This company makes more than $4 million per core team member
Three years ago the figure was $1 million, with scale and technology, especially AI, as major drivers.
Joys of Compounding · Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons: Compounding Through Operational Excellence and Acquisitions - [Joys of Compounding, EP. 40]Bending Spoons now generates more than $4 million in annualized revenue for every member of its core team, about four times the level of three years earlier. Luca Ferrari, the co-founder and chief executive of the company that buys and operates digital businesses, calls those core employees spooners.
Part of the gain is simple scale, but Ferrari says a lot of it comes from technology, particularly AI. Writing a memo or describing an experiment is now potentially about ten times faster than before, he says, and the company is trying to automate it fully and it is already mostly automated. Managers can ask an internal AI system to query databases and return a chart or summary without waiting on a data scientist.
Ferrari says the revenue-per-spooner figure should keep rising as the company scales. He suspects Bending Spoons could increase revenue tenfold while growing headcount only threefold at most, or something like that.
Questions people ask
Is $4 million per core team member a lot?
Yes, it is unusually high. Large technology companies often generate $1 million to $2 million in revenue per employee, with Apple recently around $2.4 million and Google around $1.8 million. More than $4 million puts Bending Spoons near the top of software businesses on this measure.
What is the internal AI system mentioned in the story?
Ferrari describes it as Alternative Spooner, a layer of internal tools and automations that employees reach through Slack. He says he can ask his own assistant to run an analysis, after which it temporarily accesses the relevant database and returns a plot or written summary. That lets managers check on businesses without asking someone else to pull the data.
Does higher revenue per core team member just mean layoffs?
It can reflect layoffs after acquisitions, and Bending Spoons has sharply reduced staff at some acquired companies. But Ferrari frames the larger point as leverage: if each person can do more, the company can absorb more or larger acquisitions without hiring proportionally. He even says the measure can be gamed by underhiring, so he treats it with caution.