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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#181

Post by cadamsdotcom »

stenuto wrote: post #103

As a longtime user of Vimeo (since 2009), I was afraid this was going to happen. I built our own HLS video streaming in-house a couple of years ago and never looked back. Way faster, lightweight player, uses modern apis and codecs. Now I'm working on productizing that at https://framerate.com/ (beta launches next week!)

Nice work. Aren’t there decent open source alternatives though? What do you think your differentiation will be vs. a customer using an open source solution and hosting the video chunks on a CDN - or even S3?

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

#182

Post by hedgehog »

lumost wrote: post #94
WJW wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they just come in and offer a lot of money to the current owners. Bending spoons are ruthless businesspeople but AFAIK they do offer a reasonable price for the businesses they acquire. (I used to work for WeTransfer and some time after I left it got acquired at about the price it was once considering IPO-ing at. This was apparently such a good offer that it took very little deliberation to agree to the deal.)

but where does the money come from? it seems like a good way to avoid regulatory scrutiny if your acquisition goal is to simply exit a competitor from the market.

Basically a loan.

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

#183

Post by taurath »

whalesalad wrote: post #176
hi_hi wrote: post #172

From the previous press about the aquisition: BendingSpoon CEO: "At Bending Spoons, we acquire companies with the expectation of owning and operating them indefinitely, and we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together" Vimeo CEO: "We are excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards ou…

Things happen. Times change. It's just as important to know when to throw in the towel as it is to know when to persevere.

These are the things that happen - taking a company and strangling it to make a 10% short term return.

It’s like of funny, we give corporations personhood, but the type of person that can be owned by another person, or murdered for profit

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

#184

Post by gulugawa »

bilekas wrote: post #20
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #2

4 months: Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302

This comment from e98cuenc seems extremely prescient. > Everybody loves to hate BendingSpoon, but there is a lesson here. They consistently rewrite the code of their acquisitions with a tiny team, fire everybody and are able to maintain and improve the product. They basically skip everything but engineers, and they are kept at a minimum. Feedback from users is the products they take over 1) become more expensive, 2)…

Considering what Bending Spoons did to Meetup.com after buying the site, I wouldn't trust them to improve a product. Here are some of the issues I noticed.

- Group searches consistently return irrelevant results across multiple cities. As a test, I tried searching for soccer groups in Dallas, Texas, and one of the results was for a backgammon group. Users will also often have a hard time finding events I host on Meetup. - An organizer being charged $357.98 per year to host a group on Meetup.com. - The pages for my Meetup events are full of clutter and duplicate data, while relevant information such as RSVPs is hidden. - My Meetup.com home page is full of pointless distractions, including a banner asking me to become an organizer when I already organize events. - When editing an event, Meetup shows an option to generate a description by using generative AI. Generative AI is a scam and I try to avoid it.

That being said, you are right that they are becoming more expensive and ship features faster. I describe Bending Spoons as Italian private equity.

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

#185

Post by hamdingers »

ecshafer wrote: post #119
bovermyer wrote: post #98

Can someone give me some examples of private equity firms that aren't driven purely by avarice? I have a bet going with a colleague.

Your question doesn't really make sense. What business isn't driven by the goal of making money ultimately?

Every nonprofit.

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

#186

Post by criddell »

CiccioNizzo wrote: post #133
MrDarcy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrible for those laid off but perhaps not for Evernote customers if it means there isn’t unwelcome feature creep.

Been a paiyng Evernote customer since its launch. I unsubscribed at the beginning of 2025 after 7/8 years of shitty releases, not fixing old bugs, and new useless features.

I don't user Evernote very often, but I have a bunch of stuff stored in there and use it basically in a read-only mode. For a long time I was able to get the $36 / year plan which I felt pretty good about. It was a great app and service which I didn't use very much, so that felt like a fair price and I felt good about supporting them at that level. Basically every time I opened Evernote, I was paying $2.

But then the price tripled and for me, it's too much. I'll pay $2 per session, but not $5.

I remember their CEO (Phil Libin I think) on their podcast explaining how they were building a 100 year company. I really wanted to believe that.

I use Obsidian now and like it, but it feels like they are going down the same path. They keep adding features that don't really fit the original editor-for-a-folder-of-markdown-files. I wish they would stop.

It's a bummer but the feature treadmill seems inescapable. Bending Spoons will probably be able to buy Obsidian for a very nice price in a few years and the Obsidian founders will do very well.

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

#187

Post by buellerbueller »

Eldt wrote: post #150
pnw wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same model Computer Associates used to run back in the day. Find product with marginal profit but dedicated user base, cut costs, increase pricing and milk it until the next product comes along.

Seems to be very common nowadays for PE

Is this any different than the SaaS business model, except a 3rd party bought the company to strip it?

Everything SaaS these days, hell every subscription these days seems to involve product enshittification + rising pricing. Is this the end game of the financialization of everything?

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

#189

Post by johnnyanmac »

whalesalad wrote: post #176
hi_hi wrote: post #172

From the previous press about the aquisition: BendingSpoon CEO: "At Bending Spoons, we acquire companies with the expectation of owning and operating them indefinitely, and we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together" Vimeo CEO: "We are excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards ou…

Things happen. Times change. It's just as important to know when to throw in the towel as it is to know when to persevere.

That statement was from September. I can even dig up the discussion here on the annoucement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302

Reading the comments there, I shouldn't be surprised at this maneuver.

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

#190

Post by growt »

hi_hi wrote: post #172

From the previous press about the aquisition: BendingSpoon CEO: "At Bending Spoons, we acquire companies with the expectation of owning and operating them indefinitely, and we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together" Vimeo CEO: "We are excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards ou…

After reading through the other comments about bending spoons and reading yours again: the bending spoons CEO is technically telling the truth! They intend to run the acquired companies forever. After cutting most of the staff, but he didn’t say that part of course.
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