Two Theories of Ownership: Bending Spoons vs Rocket Internet
Put the two side by side and you get an unusually clean natural experiment in how to own things.
Rocket Internet built companies. Bending Spoons buys them. Rocket went public and left. Bending Spoons just arrived. Both are, at bottom, machines for applying operating discipline to assets at scale — which is the same thing we are building, in a different asset class.
- Rocket manufactured new companies; Bending Spoons acquires mature ones with entrenched users.
- Rocket’s risk was demand — would anyone want this. Bending Spoons’ risk is price paid.
- Rocket needed public capital and it cost them dearly. Bending Spoons went public with cash-generating assets already in hand.
- Permanent hold is the single most important structural choice either made.
- For brand operators, the Bending Spoons model translates better — but only if you buy neglect rather than decline.
The core difference
| Rocket Internet | Bending Spoons | |
|---|---|---|
| Source of assets | Built from zero, localised proven models | Acquired mature software with existing users |
| Primary risk | Will anyone want it | Did we overpay for it |
| Time to revenue | Years | Day one |
| Public markets | IPO 2014, delisted 2020 | IPO July 2026 |
| Hold horizon | Exit or list | Permanent |
| Core competence | Launch velocity | Cost surgery and pricing |
Rocket had to answer the hardest question in business — does demand exist — over and over, in market after market. Bending Spoons never asks it. Evernote already had users. AOL already had email addresses. The demand question was settled decades ago by someone else.
Rocket paid for demand risk with equity and speed. Bending Spoons pays for it in cash, up front, and then spends years finding out whether the price was right.
What each got wrong
Rocket’s error was structural, not operational. A portfolio of young ventures produces lumpy results, and it asked public shareholders to tolerate that while judging it like an operating company. The delisting in 2020 at roughly 18.57 euros against a 42.50 euro IPO price is the market’s verdict on that mismatch — not on the underlying method.
Bending Spoons’ open question is arithmetic. Roughly 3.3 billion dollars deployed on AOL, Vimeo and Eventbrite against pro forma 2025 profit near 22 million is a very large gap to close. The company is betting cost discipline and pricing power close it over a decade. It might. That is not yet demonstrated.
Which one a brand holdco should copy
Mostly Bending Spoons, with one crucial edit.
Buying an existing brand with real customers removes the demand question, which is exactly why we buy rather than launch most of the time. But software and consumer brands have completely different retention physics. Evernote can raise price 86 percent because leaving means abandoning a decade of your own notes. A wallpaper brand has no such hostage. Our customers can leave on a whim and never think about us again.
So we take the acquisition discipline and drop the pricing aggression. Buy the neglected asset, fix the cost base immediately, hold permanently — but earn the price increase rather than extracting it.
- Acquire proven demand, like Bending Spoons — never gamble on whether the customer exists.
- Reuse one operating machine across every asset, like Rocket.
- Stay private, unlike both, for as long as lumpy quarters are the honest picture.
- Treat permanent hold as the structural advantage, not a slogan.
Read the full breakdowns: The Bending Spoons Playbook and Rocket Internet: The Clone Factory.
Sources: TechCrunch, Forbes and Fortune reporting on Bending Spoons (June–July 2026); CNBC and TechCrunch on Rocket Internet’s 2020 delisting; contemporaneous coverage of the 2014 Frankfurt listing.
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