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Federico Simionato

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2025-12-05

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2025-12-05

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1. “I love Neuralink. I think Neuralink is the product, like the thing that can change the world the most in 50 years, including AI, in my opinion. So I know people love AI. I love AI. I use it every day. But I think that ultimately the way you perceive reality and the way it changes through Neuralink is going to be a bigger difference compared to having hypersmart computers. So yeah, so Neuralink, if I wasn't afraid to fail, I would start a Neuralink competitor or find a way to work on Neuralink or even better start a Neuralink product inside Banding Spoons.”

   2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Be bolder. I think sometimes I waited for somebody to give me permission to do stuff as if I was in school and instead when you start doing stuff autonomously and it looks like it's something smart and it can work, people will just cheer for you. It's not like anybody is going to stop you, at least not a bending spoons. If you have an idea for something that works, we're just going to be enthusiastic about you trying it. So I tend to be high agency, but I didn't have the confidence to just start doing stuff and I'm glad that they pushed me to do it, but they would just tell myself, be bolder, start more things.”

   2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “I think at the end of the day, what we want to do is to have the preview on the right and the chat on the left, or vice versa. But I think the code will become irrelevant. But I'm biased. I'm a PM, so I care about the prompt and the result. But I think that ultimately what you want to do is to deliver a great UX by giving the right commands. So I think that the cloud code is the way to go, but I think that cursor is a better UX today when manually looking at code and knowing the code still matters a lot.”

   2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “It doesn't work super well, but it works. I built it with cursor initially, and then it didn't work, and then I built it with cloud code, and it didn't one-shot it, but I saw that it was improving the things that were broken faster, and so I went with cloud code in the end”

   2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “So I tweeted about the AOL acquisition, and the tweet went viral, and I noticed randomly It's not like I saw all of the followers and I went through the list and I didn't have time to do it. And so I said, let's see if I can rank my followers by how large their counts are. But there's no tool that does that. And so I was like, yeah, let's see if I can build a little tool to do that.”

   2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Choose one. I don't know. I think our teams use lovable more than Reblet. I personally use Reblet more than Lovable, though.”

   2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “I think great PMs are entrepreneurs at heart at least, like people who can come up with valuable ideas, find a way to implement those ideas well, focus on what matters, meaning that the idea needs to be relevant for a goal, being successful financially is one, but also doing stuff that goes viral and gets a lot of coverage. I mean, depends on the goal, but you need to be very focused on what matters. The best entrepreneurs are great. creative people coming up with ideas, designers at thinking what the UX should look like, project managers that get the team to ship fast and they ship fast with the team. So I think being an entrepreneurial is a hell of a skill for a PM.”

   2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Polytopia. It's a mobile game. And I actually discovered it because apparently Elon Musk is a big Polytopia player. It's a turn-based strategy. It looks like civilization, the game, but it's mobile, it's a bit simpler when you have 15 minutes. You just play a match there. It's nice. Another one is Napper is a, so I had a baby in April. and Naper is the app in which I log every time we feed her every time she takes a nap. And it's good at predictions too. It literally is able to tell you when she's going to fall asleep with an accuracy of minutes.”

   2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Google search, but in general, the Google ecosystem, like they just have so much surface, so much intellectually stimulating stuff that you could work on. One of my favorite products is Google Maps just because of how useful it is every day and just even working on Google Maps would be great. Just as my literally my personal taste, it would be great, but YouTube, Android, Google search, all the AI stuff that they're doing. It's just like theme park world for a PM, I think.”

   2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “I mean, I don't want to sound arrogant, but I think I would love to work on Google. It would be. It's just one of the best products in”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Yes, I mean, I'm thinking about ways it could be defined as not successful, but none come to mind. It was a success financially speaking. We were able to increase revenue a lot. It was a success in terms of how much we were able to improve the product. Yeah, I would say it's definitely a success.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Honestly, I don't see that big of a difference, to be honest. No. It's not like I spot a trend in how, I don't know, the Wii transfer team versus the Evernot team, just to name two that I worked very closely with. We transfer was based mostly in Amsterdam. Some people in London too, Evernote in the US, mostly in the Valley. I don't see a direct difference in culture.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “I don't have a strong opinion on it, meaning that one, I see that some of our best contributors work remotely or almost only remotely. And it's almost as if having the ability to craft an environment where you are almost cocooned inside your own habits and environment, you can just deliver your best work without distractions. Probably for me, I'm most effective when I'm at the office, but I do love having the flexibility to be able to, I don't know, meet my parents for a long weekend and just work from their place. I don't think that there's a clear winner between remote and in-person. I think hybrid is a very good mix of both. When you need to attract this level of talent, it's an extra requirement to have to ask them, you should also be physically in Milan. If it's not necessary, you just drop it. False requirement.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Generally individual, you can think of the function versus theme as a matrix, right? Each person belongs both to a function and the team. So I'm a product manager inside the Evernote team, for instance. So I'm inside the product function inside the Evernote team. And so there are people who are inside the growth and marketing function that work on Remy, for instance. Almost all people who do this are deployed inside business units.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Will Evernote? I'm not sure it was bad. I actually don't think it was necessarily bad, but it was complex. Just compare we transferred to Evernote. We transfer in terms of complexity could be one feature of Evernote and Evernote has literally hundreds of features. So, I mean, maybe not the simplest one, but it's easier as product surface to conceive and to think about. Evernote just has this long tail of small features. And it's 20 years old. And we transfer, if you fail and upload, people are going to be frustrated, but it's not going to be the end of the world. If you lose a note, we never know, you will receive phone calls and rightfully like understandably, it's what should happen. And so it's just critical that you do it well. Not only it's more complex, but it's also more critical and you should triple check everything you're doing. So yeah, it was difficult.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “I don't dive as deep into the code as my colleagues, so I'm not sure. I heard that the WeTransfer code base was very good.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Yeah. I remember I was on a plane. We were about to take off. I was in Malpens, I think. I was leaving to California to meet the Evernote team. And I was like, what am I going to tell these people? They are true professionals and instead I'm just a guy with some startup experience. And what am I going to tell them? And so I liked a bit of confidence.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Product. Yeah, literally, I've done that quite a bit. It's a bit uncomfortable because you have to start fresh very often, but you learn a lot. You learn both about the specific characteristics of that product, but also about you start seeing some patterns about how companies are run and these things.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Mm-hmm. We take into account people's preferences. Like if somebody comes to me and tells me I like to work on Vimeo, I'm like, that's great. It's great to know that some people are passionate about one or the other product. I mean, at the end of the day, I think people are perform better when they are working on something they are passionate about to the extent that it is possible we always try to make it so people are working on stuff that they care about and they're passionate about. So we definitely encourage people to tell us. But it's not like we find volunteers to work on a product. It's more about function leads. So our CTO, Matteo, our co-founder, myself, other people, we have in mind the structure of the product teams and we try to see where we can find people that are best suited to work on new acquisitions.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Yeah, we're not big on push notifications. We have used them in some products differently. So on Evernote, I think we don't use them at all. I mean, we use them for reminders, for people who set a reminder for a note or for calendar events, but we don't use them as a marketing strategy just because we think it would decrease the user experience. People would be pissed about it and they would turn them off. And so that would reduce the usefulness of the product. So we don't do it. On the other hand, when working on live quiz, the HQ Trivia clone, push notifications were literally the trigger to use the product because of course it's happening a couple times a day always at the same time. But if you don't receive the notification there are fewer chances that you actually remember to play and so in that case it was it was a core part of the experience”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “The best way to monetize a product is always based on what works on that product. So you just try different setups and you see what works. It has been the case often where we've made the paywall more visible than in the past just because acquiring products that have already grown and that already have a large user base, then you have more to unlock by monetizing people who are already there. Instead, if you are growing a product, then you might want to be a bit less aggressive and just like get people to try more of the product for free because maybe it will improve your K-factor. It would increase the amount of people that they refer basically if they have a deeper experience with the product without interruption. It's very case specific.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “You have on the product. And so if you want to create a lot, then you pay more. If you don't create much, then you can use it for free. So this basically aligns the incentives of I'm an advanced user, I use it hours a day, I create tons of notes, I pay more and I'm perfectly fine with it. I'm a very casual user. I don't use it much. I have a few notes and just trying it out. You can try the full product without any constraint and you just reflect the number of notes that you actually have.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Again, that it's very case specific. You don't have a playbook that you then apply to each product. Let's take Avernot as an example. On Evernote, we inherited a monetization structure that was based on basically unlocking advanced features. As a user, you would pay to unlock business cards scanning, for instance, or PDF annotation. This creates a mismatch between the experience of a free user and advanced user, right? Because you literally have access to a different feature set. The way we approach it instead was, let's try to make it so that every user sees the power, the full power of Evernote. And so we literally made many features that were previously paid free. Offline is a big one, like offline availability of notes and notebooks used to be a premium feature. And now it's free. Instead, we monetize based on content, so based on how much”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “I mean, it's not on product measure. I'm just talking about the business unit. It contains technology, product design, data science, monetization, growth, even management, you know, like all those people are a few”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Product, you can think of banding spoons as a horizontal platform to which we The platform is basically everything that you don't need to have at the product level. For instance, let's make an example, talent and recruiting or accounting, finance, legal. But not only that, also deep technological teams that power like data, pipelines, monetization libraries, stuff that can be adopted by each product. This way you don't need an Evernote recruiting team. You don't need a commute monetization technology team. You just need to have these pieces at the platform level and then to this platform that where we invest a lot you can plug new products all the time. And so this means that the individual product team can be much, much leaner than it could be as a standalone company. And often we see the difference that it makes. Like we can acquire companies that are very large and random with very few people in comparison.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “You should be very careful with your opinions. You should always try to resort to some piece of evidence instead of saying, I think it won't work or I think it will work. Do you have evidence that it's working or not? And so if you don't, you should try and build evidence and then you should follow that instead of saying, I think it won't work or it will work.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Sometimes there are things that look a bit boring and instead they just work. So for instance, I think audio transcription on Evernote is one such example. We were almost about not to launch it because people weren't recording audio on Evernote. And so, I mean, chicken and egg problem, right? They're not recording audio maybe because they don't want to record audio, maybe because there's nothing to do with the audio once you record it. We still decided to launch it because it was just like qualitatively so good. It's basically state of the art. It's perfect. You just talk and it transcribes it. It's literally perfect. And so we decided, okay, let's build it and launch it and see what people do with it. We just observed people tweeting images of the transcription just because it was so accurate. And they were like, I'm blown away by how good it is. So that's just one example of something that I didn't expect.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “No, we don't launch new products. I mean, we probably would if we were decently convinced that we have a good shot at making something very good, very useful, successful, impactful. I'm not saying that we wouldn't, but no, it's been a while since last time we did.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “How intoxicating working on a successful product can be? It's just the experience of a lifetime to work on something that goes hyper viral. We literally launched as a beta test with friends and family. I remember literally telling people, don't tell others because we can only support, I don't know, 50 users simultaneously, 100 users. I don't remember the number, but I literally remember asking people not to tell others. And we never, never, never did anything else to make it grow. It just from that moment when I told my family, my friends, don't tell others, it just went viral from there. We even set aside some money, I think, a few tens of thousands of euros to do marketing. We never touched them. It just took off. Sometimes you can see when a product works immediately.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “It was a few years ago Getting I worked on a clone of HQTrivia as my first project abandoned spoons when I joined. It went hyper viral in Italy. We did 2 million registered users in Italy only. Italy is 60 million people in total. So one in 30 people used to play that game, hyper viral, incredible virality, and it was so fun. It wasn't a good business. I think HQTRVIA wasn't a good business either, but super viral mechanic. But I'm a bit scared of games. It's very hard to make them work. It's even harder than a product, in my opinion, because it's about taste and it's about feelings and emotions and experience. Utility, as we were saying earlier, you can somehow proxy utility. You can try to guess how useful a change is going to be in the future with games. It's about the experience and the emotions that it gives you. It's completely qualitative. There's no, I mean, of course you can look at metrics and analyze.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “I've never worked on a game. I worked on an entertainment app that was very close to a game. It was called live quiz. It was, do you remember HQ Trivia?”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “The lifespan of that experience is much longer in time. And so it doesn't make sense to pay a subscription for something that gives you that much runway.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “I think a big part of it that we learned is that when you watch a movie, you watch it two hours and then you're done and the next day you want to watch another movie. And so it makes sense for Netflix to exist because people want to consume different content. When you're playing a game, you get passionate about it. And generally games have a much longer lifespan. And so you can definitely play for a game for a month, two months, six months, even a year. I have a mobile version of Risk, the game, the board game on my iPhone. I downloaded it when I was in high school. I paid for it and I still play it where I'm like yesterday I was in an airplane and I played it. It's been 15 years”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “It depends on how much you're lying to yourself. If you're very truthful and you have a plan for how do I validate that it's working with metrics, then it's easy if you're like, let's put it out there and see what people do. It's a bit harder because then you'll be hopeful you invested a lot in it and you'll try to find signals of usefulness and signals of retention. And so yeah, you should be very ruthless with yourself before you start and say these are the metrics that we'll look at when we launch to determine if it's a good product. And like I'm the first one who's guilty, I often lay too much hope behind the product launch.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “It wasn't on Evernote. It's a product that we launched at Beningspoons that we were really hopeful for. It was called PlayOnd. It was Apple Arcade before Apple Arcade. It's almost exactly the same product, right? So a subscription, you can play high quality games as much as you want. You don't need to pay for each individually. You don't need to pay to win. You don't need to unlock in app purchases. You just pay a subscription like Netflix, but for mobile games, right? We believe that people would love this and it failed. We spent, I think, like five or seven million dollars on licensing and eventually didn't work.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Shallow product by any means. So you need to take a couple minutes to show them if something is very new. Here is how it works. So come with me through the experience. So yeah, I mean, tell people what you've done, tell them how it works, tell them decently frequently.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “I sit down once a month. I think it's a decent frequency. I think it's enough that people feel like a lot is going on and not too frequent where you need to be in front of a camera every day or every week. It should talk about what you're actually doing. One thing that we decided early on when we started doing this is we talk about stuff that either we already shipped or that we are launching right now. We shouldn't talk about plans that we have for the future sometimes we break that rule, but it's not like written in Granite, but it's important that you don't just entice people with promises. You just tell people what they can do today with the product so that you build a sense of practicality and trust. You just tell them, look, slash commons are available on Evernote today. Just update your app and you'll be able to use it. Here's how it works. The other side is you also need to teach people how to use this stuff. It's a complex product. It's not a”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Yeah, this is finally, I've been waiting for this for years. It's exactly what I needed. Thank you. So the learning is if you do the substance right and you communicate it decently, people will tell you. If you don't get the substance right, people will also tell you.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Learned that user feedback matches reality and substance very directly. So when you issue a monthly update full of content that nobody needs, they'll just tell you this is irrelevant, I don't need this, why are you working on this? They're very direct in a way that I find motivating, meaning that they're not trying to be kind, they're trying to be truthful. And so they just tell you if you're working on stuff that doesn't matter to them. You can do something very easy. You can look at our YouTube videos and look at the comments under the videos and see that when we started, we were learning and so we didn't get every update right all the time. And people would just tell us, I'm pissed, you raise prices and now you're being this stuff that I don't need. Why? I don't understand. Lately, instead, we've become much better at understanding what people actually need, what they're asking us. And so comments are much more either neutral, yeah, good. Now I need this other thing.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Lot to take in, and so I think that we should have instead started allocating some percentage of our time, improving the product in very visible ways that basically reassured people, look, we are here for the long run, yes, we are making drastic changes. Some of them are uncomfortable right now. We truly believe it's the best outlook in the long run. We need to do them right now, but we are also investing a lot on your user experience. We didn't do it. And so people were either skeptical, some were pissed, some were fine with they understood, but I started doing monthly updates exactly because we saw that it was important to communicate to people what was changing in the product, putting a face behind the product. I think it's important. It's not like bending spoons as a vague entity that is working on Evernote. It's Federico and his team who are working on Evernote.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “This was born out of necessity, meaning that when we acquired Evernote, there were a few months in which we made the decision to work very deeply on the technological foundations of Evernote. Evernote was launched in 2007, I think, so it's almost 20 years old. And so it's not full of bad code necessarily, but it's full of old code. And it's very important that we innovate that we make it modern if we want to work on Evernote for the next 10 or 20 years, right? We made the conscious decision of working on Tech Foundations, but as we were doing that, we were also communicating the acquisition and we were raising prices as we discussed earlier. These three things combined for a customer are”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Let's talk about examples. When we build collapsible sections on Evernote or the slash command menu, these are utility tools that make your product more ergonomic, more polished, more useful. You don't need to be fleshy about this. You don't need to do a huge launch and to merge them together and to wait six months. You need them to put them in the hands of customers as soon as possible so that they can start getting utility out of it. Next week we are announcing Evernote V11 and it's going to be a significant change compared to what Evernot is today. It's mostly a reflection of all the work that went through in the last three years, but it's also containing three advanced AI features that are not available on Avernut Today. And when you do that, it's important instead to kind of make a mess a little bit, not only say that they shouldn't be unpolished, but like try to be noisy about it so that as many people as possible see that some drastically”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “When you want to deliver a lot of things to people who need them, I think it's important to show that you are every week delivering useful improvements. So instead of doing a large and fancy launch, you try to do it in a way that feels like every week I'm getting something new. It really convinces people that you're in for the long run, that you are doing stuff that matters, and especially that even if this week nothing gets built that's specifically useful to me since I've been here for a while, I know that Evernot updates every week, and so I know that at some point something will be built that is for me that I need and I use. Instead, when you want to innovate and you want to try to do a step change in the way people use the product, then it's important to be very considerate and very clear with communications. So for instance,”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Well, for sure, you feel more responsibility. You also feel like you stand on the shoulder of giants in some sense. Sometimes I talk to Phil Libin, who was leading Evernote a few years ago. And I don't feel like shipping bad stuff on Evernote just because it's always been such an important product and built in such a caring way that just by comparison, I don't want to be I don't want bending spoons to have the name of those who are releasing subpar experiences. I want us to have a good threshold for quality.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “I don't adhere to one of the two schools of thought. I think speed matters when you're trying things and you're trying to find your way and you're probing the area around you, but then it's all about polish when you actually need to build something that millions of people use. You cannot half ass an experience.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Usually, let's try to close the gap between the prototype and something that is production ready, because the prototype, if you did it well, it's inexpensive. And so it means that it lacks a lot of the things that make it production ready. It's basically a probe to some extent. We call it a probe. It's a piece of software that is built to demonstrate that one metric is X or Y. And its only job. And so when people interact with it, they give you the answer, but it's not ready to be plugged into the broader product. And so this way you can get your answer, but then in order to be able to plug it to the broader product, you need to do some work.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “It's evolving so rapidly that I don't know how it plays out in terms of team organization. If I had to come up with an answer right now, I would say that it's going to make designers faster and you can try more things. So today we have a backlog of 100 ideas and we know that we can only try 10 of them in a few months. I think that we'll reach a point where we can actually try 20, 30, 40, 50, both because people will be faster, but also because the manual work to actually implement those prototypes will be much shorter. So yeah, I think this means that the designer who won't work necessarily on figma as they do today in the future will work on building these prototypes and coming up with these ideas and they'll do it more and faster.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “I think so, to be honest. I think that the role of a designer will be as important as it is today, maybe even more, but I think that the tools that we use will evolve. And so you won't work on pixels and then code, but you will likely merge the two things. I remember that when I got started with web development very early when I was in high school, I wouldn't have a design that I would try to implement. I just have like HTML code and CSS and I would try to tweak it to reach my results. It was a very manual process, but it was all contained inside the code editor, right? I think that in the future it's going to look like that where you are acting on the code and tweaking the code because it's so cheap and fast that you're just like tweaking the actual thing instead of creating an abstraction and then trying to apply it in the code.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Yeah. So on we transfer, we have used lovable quite a bit. We use cloud code a lot to build prototypes. On Evernote, I think we use Figma a lot still just because it's easier to use the components that we already have to make it look like it's actually the same app. It's a bit complex product so it's harder to give the context to an LLM to build things that look very close to the original one.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “When I was working on Evernote, I still am a lot, but when I was focusing only on Evernote, we didn't have lovable cursor and these tools. And so we were building designs and we were showing them to people and we were asking questions like by looking at this, how would you use it? Now we can build prototypes. And even if they are rough, we can put them in the hands of people and we can just like ask and use it and we'll observe. It's kind of different. People tell you that they would do something and then in reality when they have a prototype on their computer, they would do something different. So it's closer to the truth.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source