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Vimeo, AOL, Eventbrite, and WeTransfer all have a couple things in common, aside from being throwbacks to the aughts and 2010s: They're still alive, and they're all owned by a tech company called Bending Spoons.
Those brands — and the others that the company has acquired — aren’t exactly known for being cash cows. Last year, Bending Spoons lost more than $100 million.
But now, it’s turning a profit — and it's just filed to go public on the stock market.
How could anyone turn a profit on AOL? Actually, it’s pretty simple to Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School. She’s got an AOL email address herself.
“If you're still on AOL, chances are there's some idiosyncratic thing you get from them,” she said. “I have a bunch of friends who are on AOL, because it's the throwaway email that they give to their shopping sites.”
But the contents of their spam boxes are treasure because there is a lot of information in there that Bending Spoons can sell.
“Nordstrom knows me as my AOL address, but now AOL knows that I'm a Nordstrom shopper,” McGrath said. That information wasn’t valuable enough for AOL alone. Or for many of the other companies that Bending Spoons acquires. So the name of the game is cuts and consolidation.
“You only need one CFO. You only need one chief marketing officer,” said analyst Roger Entner, founder of Recon Analytics.
He said a team running several brands at once leads to fatter profit margins. “You can have a very efficient sales force when you are one large company instead of a significant number of small companies,” he said. | 
