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Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO

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21–30 of 118 posts

Re: Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO

#21
post #18

I'm often thinking about building a better Meetup, it's so expensive for organizers these days. But then I acknowledge the network effects and I give up. And they own Eventbrite too! Savvy people.

I see a lot of people using https://luma.com/. I'm sure it's not as big as Meetup but it does have a decent community of users, and you can set up pretty much anything with their free plan.

Re: Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO

#22

Their strategy always was "buy company" and "instantly lay off about everyone" to save costs and rapidly increase subscription pricing (1). So far they've been relatively soft (for their doing) on Komoot, which I too am most anxious off. Bikepacking.com has a good read about Komoot; it was probably unsustainable in the long run before bending spoons took over anyways (2), yet I much rather had they stayed a sort of i…

You can imagine all of these moderately successful SAAS companies that see peak subscribers starting to fall off on top of legacy tech stacks and no will to make drastic steps to get back to growth and understand why they sell. I've never seen BS as specifically ruining companies (although they've certainly been known to jack up prices for the remaining subscribers) but it's not a good sign when they do buy something you use.

Re: Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO

#23
post #18

I'm often thinking about building a better Meetup, it's so expensive for organizers these days. But then I acknowledge the network effects and I give up. And they own Eventbrite too! Savvy people.

I see a lot of people using https://luma.com/ . I'm sure it's not as big as Meetup but it does have a decent community of users, and you can set up pretty much anything with their free plan.

At least in the Bay, Luma and Partiful are much bigger than Meetup now.

Re: Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO

#24
post #18

I'm often thinking about building a better Meetup, it's so expensive for organizers these days. But then I acknowledge the network effects and I give up. And they own Eventbrite too! Savvy people.

I see a lot of people using https://luma.com/ . I'm sure it's not as big as Meetup but it does have a decent community of users, and you can set up pretty much anything with their free plan.

Luma doesn't do discoverability well unfortunately. Also very tech centric.

Re: Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO

#25
post #14

IMO, they buy companies, lay off en masse and sell the now sunsetted products. Reminiscent of "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, but he gutted and then flipped whole companies. I think of them as the bakery outlet store that sells only stale goods.

It's the circle of life - all businesses reach a point where they don't have significant growth potential or became a "keep the lights on" operation, and at that point their investors and founders wish to exit and cash out in order to invest in greener pastures.

That's where businesses like Bending Spoons, Red Ventures, and IAC come in for digital media.

Re: Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of people using https://luma.com/ . I'm sure it's not as big as Meetup but it does have a decent community of users, and you can set up pretty much anything with their free plan.

At least in the Bay, Luma and Partiful are much bigger than Meetup now.

Interesting. Luma is getting traction in London. Not so much outside.

Re: Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO

#27
post #18

I'm often thinking about building a better Meetup, it's so expensive for organizers these days. But then I acknowledge the network effects and I give up. And they own Eventbrite too! Savvy people.

Isn’t this just Luma?

See reply I just made in other thread.

Re: Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO

#28
IPOing just before an evident .com tech bubble is about to explode is courageous. Good luck to everyone.

That said, their business model seems fairly solid, and despite the naysayers, they improve things a bit on most of their acquisitions. So there might be some real value in what they do. Yet, the expected market valuation is way off. But worry not: market will fix that.

Re: Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO

#29
post #14

IMO, they buy companies, lay off en masse and sell the now sunsetted products. Reminiscent of "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, but he gutted and then flipped whole companies. I think of them as the bakery outlet store that sells only stale goods.

They also have a very intense workplace culture, I had a manager who was part of Evernote while their site was being laid off by Bending Spoons, and he heard some wild stories, they pay above average for a European tech company (but with geo-fenced brackets), crunch a ton and then crash out at a big new year's party were they fly all their teams to some resort, among other things.

Re: Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO

#30
post #2

They also own Komoot and I am anxiously awaiting the enshittification. As of now my use cases still work and it certainly helped that I bought the lifetime all-world map package.

It has already started, many features which you could previously access without an account are now locked behind a login screen.
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