Evernote went from 350 people to 20, then got its biggest update in years
Cleanup plus AI let a small team rebuild the product, its owner says, and he hopes revenue can one day grow tenfold with only threefold growth in staff.
Joys of Compounding · Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons: Compounding Through Operational Excellence and Acquisitions - [Joys of Compounding, EP. 40]When Bending Spoons, an Italian company that buys and operates digital businesses, bought Evernote, the note taking app came with about 350 people. Twelve to eighteen months after the acquisition was completed, about 60 remained. Now the whole product is run by 20 people.
Earlier this year, in January and February, those 20 people shipped what Luca Ferrari, the co-founder and chief executive of Bending Spoons, called "by far the biggest update to" Evernote in five or six years, and maybe in a decade.
Ferrari bets that a very small, very good team, armed with artificial intelligence, can do more than a large one, and feel more ownership doing it. If he is right, revenue can grow much faster than headcount for years.
Part of the Evernote story was unglamorous cleanup. Ferrari said the company spent a couple of years cleaning up the codebase and improving the cloud infrastructure, so the code was more maintainable and new features were simpler to add. The rest, he said, was, in his words, incredibly powerful AI automations.
Ferrari put the larger ambition plainly. He said artificial intelligence is a powerful tailwind, and he suspects Bending Spoons can increase revenue tenfold while increasing headcount at most threefold, a forecast rather than a result. The advantage, as Ferrari sees it, is not mainly cutting costs. It is being able to buy more companies by deploying, in his words, "the same amount of capital across smaller tickets," which expands the number of attainable deals. As he put it, "we're just scratching the surface of that."
Smaller, he argued, is also more motivating. Ferrari said Bending Spoons tries to be impact driven rather than passion driven, built around, in his phrase, "people who are excited when their work matters" for a customer or for the business. If 10 people run a business instead of 50, Ferrari said, you could argue very simplistically that each person has "roughly five times as much responsibility," and everyone is surrounded by stronger performers. That combination of responsibility and talent density, Ferrari said, breeds ownership, competitiveness, and the desire not to let other people down.
Questions people ask
What is Bending Spoons?
Bending Spoons is an Italian technology company that buys established consumer software apps and then tries to run them more efficiently with shared technology and very small teams. It keeps the profits to fund more acquisitions.
Why does cleaning up old code matter so much?
Cleaning up old code means removing errors, simplifying tangled parts, and moving to modern cloud systems so changes do not break other features. Once that work is done, even a small team can add features quickly because each update takes less testing and repair.
What kind of AI work is a small team actually using?
Ferrari points to an internal design tool called Diagram as one example. He said it already knows the product databases and each product's design rules, and can contact the right people for feedback, so designers work faster and other staff can design on their own without extra meetings.