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Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

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Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#81

Post by ecshafer »

bradleybuda wrote: post #61
nness wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this model. Such significant layoffs would indicate that there is no real appetite for expansion or growth. Their goal might be be to acquire, dramatically cut costs, and then run the product for as long as they can at a profit before breaking it down and selling it off (or hope for a buyout by a bigger player.) But that wouldn't make sense — customers of a depreciating SaaS product surely churn af…

HN: VC is a cancer, businesses don't need to grow forever at all costs, products can be finished, what we need is sustainable small companies Also HN: No, not like that

The Bending Spoons business model is right out of the private equity playbook. Buy a business with good revenue, cut cost to turn this into a consistent revenue stream, generate annual returns.

This is not like making a small 20 person self funded company.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#82

Post by dotBen »

bradleybuda wrote: post #61
nness wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this model. Such significant layoffs would indicate that there is no real appetite for expansion or growth. Their goal might be be to acquire, dramatically cut costs, and then run the product for as long as they can at a profit before breaking it down and selling it off (or hope for a buyout by a bigger player.) But that wouldn't make sense — customers of a depreciating SaaS product surely churn af…

HN: VC is a cancer, businesses don't need to grow forever at all costs, products can be finished, what we need is sustainable small companies Also HN: No, not like that

If your comment is referring to the bending spoons business model, it's worth pointing out they are not VC, they are private equity.

If your comment is referring to the software company's exiting to provide a return to shareholders, that happens all the time whether it's venture-backed or privately owned. The owners of privately held bootstrapped companies still want an exit one day too.

As an open source software engineer who is now a venture capital investor, respectfully, I think your beef is with capitalism, not with the institutional investors.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#83

Post by agentcoops »

didacusc wrote: post #6
nness wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this model. Such significant layoffs would indicate that there is no real appetite for expansion or growth. Their goal might be be to acquire, dramatically cut costs, and then run the product for as long as they can at a profit before breaking it down and selling it off (or hope for a buyout by a bigger player.) But that wouldn't make sense — customers of a depreciating SaaS product surely churn af…

They did the same thing with Komoot and other apps. I don't understand where the money comes from and how they are planning to keep this portfolio growing.

It seems to all be debt financed, i.e. just a private equity model slightly specialized for tech. The "innovation" is that Bending Spoons has an in-house engineering team it seems they try to keep constant yet scale out to all the acquisitions. I hadn't looked into them much before, but https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma... is an interesting report -- though not focused on the finance side.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#84

Post by WJW »

jjice wrote: post #36
nness wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this model. Such significant layoffs would indicate that there is no real appetite for expansion or growth. Their goal might be be to acquire, dramatically cut costs, and then run the product for as long as they can at a profit before breaking it down and selling it off (or hope for a buyout by a bigger player.) But that wouldn't make sense — customers of a depreciating SaaS product surely churn af…

Yeah this is what I think Bending Spoons does, mostly based on the Evernote situation. Product has paying users and it's in a "complete" state. Cut costs to optimize profit for a bit and hope not everyone leaves. In the case of Evernote, it's probably really hard to get 10 year users off of it at this point, so they can double subscriptions and they're locked in. My assumption is that there's a serious amount of peop…

It was like that with WeTransfer too. Fine company that had been profitable for years, but with little hope of getting ever 10x bigger again. I used to work there and had already left by the time of the acquisition, but all the old colleagues I've spoken to said the same.

The main business was throwing off gobs of money and there were SO MANY failed projects to try and find new revenue streams. Everyone who was not being pushed by the PE owners could see that they would never account to even 1% of the revenues of the main product. It was only a matter of time before someone came in, said "the main business is fine as is" and fired the people who were involved in the moonshots then sat back and raked in the cash. Sure, it will probably not last forever. But if it brings in millions per year for 15-20 years until the company dies, then that is probably an outcome Bending Spoons is fine with.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#85

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

This is potentially disastrous to content on the web. Vimeo provides a platform-as-a-service known as OTT, that powers well known branded streaming services, like Criterion Channel, HistoryHit, Dropout, DIRTVision, Speed 51, URLTV, Armflix, MHz Choice, Trinity Broadcasting Network, SommTV, IndieFlix, BroadwayHD, Full Moon Features, etc.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#86

Post by muglug »

chuckadams wrote: post #25

Wonder what this means for vimeo/psalm, the static analyzer for PHP, which has recently seen some new life breathed into it after long neglect. Psalm has credible alternatives in PHPStan and now Mago, but it would still be a loss to see it go unmaintained again.

Psalm creator here!

Vimeo has not contributed any code to Psalm since I left in 2021.

Psalm is still in good hands!

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#87

Post by horsawlarway »

everfrustrated wrote: post #70
t1234s wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"corporate raiders" are a definitely real thing.

That usually means stripping the company for parts. Bending Spoons is just trying to run the company sustainably.

It sounds like they're trying to extract as much money as possible from a SaaS subscription service that's no longer actually paying any devs.

From my perspective as a one-time (but no longer) paying user of evernote - WTF am I paying for monthly if not to support a dev team?

Seriously - I get that there are infra costs for some of the services, and I wouldn't mind paying those costs plus a reasonable upcharge, but I'm sure as fuck not going to pay a company $100+ a year subscription to store under a GB of data.

So now I host bookstack and I pay backblaze ~$0.22/m to back up all my notes, which is much closer to real costs for these services if they're not under development.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#88

Post by Closi »

nness wrote: post #4
ayhanfuat wrote: post #3

From "Vimeo to be acquired by Bending Spoons in $1.38B all-cash deal" ( https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/10/vimeo-to-be-acquired-by-be... ): > Bending Spoons has a pattern of acquiring companies, then laying off staff and cutting features. For example, Bending Spoons acquired note-taking and task management app Evernote in 2022, after which the company laid off most of its U.S. and Chile staff and moved operations to E…

I don't understand this model. Such significant layoffs would indicate that there is no real appetite for expansion or growth. Their goal might be be to acquire, dramatically cut costs, and then run the product for as long as they can at a profit before breaking it down and selling it off (or hope for a buyout by a bigger player.) But that wouldn't make sense — customers of a depreciating SaaS product surely churn af…

What if there isn't a feasible path for expansion and growth? Vimeo already has contracting revenue, it's either in the maturity or decline phase.

Some customers will churn, some will stay, Bending Spoons are the masters of this model so will have made an assumption on how revenue will change across the next 5-10 years+, but I would assume that they aren't forecasting extreme growth, and instead are calculating that net profit can be changed from c$30m to c$139m within existing revenue, so if they can keep revenue at/near current levels without growth, they can end up with a much more profitable business.

Bear in mind that same revenue doesn't necessarily mean the same number of customers - it can also mean raising prices and having less customers. Bending Spoons might estimate that if they double prices, half their customers might leave - this would still be BRILLIANT for profit, as while revenue would stay the same, some costs would half, and thus profit might jump from c$140m to c$250m based on some napkin math!

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#90

Post by rickydroll »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #49
jjice wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is what I think Bending Spoons does, mostly based on the Evernote situation. Product has paying users and it's in a "complete" state. Cut costs to optimize profit for a bit and hope not everyone leaves. In the case of Evernote, it's probably really hard to get 10 year users off of it at this point, so they can double subscriptions and they're locked in. My assumption is that there's a serious amount of peop…

This is correct. You're buying a cashflow. Bending Spoons has optimized their model for very specific types of cashflow enterprises to aggregate into their portfolio.

I use Harvest to track hours and expenses and to invoice my customers. Bending Spoons apparently bought them a while ago and just eliminated the shell company around Harvest.

Based on my experience with Evernote, I don't trust Bending Spoons, and I'm wondering if I should look for a different time-tracking and invoicing system.

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