Bending Spoons, the newly-public Italian scaleup, has built a business out of buying and fixing struggling consumer apps. Its CEO says most M&A fails because buyers don't have a clear idea of what they will do with a company before they buy it.
In an interview with Sifted, the CEO described M&A as an operational skill rather than a financial one. Too many acquirers treat a deal as a transaction and then lack the product and engineering capabilities to improve what they bought. Bending Spoons, by contrast, buys companies with a plan to operate them and make them better.
The company has made more than 50 acquisitions, including Evernote, Meetup, WeTransfer, and Splice. The CEO acknowledged the work is hard and that most companies are not set up to do it well, but argued that the payoff comes from turning acquired products into stronger, more profitable businesses.