Bending Spoons is a joke company that buys company with hopes to restructure them to meet some nonsensical financial numbers made up in an excel spreadsheet.
Still have no idea why they have so many job applications, they don't actually hire.
AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
41–50 of 280 posts
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#42People 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 Ya…
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Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#43People 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 Ya…
It sounds like Bending Spoons is where old tech products go to die? I guess that's private equity for you.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition to ads on their web properties, they still have a sizeable (though aging) userbase that they milk for unnecessary services. I cancelled my mom's AOL subscription years ago and they were charging something like $25/mo when the only thing she used was their (free) email service -- though of course during the cancellation they touted things like antivirus and ID theft protection that she apparently had acces…
"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.
> I still kick myself for spending 6x MVNO pricing on my cell phone plan with a legacy carrier whose features I didn't need.
I have a friend who tried to switch to a MVNO (Cricket, I think) to save money and immediately switched back. Even though both companies were on the same network, the MVNO customers must have had a lower priority, because their service level was noticeably worse when literally the only thing that changed was the SIM card.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#45At one time, AOL had a market cap of $200B https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-intern...
When Verizon sold it and Yahoo, they were sold for less than 2% of their peak market cap https://www.axios.com/2021/05/04/verizon-aol-yahoo-valuation...
That is a silly comparison. The alibaba assets of Yahoo were carved out before it was sold to Verizon was worth $58.62B.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#46They bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still did a major redesign of the app and website afterwards. I expected outages, but so far it works like before.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't want to imply Bending Spoons is this awesome, as I know nothing much about them (except that they named their company after a weird scam, lol), but there's a pretty reasonable principle that might apply here:
If our service goes down for any reason, uh... wait until Monday afternoon, then try again. (Sorry!)
Like, who would die if AOL was down for 36 hours?
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#48I'm still using an email that is one of the AOL domains, mostly for accessing legacy sites that were around at that time.
I lost access to it during an iPhone upgrade, I paid $12.95 or something for a 'premium' membership that allowed me to have the password reset by a REAL LIVE PERSON.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#49Earlier 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?
Simple. They get new staff whose job is to shove intrusive surveillance and advertising into the product and push out an update, they don't have to support or develop the product.
The company bought the product to bilk money out of its existing users. They throw the product in the bin once all the users have gone.
Sadly, some ants get infected with corydceps. Tragic for the ant, but the other ants get it the fuck away from their colony, because they don't want to be next.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#50People 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 Ya…
It sounds like Bending Spoons is where old tech products go to die? I guess that's private equity for you.
That seems to be the opposite of what the article suggests, they seem to hold on long-term and invest in technology improvements.