Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B

investors.bendingspoons.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 79 posts

Re: Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B

#61

Post by altairprime »

katspaugh wrote: post #40
jtwaleson wrote: post #31

I have some friends there. Morale in the company was very very low. There were multiple rounds of lay-offs and management went AI crazy. They were desperate to live up to their extreme valuation from 2022. "We have to be the future of work" etc. Now the exit was 10x lower than their max valuation. Great whiteboarding tool though.

What’s great about it? I shudder every time some product manager sends out a miro link. People should try Kinopio.

Miro was always fine to use at work. It’s no Visio desktop or OmniGraffle but it wasn’t offensive and I only somewhat preferred LucidChart over it.

Re: Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B

#63

Post by altairprime »

joezydeco wrote: post #43
DidntUseIt wrote: post #4

Tried Miro once. Wasn’t a whiteboard replacement. Wasn’t design software. Wasn’t a PM tool. Even when the Miro power users would bust it out in meetings, it was always so painful to watch. I don’t know what the point of Miro really was. There was a time Figma was doing something similar (FigJam), so maybe there was a trend for a sec. No idea why or how it’s worth over a billion dollars. Anyone reading this going “Noo…

My best experience was a large meeting I had recently, in a well equipped conference room with actual whiteboards and stacks of post-it notes and the Power Miro User in the room insisted we all bring laptops and work on the boards online. Jesus Christ.

That’s not Power User, that’s Lazy User: just like how Agile tries to offload the work of managing ticket statuses onto developers, their demand offloaded the work of recording post-it note outcomes onto attendees.

Re: Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B

#65

Post by fakedang »

vira28 wrote: post #59

Is Bending Spoons the PE for startups?

More like the vulture PE for startups.

It's a solid business model though - get another team to take the risk and develop the app and user base, then when times are tough, buy them out, wring them dry and suck out all the value. In the meantime, don't do any extra feature development on the apps, just run them on maintenance mode with a lean dev team and zero support.

Re: Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B

#66

Post by joezydeco »

altairprime wrote: post #63
joezydeco wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My best experience was a large meeting I had recently, in a well equipped conference room with actual whiteboards and stacks of post-it notes and the Power Miro User in the room insisted we all bring laptops and work on the boards online. Jesus Christ.

That’s not Power User, that’s Lazy User: just like how Agile tries to offload the work of managing ticket statuses onto developers, their demand offloaded the work of recording post-it note outcomes onto attendees.

Funny thing, this person is also our SAFe scrum master. So double the laziness in one package.

Re: Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B

#68

Post by lbreakjai »

senko wrote: post #11

Bending Spoons is on a buying spree! Miro acquired my startup back in '21[0], so this is bittersweet as our users will be (eventually) affected by this. Founders and employees at Miro definitely deserve to cash out for their hard work and it's unclear (ie. not publicly known) if they will since this is a 10x down round. Also weird that they had to sell - they were one of the most established (visual) collaboration pl…

Do they even have the moat to pull the same sort of playbook with Miro? We used to use it for remote retros and whiteboarding, we ended up not renewing because we were already paying for Lucid and there was little added value.

I'm curious to know if it was ever as embedded as, say, Jira is, in some companies.

Re: Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B

#69

Post by 627467 »

I'm curious that every time BS buys up some we hear about all the criticism of them and never the funding/management model thay has powered saas for the past 15-20years.

Its not like they are making high payout in the purchases. They are snatching assets off weak hands (management, investors) who has no interest or idea on how to make their operations work.

Re: Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B

#70

Post by senko »

lbreakjai wrote: post #68
senko wrote: post #11

Bending Spoons is on a buying spree! Miro acquired my startup back in '21[0], so this is bittersweet as our users will be (eventually) affected by this. Founders and employees at Miro definitely deserve to cash out for their hard work and it's unclear (ie. not publicly known) if they will since this is a 10x down round. Also weird that they had to sell - they were one of the most established (visual) collaboration pl…

Do they even have the moat to pull the same sort of playbook with Miro? We used to use it for remote retros and whiteboarding, we ended up not renewing because we were already paying for Lucid and there was little added value. I'm curious to know if it was ever as embedded as, say, Jira is, in some companies.

Maybe not to the same extent. In a company I worked with recently they used it a lot but didn't store data in it, meaning there was very little lock-in: mostly inertia/convenience.

If BS slightly raise the price and ruthlessly cut costs (think - leave just a skeleton crew to keep it running), the calculation may make sense even if there's slow churn in the users and no special lock in.

(disclaimer: pure outsider speculation on my part)

Post reply on HN