Twisting the rules of building software: Bending Spoons (the team behind Evernote)

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You may not be familiar with Bending Spoons, but I guarantee you’ve encountered some of their well-known products, like Evernote and Meetup. In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, we sit down with three key figures from the Italy-based startup: cofounder and CEO Luca Ferrari, CTO Francesco Mancone, and Evernote product lead Federico Simionato. Bending Spoons has been profitable from day one, and there's plenty we can learn from their unique culture, organizational structure, engineering processes, and hiring practices. In today’s conversation, we cover the following topics:

• The controversial acquisitions approach of Bending Spoons

• How Bending Spoons spent more than $1 billion in buying tech companies

• How the Evernote acquisition happened

• How Bending Spoons operates and how it organizes product and platform teams

• Why engineering processes are different across different products

• How ‘radical simplicity’ is baked into everything from engineering processes to pay structure.

• And much more!

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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

• Good attrition, bad attrition for software engineers: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/attrition 

• Healthy oncall practices: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/healthy-oncall-practices • Shipping to production: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/shipping-to-production

• QA across the tech industry: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/qa-across-tech

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In this episode, we cover:

(2:09) Welcome, Luca, Francesco, and Federico from Bending Spoons

(03:15) An overview of the well-known apps and products owned by Bending Spoons

(06:38) The elephant in the room: how Bending Spoons really acquires companies

(09:46) Layoffs: Bending Spoons’ philosophy on this

(14:10) Controversial principles

(17:16) Revenue, team size, and products

(19:35) How Bending Spoons runs AI products and allocates GPUs

(23:05) History of the company

(27:04) The Evernote acquisition

(29:50) Modernizing Evernote’s infrastructure

(32:44) “Radical simplicity” and why they try for zero on calls

(36:13) More on changes made to the Evernote systems

(41:13) How Bending Spoons prioritizes and ships fast 

(49:40) What’s new and what’s coming for Bending Spoons

(51:08) Organizational structure at the company

(54:07) Engineering practices

(57:03) Testing approaches

(58:53) Platform teams

(1:01:52) Bending Spoons tech stack and popular frameworks

(1:05:55) Why Bending Spoons hires new grads and less experienced engineers

(1:08:09) The structure of careers and titles at Bending Spoons

(1:09:50) Traits they look for when hiring 

(1:12:50) Why there aren’t many companies doing what Bending Spoons does 

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Where to find Luca Ferrari:

• X: https://x.com/luke10ferrari

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luca-ferrari-12418318

Where to find  Francesco Mancone:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesco-mancone

Where to find Federico Simionato:

• X: https://x.com/fedesimio

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/federicosimionato

Where to find Gergely:

• Newsletter: https://www.pragmaticengineer.com/

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/mrgergelyorosz

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gergelyorosz/

• X: https://x.com/GergelyOrosz

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References and Transcripts:

See the transcript and other references from the episode at https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast

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