This EU Firm Made Billions Buying Up Forgotten Tech

Very few people know, know this, but I, with my co-founders, v- almost the same people, we, we launched a startup in twenty ten, also in Copenhagen.

It, it was, uh, we used-- We were using AI, uh, clearly too early, um, to write, [chuckles] to automatically write diaries for people.

Uh, and, uh, you know, we did that for three years, raised a million dollars and, uh, failed miserably.

Couldn't, uh, make it scale.

Uh, although I'm pretty proud of, of the product we built, but, uh, you know, sometimes that's not enough.

Uh, uh, and so on the ashes of that company, we were left with about forty thousand dollars.

The, uh, VC, uh, who had, uh, given us the money, uh, basically sold their shares back to us for a nominal one dollar, and they apparently appreciated we'd worked hard and been honest, and they didn't wanna go through the liquidation process, and we ended up liquidating the company ourselves, and, uh, basically got those forty thousand dollars out of it, uh, almost completely.

And, uh, um, and that was the seed capital for Bending Spoons.

So that's, uh, twenty thirteen, again, Copenhagen.

Uh, moved the company to Italy about a year later, but, uh, that's where we were at the time.

And, and the, the strategy we're still running these days and the, the key insights behind it, for the most part, had originated from, from that failure.

Obviously, you get smarter in time, but most of it was in place back then.

So you had a, a tech company, you say an AI company, I would assume, that they were calling it machine learning back then.

I assume that there was not a lot of hype around that sector.

That's obviously changed.

Um, it doesn't work.

Then you have forty thousand dollars left over, which you take out of that to start this other company called Bending Spoons.

What actually was the idea behind Bending Spoons? And also, I think people probably wanna know what's with this name, Bending Spoons?

So o- over those first three years of that failed startup, we saw our skills in engineering, marketing, product design, uh, improve tremendously.

Um, obviously, we didn't feel we were anywhere near world-class, but certainly much better.

And so we thought, okay, we-- if we, if we work on this skill set and, and other relevant skills and build our own tools, we should be, we should be able to get to world-class levels at some point.

And, uh, and at the same time, we saw that, uh, finding product market fit, going from zero to one, so to say, mm, seemed to require a lot of stars to align because we, we met so many startup teams where people worked really hard and we thought they were brilliant and still couldn't make it work, and sometimes in other cases, it did work.

Uh, and so we figured we should be able to find people who are maybe tired of running a business or, or maybe they don't have the skills to go from one to ten, uh, who will s- you know, will sell to us.

And if we're really, really good at doing this, we should be able to pay a price that's appealing to them and still be able to create enough value to generate strong returns and, and be able to compound capital efficiently, basically.

So those, those were the relatively simplistic ideas we had back then.

Very few people know, know this, but I, with my co-founders, v- almost the same people, we, we launched a startup in twenty ten, also in Copenhagen.

It, it was, uh, we used-- We were using AI, uh, clearly too early, um, to write, [chuckles] to automatically write diaries for people.

Uh, and, uh, you know, we did that for three years, raised a million dollars and, uh, failed miserably.

Couldn't, uh, make it scale.

Uh, although I'm pretty proud of, of the product we built, but, uh, you know, sometimes that's not enough.

Uh, uh, and so on the ashes of that company, we were left with about forty thousand dollars.

The, uh, VC, uh, who had, uh, given us the money, uh, basically sold their shares back to us for a nominal one dollar, and they apparently appreciated we'd worked hard and been honest, and they didn't wanna go through the liquidation process, and we ended up liquidating the company ourselves, and, uh, basically got those forty thousand dollars out of it, uh, almost completely.

And, uh, um, and that was the seed capital for Bending Spoons.

So that's, uh, twenty thirteen, again, Copenhagen.

Uh, moved the company to Italy about a year later, but, uh, that's where we were at the time.

And, and the, the strategy we're still running these days and the, the key insights behind it, for the most part, had originated from, from that failure.

Obviously, you get smarter in time, but most of it was in place back then.

So you had a, a tech company, you say an AI company, I would assume, that they were calling it machine learning back then.

I assume that there was not a lot of hype around that sector.

That's obviously changed.

Um, it doesn't work.

Then you have forty thousand dollars left over, which you take out of that to start this other company called Bending Spoons.

What actually was the idea behind Bending Spoons? And also, I think people probably wanna know what's with this name, Bending Spoons?

So o- over those first three years of that failed startup, we saw our skills in engineering, marketing, product design, uh, improve tremendously.

Um, obviously, we didn't feel we were anywhere near world-class, but certainly much better.

And so we thought, okay, we-- if we, if we work on this skill set and, and other relevant skills and build our own tools, we should be, we should be able to get to world-class levels at some point.

And, uh, and at the same time, we saw that, uh, finding product market fit, going from zero to one, so to say, mm, seemed to require a lot of stars to align because we, we met so many startup teams where people worked really hard and we thought they were brilliant and still couldn't make it work, and sometimes in other cases, it did work.

Uh, and so we figured we should be able to find people who are maybe tired of running a business or, or maybe they don't have the skills to go from one to ten, uh, who will s- you know, will sell to us.

And if we're really, really good at doing this, we should be able to pay a price that's appealing to them and still be able to create enough value to generate strong returns and, and be able to compound capital efficiently, basically.

So those, those were the relatively simplistic ideas we had back then.