Getting an offer from Bending Spoons, the Milan-based conglomerate behind AOL and Evernote, has become statistically harder than getting into Harvard.
America’s most elite universities receive tens of thousands of applications each year from brilliant students around the globe, rejecting almost all of them. Yet, even these Ivy League gatekeepers are not nearly as selective as a company most people have never heard of.
Bending Spoons, a Milan-based tech conglomerate, received 800,000 job applications last year and made exactly 286 hires. While top-tier universities boast acceptance rates of around 4%, Bending Spoons accepts a mere 0.04% of its applicants.
But rejecting 99.9% of candidates isn’t even the most extraordinary aspect of the company’s hiring process.
“If people looked under the hood at how we do this, they would think we’re crazy,” said CEO Luca Ferrari. “Hopefully in a good way.”
A Conglomerate in Disguise
To understand Bending Spoons’ obsession with talent, one must first understand its highly unorthodox business model.
Inspired by The Matrix, the company is a tech powerhouse located thousands of miles from Silicon Valley. Founded in 2013, it operates less like a modern startup and more like a mid-century industrial conglomerate. Over the past few years, Bending Spoons has quietly acquired the legacy companies behind forgotten but heavily used software—scooping up iconic brands like AOL, Evernote, and Vimeo.
Unlike private equity firms that buy, strip, and flip assets, Bending Spoons buys to overhaul and hold. They reinvest the profits to acquire more legacy brands, creating a self-sustaining empire. Recently going public, the company has proven that there is immense value in resurrecting unsexy, solid businesses that have failed to attract exceptional talent for a generation.
The Philosophy of Luck.
The company’s rigorous approach to human capital was born out of early failure. In 2010, co-founders Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli, and Luca Ferrari embarked on a backpacking trip and returned as the founders of an AI-based diary app. When the product failed to gain traction and the startup ran out of money, they liquidated the company.
Before moving on, they used their last $40,000 to conduct a brutal post-mortem of their failure. They emerged with two foundational philosophies that would dictate their next venture:
- Luck is essential when starting a business.
- Luck becomes entirely irrelevant when operating that business.
They realized that many struggling businesses had simply gotten lucky early on, but were now being mismanaged. Conversely, while their own product had flopped, the founders were highly confident in their operational abilities. “Too bad our skills were being wasted,” they later wrote, “on products nobody wanted.”
To remove the variable of luck from the equation, they decided to only acquire products that had already proven market demand.
The "Spooner" Strategy.
This philosophy dictates a ruthless operational strategy. When Bending Spoons acquires a company, it initiates a radical transformation by slashing most of the legacy workforce. In their place, they deploy a lean, elite team of "Spooners."
Today, about 700 of these elite employees work in technical, product, and growth roles across the organization. They are a corporate SWAT team, moving from one acquisition to the next to execute "very deep changes"—rewriting code, rebuilding infrastructure, and redesigning user interfaces under exceptionally demanding performance standards.
The workforce is remarkably young. The company is run by executives in their 30s and early 40s, while the rank-and-file Spooners are mostly in their 20s and 30s, many having never worked anywhere else. In fact, many are younger than the legacy brands they are tasked with modernizing.
“Being able to spot people who are unusually talented and motivated very early in their careers, then giving them unusually high levels of responsibility and coaching, has been an absolutely key advantage for us,” said Ferrari, 41.
The Science of Selection.
To maintain this caliber of talent, Bending Spoons has turned hiring into a hard science.
Last year, out of 800,000 applicants, 60,000 survived the initial screening to take a battery of tests measuring reasoning, judgment, and learning speed. This narrowed the pool to 3,300 candidates granted interviews.
“ A run-of-the-mill interview is almost entirely non-predictive, like tossing a coin,” Ferrari noted. “It’s basically completely useless.”
To fix this, Bending Spoons quantified the qualitative. Interview questions are precisely worded, and answers are rigorously graded against set parameters. Even subjective traits are quantified and fed into predictive hiring algorithms.
An entire internal "talent squad" of data scientists, software engineers, and AI researchers does nothing but evaluate current and prospective Spooners. They constantly tweak test variations, refine predictive models, and track post-hire performance at the four-, eight-, 12-, and 24-month marks to ensure their algorithms are accurate.
“All they do all day long,” Ferrari said, “is look for signals.”
One surprisingly effective signal? Politeness. “Most job candidates are perfectly respectful and punctual when they meet executives—the people who control their fate,” Ferrari explained. “But if they’re jerks to employees with less power, it’s a decent signal of how they might treat their colleagues. And it goes right into the model.”
The Ultimate Irony.
The numbers are staggering. To put Bending Spoons' 0.04% acceptance rate in perspective: top investment banks and consulting firms brag about hiring rates of 1%; Citadel and Citadel Securities accepted just 0.36% of the quants who applied for summer internships this year; and NASA lets in only 0.1% of its astronaut applicants. Getting a job at Bending Spoons is statistically 100 times harder than getting into Harvard.
Yet, for all their data-driven precision, the founders remain humble about their own metrics. As the interview concluded, there was one final question for CEO Luca Ferrari: As a co-founder, he was exempt from the notorious selection process. But if he had to go through it today, would he have made the cut?
“I cannot answer that question,” Ferrari replied with a smile. “I will say this: statistically speaking, it’s unlikely.”