The Bending Spoons (Italian tech giant listed on the Nasdaq this summer) “cure” is well known: acquiring historic software platforms, drastically cutting its workforce to reduce fixed-operating costs and justifying the operation with a promise of future technical efficiency.
“We fire almost everyone. Here are the new products”
But companies are made up of human beings. And often touch wouldn’t hurt. Last October 12th, yet another chapter of this business model turned into a media case, after a message published on X by Federico Simionato, Product Lead of the Milanese unicorn.
When communicating the company restructuring after the acquisition of the no-code database platform Airtable, Simionato entrusted the announcement to a concise post on X:
“Today we’re laying off a large part of the Airtable team. This is not a reflection of their work but a reflection of our deep belief that small teams ship more and better”.
And so far, nothing special. A classic corporate cuts message. The problem came in the second half of the same message, where the loss of jobs for hundreds of employees was put on the same level as product roadmap: A list of technology innovations, with the arrival of new dedicated teams, improved infrastructure, increased record limits and the release of new features.
“Techno-managerial cynicism”
The reaction from the tech community and the overseas press was harsh. The criticisms focused on the absence of empathy, branding the comparison between mass redundancies and feature updates as an exercise in techno-managerial cynicism. “Celebrating layoffs is not a boast, no matter how you try to sugarcoat it,” commented one user among the hundreds of critical messages. “This is the most unempathetic thing I have ever read in my life,” read another post. Responding to one of the comments, Simionato reiterated that he wasn’t “celebrating at all.” “It is a difficult day for good people,” he wrote. “I prefer to be transparent about the reasons rather than remain vague,” he added.
Bending Spoons has not publicly commented on the post, but a company spokesperson said a Fast Company that “the decision to part ways with some members of the pre-acquisition Airtable team was not made lightly and is not a judgment on the excellent work performed by the team.” “Their passion and dedication have made Airtable the product and company it is today, and together with the remaining team members we are honored to continue their work,” he concluded.
“Small teams work better”
It didn’t end here. The theoretical model of small teams is contested: the use of the “small teams work better” argument to motivate cuts has been stigmatized by a competing CEO like Sridhar Vembu of Zoho, who discussed the practice of firing rather than retraining staff.
History repeats itself
The post on Airtable is not an isolated episode, but the replication of a pattern already seen two years ago with the acquisition of WeTransfer.
On that occasion, Bending Spoons announced the very heavy dismissal of over 75% of the staff of the famous file-sharing platform. Even in that case, the announcement of the cuts was immediately accompanied by purely technical communications: the massive migration of the infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (Aws), the integration of artificial intelligence processes for the automation of operational flows and the rationalization of the code.
Test how TechCrunch, WiredUS And Ars Technica they then underlined the cultural clash between the original model of WeTransfer (born in Amsterdam and oriented towards supporting creatives and design) and the “financial engineering” model of Bending Spoons, based on the transformation of the software into a highly automated income machine, guided by numerical metrics and a bare-bones technical architecture.
The strategy
The communication and operational pattern now appears standardized through three key steps: the acquisition of the platform with a strong user base but high operating costs, the flash announcement of mass layoffs often ranging between 50% and 75% of the workforce, and the contextual technical justification for which the cuts are presented not as a “blood and tears” financial operation, but as an evolutionary necessity to streamline the code, exploit artificial intelligence and accelerate releases.
Let’s be clear: if from the point of view of numbers and financial efficiency the formula is proving profitable for the Milanese company, on a public relations level the price paid is the progressive affirmation of a hyper-technocratic corporate image, in which the workforce is treated as “an infrastructural variable” to be optimized together with the servers. A preview, perhaps, of a very near future for many other tech realities.