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AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

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Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#32

Post by jacobgkau »

People usually mention Evernote when Bending Spoons is brought up, but I also know them as purchasing Meetup (after it was already sort of struggling) and, more recently, entering an agreement to purchase Vimeo (of which I'm a paid user).

AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Yahoo!. Some of the still-relevant tech news sites like TechCrunch and Engadget were apparently moved from AOL to being directly under Yahoo! a few years ago. So I'm not too worried about AOL, but it's interesting how often I've heard about Bending Spoons in relation to brands I know over the past few years.

(Edit: AOL deleted all of my childhood emails back in the 2010s-- on an account that had previously been part of a paid AOL family subscription for years-- after I failed to sign into my account for more than 6 months, which also contributes to my current feeling that it's dead to me.)

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#34

Post by dancc »

neom wrote: post #2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons Interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476

Someone wrote about Bending Spoons' history and playbook:

https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma...

I enjoyed this part:

No On-Call Rotations: Bending Spoons aims to build systems so reliable that they eliminate the need for on-call rotations. This is unusual in the tech industry, where on-call duties are standard to promptly address system issues.

For most of their products, they have no on-call schemes at all. Engineers are encouraged to think through all corner cases to ensure robustness, knowing there is no fallback like an on-call team.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#35

Post by plorkyeran »

nemothekid wrote: post #24
underlipton wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Unexamined legacy subscriptions paid without a thought," is another way of saying, "Has too much money." If this is a widespread Boomer phenomenon, it explains a lot. I still kick myself for spending 6x MVNO pricing on my cell phone plan with a legacy carrier whose features I didn't need.

> "Unexamined legacy subscriptions paid without a thought," is another way of saying, "Has too much money." I constantly see ads for services like RocketMoney which helps people find and cancel subscriptions. I could arguably be in the "too much money" camp, but I couldn't imagine seeing an unknown/unused charge on my credit card bill and not immediately cancelling it. Nonetheless, RocketMoney seems like a widely use…

A surprising number of people clearly simply do not look at their credit card bills.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#36

Post by everfrustrated »

marstall wrote: post #28
pavel_lishin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote.[19] The acquisition was concluded in January 2023.[20] In July 2023, Evernote laid off all of its existing staff and announced it would relocate to Europe to be closer to Bending Spoons' headquarters.[21] Damn.

How does that possibly work? How do they continue with zero of the staff?

They replaced them with staff in Italy. Bending Spoons is an Italian (Milan) company.

They wanted the product not the developers.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#37

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

avrionov wrote: post #14
jjice wrote: post #13

I don't know much about Bending Spoons, but I associate them with Evernote now. Not sure if Evernote's downfall is associated with them or predates them. I never used Evernote, that's just what I hear. From what I've seen over the years, people don't like the way the product has moved and they really don't like the frequent price increases for not product change.

Evernote was in decline in more than 5 years before their sale to Bending Spoons. The sale didn't improve anything, because Bending Spoons act as private equity. They layoffs, moving the job to cheaper locations and increasing the prices.

For all the shit that PE gets, what you described is probably the best outcome possible from the POV of shareholders. If done well it should increase earnings per share. It's perhaps the best you can hope for in a situation where the company has been in decline for 5 years and you have no levers to effect change as a small shareholder.

This only works profitably because the users let themselves be stepped on, of course. But then again users who put their notes into a remote company's computer are those kind of people.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#38

Post by everfrustrated »

dancc wrote: post #34
neom wrote: post #2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons Interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476

Someone wrote about Bending Spoons' history and playbook: https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma... I enjoyed this part: No On-Call Rotations: Bending Spoons aims to build systems so reliable that they eliminate the need for on-call rotations. This is unusual in the tech industry, where on-call duties are standard to promptly address system issues. For most of their products, they have no on-cal…

I wonder if that's got lost in translation somewhere. I can understand not having on-call operations teams (an anti-pattern) but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Unless they mean to say its part of all devs job expectations and not a paid extra.
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