Super silly of me to ask but how does Bending Spoons make money in all of this? Is it the "fire all American devs and save costs with cheaper Italians" schtick or is there something else?

I don't see how Airtable makes money on its own.

Having read their IPO prospectus, my reading - They buy a company which they feel has a sticky product for its loyal userbase and then integrate as many of its common services into its in-house platform e.g. data

They then fire nearly all of the existing new companies staff and think of all the ways they can maximally monetise the existing userbase. Growing the product via investing in it isn't a priority, revenue stream is.

They get a lot of stick, but in fairness they are up front about their business model; they don't hide the fact that they are going to fire most people, unlike traditional private equity firms who make false promises.

That goes a long way yes. Most of these products have built up to hundreds or maybe thousands of engineers over the years, and if you can keep it going with just a handful in Italy, that is a serious cost optimisation.

They look for companies which got fat on free money with impossible valuations which are dead ducks. The free money period ended so they can't raise more money and if they do it will be a substantial down valuation so investors won't approve it as it would cristalise a loss on their portfolio.

These companies all pay insanely high silicon valley wages and deliver very little actual product development velocity for the wage costs involved.

The founders don't have the b**s to do the necessary haircuts themselves so they sell. Bending spoons takes the reputation hit that the founder should have taken and makes severe cuts.

BS then rationalises the roadmap, and either keeps it alive or invests into it depending on expected return.

Nothing particularly revolutionary other than they are an execution machine.

Find product that users like and can be difficult to switch away from, cut operating costs to the bone, and jack up prices. Ideally the money you extract from the remaining customers pays for the acquisition plus generates a profit. Someone in a previous thread compared it to a perpetual bond with fluctuating payouts or a royalty stream, the discounted future earnings eventually converge to 0.

The same thing Broadcom is doing with VMware.

They also hike the price so significantly most people stop using it. See meetup.com for example.