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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

#191

Post by tombert »

horsawlarway wrote: post #87
everfrustrated wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Genuine question, why not use a free Git service or something

I pay for Sourcehut now, but until recently I was using a free private GitHub account to sync my notes in Obsidian. It works fine and cost me nothing (at least nominally).

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

#192

Post by epolanski »

This is the Bending Spoons model: acquire companies that have some core user base and traction with VC money.

Lay off the entirety of the staff. Focus on price modeling.

Depending on the particular software they may or may not invest some internal engineering in keeping the money flowing.

Rinse and repeat.

Italian LinkedIn hails them as one of the most innovative companies, whereas to me they seem to fall in the butt cigar business.

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

#193

Post by JayStavis »

moralestapia wrote: post #55

What I've always found unusual (but not necessarily bad) about BS is ... how come a company that came out of nowhere starts buying tech companies here and there? Billion dollar deals? In cash? It can't be just a few "enthusiastic" random guys (as they portray), you need a lot of capital to pull that off. IMO they're someone's family office with an obfuscated name. Edit: and my comment suddenly goes to the bottom desp…

The founder recently went on invest like the best and explained it top to bottom, they started as a broke agency and grew from there quite fast. I forget the details but I would imagine they are financed quite heavily by LP's

https://colossus.com/episode/luca-ferrari-building-bending-s...

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

#194

Post by hn_acc1 »

munk-a wrote: post #15
charliebwrites wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to see how this impacts their bottom line Sure short term it’s more “focused” and “greedy” But the damage to the community and acquisition through a free tier must drop those numbers in an impactful way

Oh, it will - but they don't care. I'm sure they'll eek out 1.5b from their 1.3b acquisition and be happy as clams. It certainly is depressing to look at what was built and what could be made of it but most of the folks with money lack the creativity or skill to actually build a lasting business. Just burn it down and rob it on the way out - such is the modern economy.

I mean, Broadcom / VmWare is basically doing the same, just more for enterprise level software.

OTOH - if Vimeo has given up all hope of further new features, then giving current users the chance to keep going isn't completely evil, even if it's at a higher price. VmWare is basically doing the same, and lots of customers are leaving, and those who aren't may still eventually do so, etc. (Edit: what if the alternative was Vimeo shutting down?)

Think of vintage car parts - if you absolutely want to restore that '30s Ford (keep using 20+ year old software) - someone offering an OEM-equivalent part for 3x what it cost back in the day (even adjusted for inflation) may actually still be good value - because what other alternatives are there?

Now - does it suck for the employees? Sure. One thing an econ prof said back in the late 90s (who loved to guest-lecture to CS/SWEng students): your job as a software person is to put other people out of work by automating stuff they used to do manually. Are you ok with that? Because if you're not, you should go into a different industry right now. Feels much worse when it's programmers getting the axe due to finance types, but not unexpected.

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

#196

Post by wqtz »

The strategy is simple.

- Buy a product that has name recognition overshadowed by a monopolistic company and the leadership is trying to make a pivot and failing terribly.

- Leadership is aggressively rebranding to appease a takeover. They keep doing the most basic forbes council op-ed title moves to make the product appealing.

- It is not a parts-shop, the team is used to sense of "eh what you are going to do about it". It is a signboard and patents that you can use to hostage bigger companies.

- The takeover company has figured out maintenance engineering. You buy the product, you cull the team because they are not a growth engine. You focus on maintenance, and you milk the brand. Any eastern European or LATAM team can approve an automated version bump PR and send out "let's jump on a call" email.

Heck, even Tai fricking Lopez bought Radio Shack under similar pretense.

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

#197

Post by everfrustrated »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #153
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…

> customers of a depreciating SaaS product surely churn after a 1-3 years, so they wouldn't make enough of a return You might think that. Then there's Earthlink and AOL still collecting $5 or $6/mo per mailbox as their cash cow.

They recently bought AOL too!

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

#198

Post by epolanski »

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…

It's called butt cigar investing or corporate raiding.

They acquire startups and companies without a huge growth potential but modest cash flow and little profits.

They cut the operating expenses to the minimum and jack up the prices to sky rocket profits till their mathematical models will tell them they will profit on the investment.

Rinse and repeat.

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

#199

Post by aetherson »

WJW wrote: post #84
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…

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 b…

And honestly this is probably fine. If the main business can't grow and there have been a few years of attempts to produce complementary businesses with no success, that's a good sign that the business should be moved into a "return money to owners" model.
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