🖥️ Server Rack, Scissors

At Evernote, Bending Spoons 🇮🇹 sacked almost the entire workforce. 75% of staff at WeTransfer 🇳🇱. Two thirds at Brightcove. The recipe has been applied some fifty times in 13 years. On Monday the Milanese group filed for a Nasdaq listing under the ticker BSP, targeting an €18bn valuation, up from €10bn at its last funding round eight months ago.

The trade is simple and nobody wanted it: buy web brands in terminal decline, cut everything that doesn’t pay, kill the free tier, raise prices, collect. Vimeo for €1.3bn, AOL with LastPass and McAfee for as much again, Eventbrite for €460m, all carried on €2.6bn of debt. Revenue doubles every year, €1.2bn in 2025, €550m in Q1 2026. Organic growth is close to nil, and interest payments eat half the operating result, €130m of €255m.

Thoma Bravo and Vista Equity have played this sport for 20 years, same targets, same cuts, same synergies. But in private, on private equity multiples. Bending Spoons does it in the open, and is asking public markets for a tech multiple on a restructuring machine. Fourteen banks, UniCredit 🇮🇹, Intesa Sanpaolo 🇮🇹 and BNP Paribas 🇫🇷 among them, are queuing to place the paper. The fee pool on an €18bn float settles whatever qualms remain about how the revenue is made. At that price, the market is paying less for the moribund brands than for the team that wrings them out.

That team sits in Milan. One company does not make a trend, and salvaging what America lets die proves nothing about the continent’s capacity to create. What the anomaly does kill is a precise cliché, the soft European operator, congenitally unable to cut. Consolidation by chainsaw passed for an American craft. Its most aggressive practitioner is now Italian, and the margins hold. You are allowed to find it ugly. Many of the investors now subscribing will deplore the layoffs at their next portfolio offsite.

Nobody else does this at scale, for a reason: it takes a machine. A shared technical platform, a science of subscription pricing honed on its own apps such as Remini, the capacity to absorb an acquisition in weeks where a fund takes two years. Evernote, declared dead years ago, still runs and still bills. The known weakness remains: roll-ups die of one cheque too large, and Luca Ferrari, the chief executive, talks of a thousand targets. Everything will hinge on price discipline as the targets get bigger.

On Monday, Europe lost an excuse. The model cannot be copied, but execution is not a matter of time zones, and the next founder who blames the continent’s culture for his slowness will have a Milanese precedent to digest.