Bending Spoons CEO talks future acquisitions

Bending Spoons, an Italian holding company that buys and seeks to revitalize digital businesses, raised $1.7 billion in its IPO and will list Wednesday on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol "BSP."

Why it matters: AOL is part of a public company again. So is Eventbrite. And Vimeo. And a bunch of other legacy tech brands.

Zoom in: It fetched $29 per share, versus a $26 to $28 per share offering range, which imputes an $18.4 billion valuation.

Axios spoke last night with Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons' co-founder and CEO. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation, which touched on strategy, future dealmaking, and the IPO.

Axios: Your IPO prospectus says that Bending Spoons has identified more than 1,000 acquisition targets, both public and private. What makes something a Bending Spoons target?

Ferrari: "It's a fairly broad net, but the first characteristic we look for is predictability. We want to feel confident that we know where the business is going, especially once integrated into our platform for a long time horizon, and also that we believe we can improve the business dramatically.

The thesis of what we do is to integrate these companies very deeply onto our platform and rebuild them almost from the ground up. The technology, the product, the monetization and big parts of the team. If we don't see that we can make a big difference, we don't expect to be able to make an appealing offer."

Do you want companies that complement others in the portfolio?

"No, we're not thematic in that way and don't really cross-sell our products. We've done consumer businesses, SME businesses, enterprise businesses. Mostly subscriptions, but we've done a little bit of advertising revenue too."

What percentage of that 1,000 companies are actually buyable?

"Well, we couldn't buy all of them even if we wanted to. The biggest flaw or downside in our strategy is that these transformations are extremely time-consuming. We almost unsee a business and try to reimagine it — the most high-performance, most successful version of it — and then try to close the gap between the current state and that vision. It takes a lot of time and effort.

If you look at our history, we've generally acquired four or five companies a year, with size increasing as we grow our top line... My guess is that over the next five or six years, 90% of those companies would be buyable if you make a good enough offer."

The founder letter in the S-1 mentions that Bending Spoons paid $10,000 for its very first acquisition. What was it and what's its current status?

"It was an iPhone app that would enable you to personalize your keyboard with different colors and shapes and different user experiences. Just baby steps for us at the beginning.

We shut it down maybe six or seven years ago, because it was just too small and had only a few users. It's almost like a tennis player mentioning their first amateur match, in that it's meaningful not because of the match but because it's the first tiny step you take down the path."

What is going to be your message to the Bending Spoons team, to the rank and file, after the stock starts trading?

"It'll be a bit more articulate than this, but: I really believe that in so many ways we're just getting started. The vision we had for this business over a decade ago was to build one of the most remarkable, most important companies in the world. And if you look at what we've achieved through that lens, we've achieved very little.

But we carry that spirit into this next chapter, along with better tools and better access to capital. We're excited to keep working."