Live data from Hacker News

Bench to be acquired after abruptly shutting down

techcrunch.com

41–50 of 92 posts

Re: Bench to be acquired after abruptly shutting down

#41
post #39
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the founder, he just bought the domain a month ago: https://x.com/JesseTinsley/status/1861243509006848065 Probably not finished but acquired Bench anyways.

Amazing how this company that barely existed 5 minutes ago is already trusted by Google, Chipotle, Robinhood, HubSpot, X, Chime and Anthropic per their landing page. I wonder if that's also news to those companies.

[deleted]

Re: Bench to be acquired after abruptly shutting down

#42

Would you trust Employer when their "About" page looks like this? https://www.employer.com/about "Our Story There are many variations of passages of available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even..."

Screenshot would have been nice ;)

Re: Bench to be acquired after abruptly shutting down

#43
post #35

Would you trust Employer when their "About" page looks like this? https://www.employer.com/about "Our Story There are many variations of passages of available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even..."

According to the founder, he just bought the domain a month ago: https://x.com/JesseTinsley/status/1861243509006848065 Probably not finished but acquired Bench anyways.

In the world of crazy valuation ~$450k for that domain seems pretty good deal.

Re: Bench to be acquired after abruptly shutting down

#44
post #22

Would you trust Employer when their "About" page looks like this? https://www.employer.com/about "Our Story There are many variations of passages of available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even..."

Employer.com is a new "brand" from long-established Recruiter.com. My guess is that Recruiter.com planned to launch Employer.com in the near-term, and they saw the Bench.co shutdown as the perfect opportunity so they've sped up their plans and "launched" employer.com. edit: after reading Recruiter.com's investor filings (as they're a public company) the acquisition of Bench is going to kill them. The founder has gone…

[deleted]

Re: Bench to be acquired after abruptly shutting down

#45

What a comedy of errors. So they screw over their paying customers without any notice and now suddenly they are acquired ? I love capitalism but the way Bench handled this is a disaster and left so many customers unsure of what to do. Especially at year end when accounting becomes even more critical. Shameful.

In disrupting the staid, predictable world of accounting, one must move fast and break things.

Re: Bench to be acquired after abruptly shutting down

#46

Would you trust Employer when their "About" page looks like this? https://www.employer.com/about "Our Story There are many variations of passages of available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even..."

An hour after the parent post, the about page https://www.employer.com/about now redirects to the home page https://www.employer.com/ — must have been an error that the webmaster has corrected.

Re: Bench to be acquired after abruptly shutting down

#47
post #22

Would you trust Employer when their "About" page looks like this? https://www.employer.com/about "Our Story There are many variations of passages of available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even..."

Employer.com is a new "brand" from long-established Recruiter.com. My guess is that Recruiter.com planned to launch Employer.com in the near-term, and they saw the Bench.co shutdown as the perfect opportunity so they've sped up their plans and "launched" employer.com. edit: after reading Recruiter.com's investor filings (as they're a public company) the acquisition of Bench is going to kill them. The founder has gone…

The process you describe above is highly vulnerable as Ponzi scheme. The goal would be to raise total revenues, to paint a certain financial picture to meet targets for cashing out before the high debt load and interest payments sink the ship.

As soon as there is insufficient cashflow for several consecutive periods, the whole thing comes crashing down. This is a strategy for cashing out, rather than building a long term sustainable book of companies for steady, organic growth which has the cash to payout dividends and reward loyal investors.

Re: Bench to be acquired after abruptly shutting down

#48
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employer.com is a new "brand" from long-established Recruiter.com. My guess is that Recruiter.com planned to launch Employer.com in the near-term, and they saw the Bench.co shutdown as the perfect opportunity so they've sped up their plans and "launched" employer.com. edit: after reading Recruiter.com's investor filings (as they're a public company) the acquisition of Bench is going to kill them. The founder has gone…

The process you describe above is highly vulnerable as Ponzi scheme. The goal would be to raise total revenues, to paint a certain financial picture to meet targets for cashing out before the high debt load and interest payments sink the ship. As soon as there is insufficient cashflow for several consecutive periods, the whole thing comes crashing down. This is a strategy for cashing out, rather than building a long…

> The process you describe above is highly vulnerable as Ponzi scheme. The goal would be to raise total revenues, to paint a certain financial picture to meet targets for cashing out before the high debt load and interest payments sink the ship.

You have just described almost every modern VC backed company….

Re: Bench to be acquired after abruptly shutting down

#49
post #19

As someone who was affected by this, I opted to go ahead and try and get my money's worth (although I have another service doing this in parallel). Also they were supposed to file an S Corp election for me, so hopefully I'll be able to find out the latest status of that. This whole thing is such a mess.

did it immediately let you proceed to your existing data

Re: Bench to be acquired after abruptly shutting down

#50
post #49
post #19

As someone who was affected by this, I opted to go ahead and try and get my money's worth (although I have another service doing this in parallel). Also they were supposed to file an S Corp election for me, so hopefully I'll be able to find out the latest status of that. This whole thing is such a mess.

did it immediately let you proceed to your existing data

Yes. I'm able to log into the platform. You need to navigate to https://app.bench.co. I actually don't remember if they provided that URL, or if I just typed it into my browser out of habit. It may work for everyone who was on the platform.
Post reply on HN