It can be delightful to revel in hating things, and Bending Spoons seems purpose-built for the role. It’s Italian, not so bad. It has a lot of money, and that needle on our irritation meter starts twitching. Also, it’s a cynical machine that buys fading dreams, clips their wings, and poops out capitalist uniformity.
Are you there yet?
Dicks.
So what do dicks actually do?
Well, this week, they – the buy-and-not-so-much-build club – acquired Airtable. I still remember wanting to build an app on Airtable back in 2021, because it was so cool amongst the nerds. But I also remember the reorganizations starting the very next year. Looking back, the warning signs seem painfully obvious: funding round after funding round, endless free tiers, very few enterprise customers.
That’s the thing about warning signs. In hindsight, you convince yourself you saw them all along.
Before Airtable, the Italian outfit acquired a whole series of apps that were, for about fifteen minutes, the coolest thing on Earth: Vimeo, WeTransfer, Meetup, Eventbrite, Evernote. For a certain kind of trendy tech nerd, that acquisition list is a complete trip down memory lane.
If you follow tech nerds on Twitter, you don’t even need to keep an eye on the mergers market. You’ll hear all about it, the moment their favorite product gets clipped and groomed. First, it stops being cool and the founder disappears. Then the price goes up. Finally, all forms of support vanish.
Do you have white knuckles from clenching your fists yet?
Good.
Anyway.
Around 2010, for about five minutes, I was one of those coolest-app-in-the-world things too.Well, maybe two steps below that: National TV, national newspapers, events, viral launches, smoking servers, trips around the world. But mostly in the Netherlands. Mostly among boomers, too. (<3 Dutch boomers.)
It was a moonshot. We would become the new way people connected with their communities.
And we, or rather I, failed.
There are many reasons why it never became the next Facebook. I’ve written about some of them before. And one of them is liquidity – in Europe. Plenty has already been written about that, including by people who write better than I do.
Once you’ve given up on your dream, once you’ve fought yourself tired because you wandered two or three streets too far, you still have to figure out what to do with the wreckage.
Who is taking the controls and pointing that nose back toward the sky, so to speak?
Who ís buying that mess off your hands?
Because that is liquidity, too.
In a moonshot, everything is about the vision. You spend money for the plan. You put in the miles for the idea. You lose sleep over the dream.
Do you know what you don’t do?
What, to a certain extent, you shouldn’t do?
Be realistic. Reality is on the backlog.
You don’t line up expenses against revenue. You don’t worry too much about career paths and work-life balance. You don’t clean out cupboards or tie shoelaces. And you don’t spend your days asking whether your customers are getting more than they’re paying for.
That is work for dicks.
Man, I wish I’d had a non-dreaming dick around once it was time to brace for impact – missing the moon and all.
Not because that’s the real work.
But because it has to be done – just like the other work.
Just like vitamins. Cod liver oil. And dentists.