No one outbid Bending Spoons for Airtable because PE firms see SAS as facing a fundamental change in long-term growth expectations, not a pricing dislocation—and their own portfolios already hold enough turnaround problems.
The panel explains that no PE rival outbid Bending Spoons for Airtable because SAS multiples reflect a fundamental long-term-growth reassessment, and PE firms already carry heavy software-restructuring portfolios. ✦ AI generated
Nikesh Arora · 20VC · 2026-08-06 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 6:54
“there any reason why no PEs came in and why no one would want to take that off and that was a once in a decade gem? Did did did you see that?”
You know you see dislo is this a pricing dislocation or is the fundamental change in the long-term growth rate that people expect out of SAS. If it's a fundamental change in long-term growth rate people assess, then the multiples are right now, you know, and that's I think where the market is grappling with this... the people you mentioned, uh, Jason, the the PE guys, they might have a full roster of stuff they'd like to sell to Bending Spoons as opposed they'd like to buy against Bending Spoons.
verbatim transcript · starts at 6:54
6:51on the pig. >> It's a tough It's a tough one, right? But >> yeah, it is. And I because I didn't feel Jason that this was the kind of category that PE would sweep sweep up because Yeah. kind of merging the two sets of comments. one is yeah they definitely you you're trying to add some AI pixie dust but you're fundamentally your your core productivity app and you've been
7:13the proatizer Jason that you know oh my god look at all you can do with lovable if I wanted to build my own CRM and I wanted to be personalizable 10 years ago I might have used air table because it's way more configurable than Salforce but today if I'm the nerd that wants to build my own CRM I might just go to lovable replet or claude code and just
7:31bang it out from scratch so if you want to do that, I'd call you a person with no low imagination or there's so many other Google things to build. The last thing you want to build is a user. >> I agree and I Yeah, and I am a person with low imagination. I cop that. But I agree. But but the point is this what it means if you own a horizontal
7:49productivity app that's mainly individual user. I just think that's one of the tougher categories for PE to get their head around. Ironically, given the Evernote purchase, this is right in the bending spoon sweet spot. If you think about it, this is, you know, just like Evernote, it's like the people who have stuck with this product are going to stick with it. They're going to apply their formula.