I was an Engineering Manager at Evernote. I managed the team that built and operated Evernote’s notifications system, handling 110M messages in 2022.
After Bending Spoons acquired Evernote, almost everyone ended up getting laid-off. Severance packages come with a non-disparagement clause. I quit on my own terms, so I am one of a few people who can openly talk about what happened during the transition.
That being said, this isn’t a hit piece. What I saw was a business playbook that was equal parts brilliant and ruthless.
Most importantly, Evernote, the first dead unicorn, was a great company and a great story, and its last chapter deserves to be shared.
Very Brief History of Evernote
- 2004 – Founded in Sunnyvale by a Soviet immigrant, Stepan Pachikov, as “EverNote,” selling Windows desktop/tablet software, including a note-taking app of the same name.
- 2007 – Phil Libin joins as CEO and pivots to web, mobile and Mac; Evernote 3.0 ships the following year (note the lowercase n).
- 2009–2014 – Well over $200M raised (DoCoMo, Sequoia, Meritech, Nikkei and others), with aim to go after the business sector. Hits 11 million users in 2011.
- 2015 – Libin out, Chris O’Neill in; 18% of staff cut, three offices closed.
- 2018 – CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head all leave; another 15% cut; Ian Small becomes CEO.
- Jan 2023 – Acquired by Italy’s Bending Spoons; Francesco Patarnello takes over.
The Announcement
In November 2022, Evernote’s CEO Ian Small called an all-hands and announced that Evernote was being sold to Bending Spoons.
He mentioned that the successor was carefully selected, and they tried to find somebody who would carry the torch and honor Evernote’s legacy.
Then he introduced Bending Spoons’ CEO, Luca Ferrari. Ferrari was charismatic and clearly excited about the magnitude of this event, but was very careful not to promise anything to existing employees.
The Welcome Party
The deal closed in early January 2023. Bending Spoons sent a delegation from Italy and threw us a welcoming party in Redwood City, CA.
I remember many of us were puzzled by this event. Without a commitment to keep some workforce around, the event seemed out of place.
Who Are Bending Spoons Anyway?
The founders – Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, Francesco Patarnello, and Luca Querella – are Italian engineers who met at the Technical University of Denmark while pursuing their master’s degree. Their first startup, Evertale, failed. Ferrari later called it “arrogant to think we knew what the market would want.” (Side Note: Evertale’s name was inspired by Evernote. Luca shared this with us shortly after the acquisition, and it clearly meant something to him).
Instead of building the next idea from scratch, they started buying apps with existing users. Their first acquisition was an iPhone keyboard app for about $10,000. They updated it, made it profitable, then bought the next app.
In 2018 they bought Splice from GoPro. In 2021, Remini. The pattern: buy apps with loyal users, cut costs, raise prices, use profits to scale up. Rinse and repeat.
In September 2022 they raised $340 million from investors including Ryan Reynolds, followed by the Evernote acquisition.
Bending Spoons is based in Italy, but operates in English. They were open with us that this decision was made to hire excellent talent, from all over Europe, at a fraction of Silicon Valley cost.
After Evernote they acquired Meetup, WeTransfer, Vimeo, AOL, Eventbrite, and Airtable. In July 2026, Bending Spoons IPO’d on Nasdaq at an $18.4 billion valuation, with reported revenue of $1.31 billion in 2025.
Behind the Glass Doors
Let’s travel back in time to Jan 2023. The Evernote acquisition had just closed and the Italian delegation set up office in the biggest conference room, with floor-to-ceiling glass walls.
For weeks, the entire office watched them through that glass. They were planning, congregating, joking, but it was clear that our fates were being decided live, in front of our own eyes.
The delegation was friendly to us, but was careful not to mingle or get attached too much.
Soon after, they began embedding their own people on teams. Each department got a Bending Spoons representative, in our case we got a shadow manager, overseeing things and setting direction.
The Loyalty Filter
Before any layoffs or operational changes, they had everyone sign a document. They made a big deal about this, but the document was fairly straightforward. The core message was: you are responsible for your own work-life balance. The company will not make any special accommodations for anybody.
Those who didn’t want to “sign the document” were offered a voluntary exit package – including three months’ salary, COBRA coverage and your laptop. (The publicly reported July 2023 severance was 16 weeks plus bonus and health insurance. The early voluntary terms are based on my memory, and may have been different.)
I was very transparent with my team; the odds of us remaining with the company long term were pretty low and three out of my six developers took the package, and quickly landed at other companies.
The Cost-Cutting Machine
Evernote had roughly $100 million in annual recurring revenue but was still losing money. Bending Spoons went after every dollar, line by line:
- Zoom – gone overnight. Switched to Google Meet, already included in our corporate account.
- Tech interview platform – canceled. Replaced with their own in-house tool.
- Marketing platform – dropped immediately.
- Push notification vendor – my team was tasked with building a native replacement, to move away from a third-party vendor.
- The office – closed as soon as possible.
Every subscription, every vendor, every tool – scrutinized and cut. They stopped the bleeding and made Evernote profitable in a span of a few months, before ever touching any revenue.
The Price Hike
Soon after, they nearly doubled subscription prices. Personal went from ~$69.99/year to $129.99/year.
Their logic: Evernote users were locked in and engaged. Years of notes, documents, entire workflows stored in the app. Migration is painful. Most people would absorb a price increase rather than switch.
This was the same exact playbook they’d run on mobile apps in the past – Splice at $4.99/week, Remini at $9.99/week (note the week vs month trick, to make the price look better). Evernote stayed on monthly/annual plans, but the principle was the same. Find locked-in users, raise prices.
People Start Disappearing
February 2023: 129 employees laid off across product design, engineering, HR, sales, and customer service. The marketing department was gone entirely.
After three out of my six engineers left, somebody from engineering leadership reached out to me, to see why half of my team had left and to re-assure me that we still had a future at the company. (I doubt they fully believed it, but they had a job to do too.)
To be fair, the company had been through something similar in the past. Evernote cut staff in 2015 and again in 2018, and kept going both times.
I remember when it was announced that the marketing department was being cut, a group of managers who’d been there for many years were casually discussing what to have for lunch that day.
My Exit
Evernote was one of the best places I ever worked. I had been a loyal (and locked-in) user since 2012. I loved the company, believed in the product and wasn’t eager to leave. But I could not ignore the writing on the wall. My time at Evernote was coming to an end.
I started looking in January. The market was pretty cold and I wanted to find the right role. I converted to Engineering Manager at Evernote, so my track record of management at that time was just the one company.
Part of me was also holding out hope that my read was wrong and my co-workers were right; and that I might have a future at Evernote after all, now under new and more focused leadership.
I am not knocking our old leadership. I really enjoyed working for Ian Small – his leadership and compassion are what made Evernote one of the best places I’ve worked at. At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering whether we could have delayed the end.
At the end of the day, that was just a pipe dream. The business could clearly be made profitable – Bending Spoons proved that in a few months. The problem was that Evernote had raised over $200M at a unicorn valuation and investors needed a billion-dollar exit. No amount of expense-cutting turns a $100M ARR note-taking app into a billion-dollar company. At that point, the best thing an investor can get is a tax write-off. They got one.
Anyway, I kept looking and my team kept shrinking. One more developer left, and the team was down to me, our QA-turned-engineer, and our lead from Bending Spoons who was embedded with us but splitting time between multiple teams.
One evening something he said just hit me the wrong way. I can’t remember the exact words and it doesn’t matter. But I remember it felt like a switch flipped; it was time to stop “slowly” looking and go all-in.
Same day, I reached out to two strong contacts I’d been saving as the last resort. A couple months of interviews later, I finally had an offer. Engineering Manager at a bigger company.
When I told the Italian lead I was leaving, his expression changed. He smiled – not in a mean way, he seemed happy for me. He was curious where I was going, was excited to learn it was a promising place, and wished me well. There was no future for me at Evernote, and he already knew it. He was a decent guy, and this must have been pretty tough on him too.
I started my new job in May 2023.
By July 5, 2023, everyone in the US and Chile (where we had a large engineering presence) was laid off. Everything moved to Italy.
A select few were offered the chance to interview for Bending Spoons roles and relocate to Europe. I believe one or two people from the whole US operation made it through.
Evernote is still running today. New features, active development, a team in Milan, and prices roughly double what I paid as a user in 2022. The product survived. The company that built it didn’t.
What I Learned
Was Bending Spoons good or bad for Evernote? Good or bad in general? I don’t know. I do know that they are effective and I learned a lot by watching them operate, even though it was not a lot of fun to find myself and the people I cared about on the other side of this learning opportunity.
- The “buy instead of build” model is underrated. Their first startup failed, so they stopped guessing and started buying. Bending Spoons started with a $10K app acquisition and compounded over time into an $18.4 billion company.
- Lock-in is the game. Users will pay. Many companies under-price their product and suffer the consequences.
- Most companies leak money through optional expenses. Watching Bending Spoons question every dollar and turning Evernote profitable, even before any lay-offs hit, was one of the most educational business experiences of my career.
- Read the room. The company survived layoffs before, so people assumed this one would be similar. It wasn’t.
- Voluntary packages are information. When a new owner offers you money to leave, they’re telling you about the future.
- Keep your network warm before you need it. The connections that got me out were relationships built and kept warm over the years.
- Your life is your responsibility. That work-life-balance document was right.
Facts about Bending Spoons come from the sources linked above. Everything else is my firsthand experience.