f_marzotto

Strategy & Planning @UberEats | $UBER | Tech | Crypto | Stocks

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

$BSP is a masterpiece. Just not of innovation.

Working in Big Tech, you get used to seeing what actual scale and innovation look like. So watching Italy crown Bending Spoons as its great tech champion - a team that buys beloved, declining brands like AOL, Evernote, WeTransfer, and Meetup to "revive" them - has been fascinating.

Their $18 billion IPO is largely deserved: they are exceptional operators. They make neglected software fast and profitable. The machine works. But there are two things you can do to a fading product. You can make it modern and profitable again - or you can make it win again, attracting new people who genuinely love it. Bending Spoons does the first brilliantly. The second, almost never.

Their own SEC prospectus reveals the trick. Organic growth was 13% last year, and just 6% last quarter. Net revenue retention is 94%, meaning each cohort of users is worth less a year later, even after aggressive price hikes. This isn't a base being won back; it's a base leaking quietly, taxed harder on the way out.

This is exactly why comparing them to Big Tech is so revealing. Picture $META putting WhatsApp or Instagram behind a paywall tomorrow. There would be a global uproar. Meta has the most locked-in audience on Earth, yet they refuse to charge them. Why? Because they are still chasing growth.

Bending Spoons charges its captive audiences precisely because it has no growth left to protect. They execute the exact playbook that would make Meta a supervillain, but on smaller apps with weaker exits - and we call it genius. The reviled villain treats its users better than the celebrated innovator.

A true maker earns its price by building something genuinely better; you pay because you want to stay. Bending Spoons didn't build these products; braver people did. They buy them when they are loved and hard to quit, and turn them into extraction machines. They are professional converters of makers into takers.

Charging people because they want to stay makes everyone richer. Charging them because they can't leave just moves money from users to shareholders. One is a gain for the world. The other is a transfer. And every switch they flip is one more bill on people already drowning in subscriptions, asked to pay again for what they once had free.

Of course, the business works. Rent extraction is the safest business on earth: low risk, fast payback, nothing to invent. But compare that to actual innovation. Whatever you think of Elon Musk, he took real risk on things that didn't exist yet: Tesla forced open the EV industry, SpaceX made rockets reusable, and each time the rest of the world had to follow. He earned his success by growing the pie; Bending Spoons pours the same ingenuity into nag screens and cancellation mazes, carving up a pie someone else baked.

Let's not call a toll booth a cathedral. Celebrate rent-collection as innovation, and we teach our best makers to optimize the past instead of building the future.

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@IncomeSharks Man so why $USAR and $USAS being going like shit lately?

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@TheLongInvest Can you elaborate more on $GRAB? What you think could happen with Uber and DH acquisition? If it happens

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@TheLongInvest Great posting thanks man

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@alc2022 Do you think this will happen for more and more companies? What kind?

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@gostainvest I recognize and admit the fact that their real moat is having excellent operators and management. So they might even find ways to survive well still for some time. Curious to see the first financials after IPO

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

$BSP is a masterpiece. Just not of innovation.

Working in Big Tech, you get used to seeing what actual scale and innovation look like. So watching Italy crown Bending Spoons as its great tech champion - a team that buys beloved, declining brands like AOL, Evernote, WeTransfer, and Meetup to "revive" them - has been fascinating.

Their $18 billion IPO is largely deserved: they are exceptional operators. They make neglected software fast and profitable. The machine works. But there are two things you can do to a fading product. You can make it modern and profitable again - or you can make it win again, attracting new people who genuinely love it. Bending Spoons does the first brilliantly. The second, almost never.

Their own SEC prospectus reveals the trick. Organic growth was 13% last year, and just 6% last quarter. Net revenue retention is 94%, meaning each cohort of users is worth less a year later, even after aggressive price hikes. This isn't a base being won back; it's a base leaking quietly, taxed harder on the way out.

This is exactly why comparing them to Big Tech is so revealing. Picture $META putting WhatsApp or Instagram behind a paywall tomorrow. There would be a global uproar. Meta has the most locked-in audience on Earth, yet they refuse to charge them. Why? Because they are still chasing growth.

Bending Spoons charges its captive audiences precisely because it has no growth left to protect. They execute the exact playbook that would make Meta a supervillain, but on smaller apps with weaker exits - and we call it genius. The reviled villain treats its users better than the celebrated innovator.

A true maker earns its price by building something genuinely better; you pay because you want to stay. Bending Spoons didn't build these products; braver people did. They buy them when they are loved and hard to quit, and turn them into extraction machines. They are professional converters of makers into takers.

Charging people because they want to stay makes everyone richer. Charging them because they can't leave just moves money from users to shareholders. One is a gain for the world. The other is a transfer. And every switch they flip is one more bill on people already drowning in subscriptions, asked to pay again for what they once had free.

Of course, the business works. Rent extraction is the safest business on earth: low risk, fast payback, nothing to invent. But compare that to actual innovation. Whatever you think of Elon Musk, he took real risk on things that didn't exist yet: Tesla forced open the EV industry, SpaceX made rockets reusable, and each time the rest of the world had to follow. He earned his success by growing the pie; Bending Spoons pours the same ingenuity into nag screens and cancellation mazes, carving up a pie someone else baked.

Let's not call a toll booth a cathedral. Celebrate rent-collection as innovation, and we teach our best makers to optimize the past instead of building the future.

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@gostainvest It’s a valid perspective, I don’t share it. But in the end I think this type of play has intrinsic problems when you try to scale it and when AI lowers switching costs

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

Appreciate the perspective, but the comparison misses the actual mechanics.

First, Twitter wasn't a financial extraction play. Musk deliberately sacrificed his main revenue stream (ads) to prioritize an ideological shift (free speech) and an AI pivot (Grok). BSP does the opposite: they preserve the old product but super-tax the captive users on their way out.

Second, 'cross-breeding' deep R&D (FSD compute, robotics, rocket engineering) across Tesla and xAI to build things that don't exist is not the same as sharing a centralized operational stack (billing, localization, marketing automation) to run legacy apps cheaply.

One shares engineering to invent the future; the other shares infrastructure to optimize the past

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

If this engine is a shared infrastructure built to automate localization, push notifications, and dynamic pricing while slashing overhead, that’s operational engineering, not product innovation. It’s a masterclass in efficiency, absolutely, but it's an optimization playbook automated by code.

You get a team of skilled SWEs and you can replicate the same pretty easily

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@readfirstprint @luke10ferrari Great post man

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@DudeWhoInvests No $UBER moat is the demand and active daily users growing. There are many other AV companies that will give the supply.

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@BrianFeroldi Most people here are -80% down with crypto

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@catmanyau @Ric_RTP You can shift outcome analysis between platforms, depends the type of task

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@Ric_RTP I honestly hope they will add Grok to Cursor as a model

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@alc2022 How much HRV you have?

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@patientinvestor $META Still looking cheap but let’s see when they realized Capex spending didn’t bring anything relevant

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@MrBeast 989000

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@itsmichaelluu He is right but timing is gonna be key here

[f_marzotto @f_marzotto]

@karlmehta Need to take better decisions