Best of Business — February 2026

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   Video

   Hiten Shah·15w

   This Italian startup makes $1.5B a year reviving zombie apps

   Bending Spoons, an Italian startup valued at $11B, generates $1.5B annually by acquiring struggling but established apps like Evernote, Meetup, and WeTransfer. Their playbook: buy companies with loyal users but poor execution, send strike teams to fix bugs and optimize monetization, then hold forever rather than flip. They've completed 20 acquisitions in 10 years using proprietary tools for data analysis and decision-making, maintain 1% annual turnover with elite talent (0.003% acceptance rate), and fund growth primarily through debt rather than venture capital. The strategy focuses on improving products for paying users, raising prices, and achieving profitability through operational excellence rather than building from scratch.

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2. 2
   Article

   Frederick's delirious rantings·13w

   Systems Thinking in Enterprise Architecture

   Systems thinking applied to enterprise architecture explores how organizations, like complex ecosystems, contain interactions that are impossible to fully map. Using the Rumsfeld Matrix (known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, unknown unknowns), enterprise architects can categorize their knowledge gaps — from documented systems to shadow IT and emergent behaviors. Causal Loop Diagrams offer a post-mortem tool for understanding reinforcing loops (snowball effects) and balancing loops (resistance to change, often behind failed digital transformations). The key takeaway: a map is not the territory — architects should focus on high-value abstractions rather than exhaustive documentation, while staying humble about the organizational complexity they cannot see.

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3. 3
   Article

   swizec.com·15w

   The 3 curves that make a scalable business

   Building scalable businesses requires managing three growth curves: exponential growth in users and revenue through retention, linear growth in bugs as usage increases, and logarithmic growth in support work through automation and tooling. Engineers create value by building systems that maintain these curves through code quality, automation, documentation, and reducing operational overhead. Many startups fail not from lack of features, but from inability to scale operations to match demand.

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