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

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! — Brought to by: • The Enterprise Ready Conference on October 30th — For B2B leaders building enterprise SaaS. https://www.enterprise-ready.com/ • DX — DX is an engineering intelligence platform designed by leading researchers https://getdx.com/?utm_source=pragmat... • ByteByteGo — Ace your next system design interview. https://bytebytego.com/ — The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode: • Good attrition, bad attrition for software engineers: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.... • Healthy oncall practices: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.... • Shipping to production: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.... • QA across the tech industry: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.... — Where to find Luca Ferrari: • X: https://x.com/luke10ferrari • LinkedIn:   / luca-ferrari-12418318   Where to find Francesco Mancone: • LinkedIn:   / francesco-mancone   Where to find Federico Simionato: • X: https://x.com/fedesimio • LinkedIn:   / federicosimionato   Where to find Gergely: • Newsletter: https://www.pragmaticengineer.com/ • LinkedIn:   / gergelyorosz   • X: https://x.com/GergelyOrosz — In this episode, we cover: (0:00) Welcome (06:38) The elephant in the room: layoffs (17:16) Revenue, team size, and products (23:05) History of the company (27:04) Evernote acquisition and architecture (32:44) Oncall (41:13) Shipping approaches (51:08) Organizational structure at the company (54:07) Engineering practices (1:01:52) Tech stack (1:05:55) Hiring junior engineers (1:12:50) Why there aren’t many companies doing what Bending Spoons does — See the transcript and other references from the episode at https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.... — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].