Harder to Be Hired by Bending Spoons than Getting into Harvard

Software
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The WSJ had an interesting story on Bending Spoons. Apple News+ subscribers can read it here.

Summary: Bending Spoons has a highly selective hiring process, rejecting 99.9% of applicants. The company, which owns brands like AOL and Evernote, focuses on acquiring and revitalizing established software companies. Bending Spoons prioritizes talent, using a data-driven approach to identify and nurture exceptional individuals, often giving them significant responsibility early in their careers.

They set out to acquire products that had already proven people wanted them. These days, the companies in the Bending Spoons portfolio tend to be solid but unsexy businesses that haven’t been appealing to exceptional talent in a generation …

“There are now about 700 people who made it through the notorious hiring process and now work in technical, product and growth roles across the organization. They move from one Bending Spoons acquisition to the next, making what Ferrari calls “very deep changes”—rewriting the code, rebuilding the infrastructure, redesigning the user interface. And they are “held to particularly demanding performance standards,” the company promises …

In fact, an entire team of Spooners does nothing but evaluate other Spooners and potential Spooners. ”

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I suspect this says more about the job market in Italy than the excellence of the company.

Katie

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It might be the other way around too. 99.9% candidates reject working there.

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That’s a possibility. But 251 bending spoons employees gave the company an average of 4.7 stars on Glassdoor.com. And the estimated salary ranges top out in the low to mid six figures.

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So Bending Spoons is that farm upstate where all the companies from the last bubble go to…live out the rest of their days. I guess Bending Spoons is picking up the scraps that Apollo didn’t want to acquire.

Spoons piled on debt, bought a bunch of really weird tech companies, gutted the staff, hiked prices and left the corpses out to dry. Evernote’s price increase and shoe-horned AI features had some folx move away from it. Vimeo (oh poor Vimeo…) was the only potential competitor to YouTube, but it was shifted to enterprise media, which I guess can be viable? AOL is just a joke.

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I don’t think it is as hard to get into Harvard as people think.

I base that on having met 3 people this year who attended Harvard.

I didn’t ask them which university / college they attended.

They volunteered this info freely and quickly.

(I’ve only met 5 new people this year, so it looks like 60% of the population attended Harvard.)

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Probably more of a prestige incentive to claim a Harvard degree than, say Reed. Of course, Jobs could say truthfully “I attended Reed”. Anyone who assumed “graduated” made the wrong conclusion.

Katie

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