-improvements-april-june-2024
• Rust: https://www.rust-lang.org/
• Jobs at Bending Spoons: https://jobs.bendingspoons.com/
• Evernote on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@evernote
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.
Share this post