Bending Spoons Buys Airtable, OpenAI Hits Back at Apple Over Lawsuit, Spider-Man Ads in BMWs | Diet TBPN

0:01John Coogan:Big deal, the big one that's tearing up the timeline right now is that Airtable, founded in 2012, and once valued at$11.7 billion, is getting acquired by Bending Spoons, founded in 2013 at 2.7 times ARR. A once-hot startup now an unfortunate victim of the SaaS bust, says Didi Doss. It raised$1.4 billion, only to be sold for$1.285 billion enterprise value because they had almost a billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet. And so the total equity value was$2.25 billion equity value. Just clearing the preference stack. So early employees, founders probably got something. Later investors probably got 1x their money back, but probably had it tied up for a few years.

0:55John Coogan:So not a good outcome, but there's some interesting silver linings here. Obviously, it could be good for bending spoons if they got a good deal and they turn it into a mammoth cash machine. Also, there's some nuance to where different pieces of the business are going because they're sort of dividing it up. Really sort of exemplifies the current moment where a company can sell for over a billion dollars and everyone's like, wow, that's rough. Yeah. Yeah. And a wake-up call to the many maybe younger companies that are at a lower revenue run rate that are raising at much higher valuations and basically signaling to them like you've got some many, many years of compounding to do.

1:43John Coogan:Yeah, it's interesting. There's a SaaSpocalypse narrative, which is like these companies are going away. Software won't exist. You'll just prompt it. And I think there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But one thing that it does feel like the underwriting, the financial trajectory of these single point solution SaaS products, single player, somewhat sticky, maybe not that sticky, maybe replaceable. It's not that they're going to zero. Bending Spoons wouldn't be buying it if everyone was churning and it was going to be a zero. But at the same time, you can't underwrite it. It's growing 20%. Yeah, yeah.

2:22John Coogan:But you can't underwrite it at 40x revenue, 100x revenue anymore. And it feels a little bit like what happened with D2C e-commerce. Honestly, there was a moment where e-commerce brands were venture backable and you could underwrite them or they were being underwritten similarly to venture startups that had true moats, true compounding advantages. they would get the same multiple as a SpaceX or an AI company or a social media company. And that never really made sense. It was sort of just a weird quirk in the system for a couple of years. And then go forward a few years when there were some pullbacks.

3:05John Coogan:Some of the IPOs went out. They didn't do that well. They traded down. And all of a sudden, it was like, okay, well, if we're doing, in my case, food on the Internet, and we're going to VC back a food company, has Nestle been disrupted? Like, no. And that would – or Unilever. Is Unilever trading down like crazy because they're facing so much pressure? And that's usually what happens when there truly is disruptive innovation. Like, you see this with – I saw some crazy post about how people were bearish on Starlink for a while, and the company that they were competing with just went bankrupt. And you see this with, you know, social media came out.

3:39John Coogan:And, yes, like, the newspaper and the internet, actually, the newspaper stocks did actually trade down. That never happened in e-commerce, D2C e-commerce, any of that. And we're now in this new regime. So I think that there's actually a pretty safe path if you just build the business. If you're saying, look, I am in this SaaS industry. It is going to be more competitive going forward. But I'm setting myself up to have a reasonable multiple so that at every point, if I'm trading at three times ARR, I'm happy because the cap table is set up for that. Yeah, one thing I will say is I started using Airtable.

4:16It was 2015, right? So I probably started using it a few years in. But the way that I used the product back then for my first business, I would 100 % just VibeCode a solution today. Because I was using very basic dashboard functionality. I wanted dashboards that we could use internally, share externally. Now it would be quite easy to just do all of that in Codex or your favorite agent. So I do think that business is very much under threat over the long run, but still has sort of compounding that it can do just given how deep it is into the Fortune 500 and a long tail of small businesses.

4:54John Coogan:I'd be very interested to know what is new user, new logo growth like versus just expansion within an organization. Because if you have some company that's already sort of running on Airtable, they're growing, so they're adding seats, they're adding functionality because they're sort of bought in and they're not going to rip it out. What does that growth rate look like versus new companies actually going and signing up and saying, yes, this is the best tool for the job? because you do get a lot built for free. It's not like they don't have access to AI agents that can improve their systems. You might be doing a lot of maintenance on your Vibe-coded solution, but at the same time, a lot of people, especially in smaller organizations, were using this as just one small dashboarding tool, one small database that is sort of replicable.

5:42John Coogan:So interesting to see where it goes. And yeah, just like an interesting data point in the SaaSpocalypse, late-stage growth, So like, is it a zombie corn? What term are you using for it? Jared Sleeper has some more thoughts. 480 million ARR growing 20%. It's a unicorn exit. Many very satisfied customers, including Jared Sleeper for years. Fantastic run. Never underestimate how much VCs love products that make, quote, everyone a builder. The wrinkle is that one player products are high churn. Was Airtable, I feel like the whole pitch for Airtable was that it was multiplayer, player, but maybe that wasn't the way that people were actually using it that often.

6:23John Coogan:A lot of people would just be like, oh, yeah, that guy on the team is using Airtable for that thing. But I mean, certainly from very early on. I think by one player, he means that it's more like product led, like one person at a company. Because I've only used it in a team capacity, right? But one player can sign up, start using it, invite other people to the team. Yeah. It's an advantage because you're bottom up. you can just ramp into a different company so quickly. But at the same time, if you're not like going through the CFO and being like, there is a mandate that we're using this ERP system.

6:56Selling 200 seats at once.

6:58John Coogan:Exactly. Yeah, it is a little different. Three, his third point, gross retention remains the single greatest predictive variable of terminal value for any business that doesn't have a scale effect or network effect. It dictates somewhat mathematically what folks like Bending Spoons will pay. Great to see employees get liquid, but perhaps sad that some are learning about liquidation preferences, SaaS multiples to their disappointment. So, of course, if you had mentally marked your stock at$11 billion, but then this deal happens, the investors that put in that money at$11 billion, they're going to get their money back first, and then you're going to have to fight for whatever's left over, the scraps.

7:37John Coogan:Silicon Valley can do a better job talking to employees about what stock is worth in various scenarios, but no one is incentivized to do it. Well, I mean, you can also just look it up. There's a whole bunch of blog posts about it. You can ask JGPD and get a whole deep dive on, run this whole scenario and play out every possible option. But yes, I agree. No one likes to, you know, oh, we're closing a big candidate. Let's tell them about what's going to happen if Bending Spoons comes in. Let's tell them what happens if we get our spoon bent. So Bending Spoons is emerging as the constellation software of the prosumer high churn, higher churn SaaS is a fascinating turn of events and a good thing for pref stacks everywhere just because there's more liquidity for systems.

8:20Well, it's a buyer of last resort.

8:22John Coogan:Yeah. Whereas. Like no founder, no founder setting out, hey, I want to be, you know, go on this generational run and then get my spoon bent. but it's still great because it allows, again, it is real liquidity. This is a win. I think Bending Spoons will obviously end up, I would say, like right-sizing the company. They're not going to continue to run it the same way that it's been run, but at least it allows everyone to get out and go on to do new things. Yeah. In an interesting twist, speaking of getting out, quote, Shiel Monat shares this about the Airtable acquisition. They spun out their AI business, HyperAgent, prior to the acquisition.

9:06John Coogan:So the company lives on and likely some cash with it probably can be recapitalized. Seems like a fantastic outcome. Shed the old business and focus on AI. So I would be very interested to see who is going to be working at HyperAgent. Is this something where the founders didn't want to exit the business entirely and then just start from scratch. They wanted to take a whole bunch of the team with them and they wanted a bunch of the resources and learnings. And so they were able to package everything up and this will be something that's very founder led or was this just, okay, that is a more expensive piece of the business.

9:38John Coogan:Bending spoons, it's earlier in its ramp. Maybe it's working, maybe it's not, but that's not the business that's bending spoons in. And so this is more like a bending spoons driven. Look, we've had, we've had both founders on the show. Bending spoons is like, Hey, let's take a great product and just basically right size the team, run it efficiently. And we're not trying to get growth back to 200, 300 % a year. Howie's been on the show. He talked a bit about HyperAgent. That's a product that if they execute well, can grow 10x year over year. And so I could imagine, again, leaving some of the team to just continue running Airtable indefinitely.

10:16And then again, like you said, taking some of the talent out and saying like, let's take another Big swing.

10:50John Coogan:fair price, take it or leave it and you can take it. You don't necessarily need to be this like crazy werewolf of like a shark, you know? Yeah. There's just not, there's just not that many, there's not that many buyers for a company like Airtable. Yeah. And it's a, a just sort of in this, in this economy, a slow growing enterprise software business, right? There are not that many buyers. If Airtable had wanted to sell in 2020, I'm sure they would have gotten meaningfully more. They probably did have offers at different points. You can imagine Airtable, you know, Ending up at a Salesforce, as an example.

11:23But now, Luca is saying the buyer of last resort is maybe unfair.

11:31John Coogan:Yeah, just like a value-based buyer. Yeah. I don't know. Snap earnings happened, and Evan Spiegel was on CNBC talking to Sorkin. And it's a very interesting storyline because people are obsessed with the specs. I mean, job completed in terms of like getting more attention for the company, but it's been sort of a weight around the company because the question is like, okay, is everyone going to be buying$2 ,200 smart glasses from you anytime soon? When that's not really the story. The story is actually like the revenue growth, the profit, the operating leverage, the coming back into the business.

12:10John Coogan:So, I mean, overall, it was a good quarter for Snap. Clear beat. Revenue was up 19 % year over year with profitability and cash generation rising even faster. So that's that operating leverage. They're growing revenue faster than they're growing costs. And so they're increasing their margins. Advertising revenue grew 9 % to 1.3 billion in the quarter. But the really interesting number that was surprising to me was they're making$316 million a quarter in subscriptions and paid services. up 85%. So just subscribing and being a paid power user, it's only 3 % of the user base, something like that.

12:52John Coogan:That's now a billion dollar line of business. Obviously, very high margin, working really plays to the strengths of what Snap offers. And usage is up globally, but they're losing a step in Western markets. So the North America, I think, fell 7 % and Europe fell 2%. And so that's not great for long-term ad monetization because you want to be in the richer countries generally, but still revenue is accelerating. They are monetizing better. And that's probably an AI story. It's just like a boring AI story because it's like the ad recommendation system got a little bit better. Nobody really cares. People want to focus on specs, but they're$2 ,200 and they're bulkier than competing smart glasses.

13:34Well, it felt like in that interview, Spiegel was talking about specs, but he wasn't wearing them.

13:39John Coogan:Yeah, does he need to wear them all the time? I think he kind of needs to wear them all the time. You got to wear them? I mean, you're going to hold Apple to that? Tim Cook's got to wear a Vision Pro everywhere he goes? That would be hilarious. No, but the Vision Pro is not meant to be. Augmented reality. It's augmented reality. It's meant to be worn 24-7. You're a serious person. Let's actually pull up the. You should do a full show. If you love. I could. Apple Vision Pro so much. It would not be a problem. Do the full show. Okay. Do the full show. Okay. This Friday. Book it. We'll test running with Tyler.

14:11John Coogan:So here's an interesting tidbit. Specs, it feels like, oh my God, they're spending so much money. It's like so crazy. I think the rough estimate is like 300 million a year, which is a lot, but it's only 5 % of their cost. It's like 20 % of their overall R &D budget, maybe something like that. These are very rough numbers, but it's not like if they just spun out specs or cut specs. and they were just like, we're not doing anything there. All of a sudden, the business is like wildly profitable. It's not that big of a stone around the neck. It's more just like a distraction and a question. And it's also not great that on the earnings call, they asked how many pre-orders have you sold?

14:53John Coogan:And he sort of danced around it and didn't really give a straight answer on that. Because if it was good, you'd probably be like, yeah, we sold a lot of these things. Yeah, you'd bleed with that. Okay, let's play a little bit of Evan Spiegel on CNBC. I want to hear him talk. Snap reporting Q2 results after the bell on Monday. They scored an earnings beat with$1.6 billion in revenue. It's 19 % higher than just one year ago. And joining us right now for more Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. He did not bring his glasses on the set. But we're going to talk about those glasses in just a minute because I think that's been a big part of the story.

15:24But you beat across the board. Not just, by the way, on the revenue piece, but on the margin piece, which is what I think the market was actually looking for. Yeah, well, first of all, thanks so much for having me on, Andrew. It's such a beautiful morning here in Aspen. It was a great quarter for Snap. And I think what folks are seeing is that the free cash flow in the business is really starting to inflect, which is allowing us to offset dilution, to strengthen our balance sheet, and, of course, to continue investing in the future, which is so important to us. Okay, click forward to like$2.30.

15:50Let's talk about the future because there's a couple different pieces of that story. I mentioned glasses. We'll get there in a second. I think glasses. Because I want to hear him talking about glasses. About$2 ,200 right now,$2 ,100 is what they're going to come in at. $2 ,195. Okay, so the question I keep thinking about is how quickly those can come to market in a way and at a price point that people buy them en masse. And how do you think about the competition coming from whatever you think Apple is ultimately going to create, whatever you think Google is working on, and whatever you think Meta is going to do next?

16:18Well, we've been working for more than 12 years to reinvent the computer and make it feel more. I think today people are spending more than seven hours on average staring at screens. Specs represent the opportunity to bring computing into the world, to make it a shared experience, and ultimately to help bring all the productivity gains we saw in desktop computing and laptop computing to the real world and to real-world jobs, which is the vast majority of jobs, about 60 % of jobs. So I think this computing transformation is incredibly exciting. We're certainly the leader in the space. I think specs represent a totally new category.

16:49If you look at the landscape today, you have very bulky but capable headsets, and then you have very limited but lightweight AI glasses. And specs represent, you know, the capability of some of these VR headsets in terms of the immersiveness and the ability to really have a full workstation experience, but with the wearability of some of these lighter weight glasses. But do you say to yourself, Apple's going to come and do the same thing and Meta's going to go? I mean, so how do you think about that, given the cost of putting this all out there and the amount of money that some of these big companies can actually throw at this?

17:20Yeah, well, I think, you know, as we look at the history of innovation, I actually think one of the things that helps power innovation are constraints, right? And one of the things that makes Snap so unique is that we've been so laser-focused on specs for such a long period of time. So I think this focus, our history of innovation, and our first mover advantage in this space.

17:37John Coogan:It feels like it should be a different company. If you want to be laser-focused, it feels like the benefit would be do the Elon thing, start a separate company that is laser-focused on it. The investors in that company are laser-focused on that. The employees. Yeah, have a distribution deal with Snap. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like, like just, just have this, like, you know, gets where we're good in this video. Just get snapped to a really polished oiled machine. You own all the equity. You, you, you have the founder control. It's your, you know, your, your, your financial backstop, your, your, your credibility for, to actually go and truly laser focused because like, it's weird to be laser focused on a thing that's not your core business.

18:21John Coogan:And then everyone's just constantly asking you like we'd love for you to laser focus on the main business that's making millions of dollars every year seems pretty solid yeah it's like making six billion dollars well what do you think yeah i mean earlier this year they did spin off the um ai video company yeah that seems like much more related to the main like you know hatchet app that would have been glasses right what is the ai video company i think it's called dotmo it was like their internal uh generative video oh team. Interesting. He was talking about enterprise use cases for the glasses.

18:52I mean, like workplace use cases. It's so hard to imagine. It's as an independent company, you make a really great device. I can imagine that company having its own go-to-market motion saying, hey, Amazon, we want you to use our devices across your workforce and maybe they do a pilot. But trying to sell in Snapchat glasses into the enterprise feels like just going to be a tough sell.

19:15John Coogan:OpenAI is firing back Back at Apple. A little glazy, though. They say Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time. What a funny way to kick off a blog post. Firing back at a lawsuit. Apple just cooked. OpenAI just cooked Apple. Well, they say it built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details. True. And then they go on to say maybe there were some details that were missed. Yes. So what were the key things that they said? Apple accused OpenAI of ignoring them. Turns out the lawyers emailed the wrong Asian guy because two Asian last names look similar. They claimed you discussed the allegations with OpenAI's general counsel.

19:55John Coogan:They admitted that that conversation never happened. Accused an ex-employee of improperly accessing files. They forgot to mention Apple employees were allegedly asking him to access those same files after he left. So there seemed to be some scenario where the guy had left, but he had so much internal knowledge that someone at Apple was just like, hey, can you remind me where this thing is or something? Yeah. When reading through the initial complaint, Apple made it seem like the employee or the former employee was just running wild through his old laptop. He had sent a message to someone at Apple saying something to the effect, I'm paraphrasing, but I still have access to my computer, LOL.

20:37But the reason that in the text messages that they shared, you can imagine the reason that he was there and sending that message why would he send the message if he was doing something that he was that was wrong that he would feel guilty of right he was helping his former teammates and they say there's 10 other people i could ask you but you're the smartest or something like that yeah um and and so when you have all this context the story looks

21:03John Coogan:quite a lot different yeah they're sharing a lot of text messages you can go read the blog post but There's like full back and forth iMessages between Chang Liu and Apple employees, where Chang, whose last day at Apple was January 22nd, 2026, is being asked by his former colleagues to help them locate files and information to assist them with their Apple work. Note other individual names in Apple confidential information has been redacted. So certainly another wild. Yeah, I'm still just very surprised that Apple, during the middle of a year-long talent raid would know that someone significant had quit and that would not go through the process of actually taking back their laptop and making sure that the separation was really finalized.

21:55People have been saying stories how historically, maybe call it 15 years ago, if you quit Apple, someone would show up to your house immediately and take back any prototypes that you may have had or anything of the sort.