Luca Ferrari (Bending Spoons)

Ferrari was born in 1985. He has said that from the age of five or six he wanted to build something great, lasting, and exceptional, but that only at university did he realize entrepreneurship was his path.⁠[1][2]

He earned a bachelor’s degree in information engineering and a master’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the University of Padua in Italy, and a master’s degree in telecommunications engineering from the Technical University of Denmark, each with honors. While on a dual-degree program at the Technical University of Denmark, he met Matteo Danieli and Francesco Patarnello in Copenhagen, engineers who had also trained at the University of Padua.⁠[3][4][4]

Late on the night of August 2, 2010, while backpacking in Lombok, Indonesia, to celebrate their engineering graduation, Ferrari, Patarnello, and Danieli decided to start a company together; two months later their first company, Evertale, was up and running, with a smartphone app that used artificial intelligence to generate a user’s diary automatically. They raised about $1 million and built a team of about ten.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

From 2010 to 2012, Ferrari also worked as an associate at McKinsey & Company to support himself and the two other founders; he left McKinsey in early 2012 after Evertale secured venture funding. By mid-2013, Evertale had essentially no revenue and only about four months of runway left, and the founders concluded it was a failure and liquidated it, leaving about $40,000.⁠[3][2][2][3][3]

In June 2013, Ferrari, Patarnello, and Danieli, together with two Evertale standouts, Luca Querella and Tomasz Greber, used that roughly $40,000 to found Bending Spoons in Copenhagen, and Ferrari has served as chief executive officer and a director ever since. The company’s name comes from the scene in The Matrix about bending a spoon with the mind; Ferrari said they liked the “silliness” of the name, given that they had just $40,000, a team of five, and a track record of zero for one.⁠[3][3][3][4][3]

Looking back, the founding team said Evertale taught them two lessons: finding product-market fit depends heavily on luck, while improving operational skill has nothing to do with luck. They therefore set Bending Spoons’ strategy as acquiring digital businesses, transforming and continually optimizing them to expand earnings, and reinvesting the profits in new acquisitions, in effect outsourcing the search for product-market fit and focusing on operations; the company’s first acquisition cost just $10,000. Bending Spoons says it has been acquiring digital products since 2014, not to sell them on but to own and operate them for the long term.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][5]

Bending Spoons moved its headquarters to Milan, Italy, through a multi-step cross-border merger, with the Italian limited liability company Bending Spoons S.r.l. becoming the surviving entity in 2015 and being transformed into the joint stock company Bending Spoons S.p.A. in 2017; its headquarters were initially on Corso Como in central Milan and later moved to Via Bonnet in the Porta Nuova district.⁠[3][3][4]

From 2018 to 2021, Ferrari also served as a director of WeRoad, a social adventure travel company.⁠[3]

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Italian government chose Bending Spoons to build Immuni, the official contact-tracing app, bringing the company to public attention. Ferrari later said Immuni did not have the impact they had hoped for, but that the company was proud of the product’s quality, had done the work completely free of charge, and that trying was the right and responsible choice given Italy’s emergency.⁠[4][2][2]

In November 2022, the note-taking app Evernote announced it was being acquired by Bending Spoons, a deal completed in early 2023. According to the founding team, the company rearchitected Evernote’s organization, modernized its technology, accelerated product development, and rethought marketing and pricing.⁠[6][3][3]

In a February 2025 interview, Ferrari said that after acquiring a digital technology business, the company imagines what it would need to look like to achieve the greatest possible long-term success and then works to make that vision a reality, even when radical changes are required; he likened the company’s tools and principles to an engine that makes very different cars go faster. He said the company’s 2024 revenue was $706 million and that he expected 2025 revenue to be well above $1 billion.⁠[2][2][2]

He said he tries to reserve half of his own time for individual hands-on work; before making a job offer he tries to talk the candidate out of joining, and the offer comes with a document called “Controversial principles” listing aspects of working at the company that might be disliked; once a year the company sends an anonymous questionnaire to its main investors, directors, and senior managers asking only whether it should look for another CEO and why, and if the share of “yes” answers exceeded a certain threshold, the board would step in. He also said the company received more than 350,000 job applications in 2024 and made only 150 offers.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

Explaining the 75% staff cut after the WeTransfer acquisition, he said the company had concluded the product was too simple and its growth prospects too limited to justify such a large team, and that in creative and engineering fields small teams often achieve far more than large ones. He also acknowledged that the company is wrong about 80% of the time in predicting which new products users will like, citing Playond, a mobile game subscription service similar to Apple Arcade, as a failure.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

On June 8, 2026, Bending Spoons filed a Form F-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker BSP. The company has a dual-class share structure, with all Class A shares, carrying five votes each, held by the four co-founders Danieli, Ferrari, Patarnello, and Querella; the filing listed Ferrari, then 41, as chair of the board of directors, co-founder, and chief executive officer.⁠[7][7][7][3]

The letter to investors included in the filing was signed by Ferrari on behalf of the team. It stated that revenue grew from $387 million in 2023 to $1.31 billion in 2025; that the company received about 800,000 job applications and hired 286 people in 2025; and that the share of code pull requests authored or co-authored by artificial intelligence rose from less than 10% in the first quarter of 2025 to more than 90% by the end of the first quarter of 2026, with about 70% authored by AI alone. The letter also said nearly all of the company’s businesses and functions are led by people in their twenties or thirties, and that investment decisions are based on expected returns, assuming the acquired business will never be sold.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

On July 1, 2026, Bending Spoons began trading in New York, with the IPO valuing the company at about $18.4 billion; during its first week of trading its market capitalization briefly exceeded $25 billion. After the listing, the four co-founders retained more than 80% of the voting power.⁠[8][9][9]

After the listing, Ferrari described the company’s hiring process to The Wall Street Journal: the roughly 60,000 candidates who pass the first screening take tests of reasoning, judgment, and learning speed, followed by interviews, algorithmic scoring, and reference checks. He said that if people looked under the hood at how the company does this, “they would think we’re crazy,” and that a run-of-the-mill interview is almost entirely non-predictive, “like tossing a coin.”⁠[10][10][10]

Bending Spoons: Official website: https://bendingspoons.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]