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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

#201

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

For a hosting space like Vimeo, I'd be surprised if this gave them 5 years. And remember, they acquired Vimeo for over a billion dollars.

This isn't like some B2C 5-10 dollar a month service. Video hosting is notoriously expensive and paying clients will quickly see other alternatives if they see smoke. These are already people with specialized needs that the main market leader (Youtube) cannot fulfill. They are "active", so to speak.

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

#202

Post by dangoor »

gulugawa wrote: post #184
bilekas wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Meet…

As a heavy Meetup user, I can say that Bending Spoons absolutely fixed some glaring, long-standing bugs. But their massive price increases have really driven people away, and some of their attempts to grab more money (Meetup+) really rankled a lot of people. Also, search still sucks.

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

#203

Post by 999900000999 »

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…

Of course words don't actually mean anything.

I've been through this myself once upon a time I was at a company and the way they described it is they just changed owners habitually.

Within about 4 months of this ownership change they fired my entire office. Luckily I was already some place new.

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

#204

Post by johnnyanmac »

aetherson wrote: post #199
WJW wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sadly, "return money to owners" ends more like the owner selling off the company and leaving all the workers under them in freefall. And people wonder why loyalty is dead.

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

#205

Post by joelthelion »

epolanski wrote: post #198
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…

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.

Have there been any serious legal efforts to make this less profitable? It's very clearly detrimental to society.

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

#206

Post by cowsandmilk »

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…

Nothing the bending spoons ceo said isn’t true. They are still operating Vimeo.

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

#207

Post by kelnos »

everfrustrated wrote: post #129
munk-a wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vimeo employed somewhere north of a thousand people a year ago with 28% being in the engineering team (according to random google results - this isn't an area I have personal knowledge of). If they dropped from around 300 people to 15 that sounds like gutting - not trimming.

They will be hiring up but not the same people. Bending Spoons tends to replace high silicon valley wages with high Italy wages which is a considerable saving.

Typical bean counters, firing all the people with institutional knowledge up front, and then hoping their cheaper labor can figure things out.

Meanwhile, the users are the ones who lose out. Classic.

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

#208

Post by johnnyanmac »

MrDarcy wrote: post #69
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…

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

It's worse. When a company like this is "mature", they don't try to appeal to new users. They instead squeeze what they can out of the existing user base, because that user base is probably already dying off. This isn't about attaining a steady state business, its about seeing how much of the toothpaste you can still squeeze out the bottle before it crusts up.

This practice is derogatorily called "vulture capitalism" for a reason. I hope the remaining engineers are either lining up for retirement or networking around for their next gig.

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

#209

Post by Aunche »

tootie wrote: post #71
gtowey wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 In the 80's people who did this were known as "corperate raiders". Nowadays it's just called business.

Corporate raiders is a bit of a different concept. That implies a hostile takeover. Like aggressively buying up shares in order acquire a majority stake and set company policy against the wishes of other insiders. Bending Spoons is what we'd call vulture capitalists which have and continue to exist. Basically they buy weakening businesses and carve them up for parts, selling anything of value and squeezing max revenu…

> Basically they buy weakening businesses and carve them up for parts, selling anything of value and squeezing max revenue of whatever is left.

People say this like it's a bad thing, but without "vulture capitalists", struggling companies would default and banks would attempt to do the same, except they are much worse at it and even more people would lose their jobs.

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

#210

Post by epolanski »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #155
bradleybuda wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Alright, so is vimeo finished product then? Why not come out and say this? Also another thing but other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699#46709164 points out how Vimeo wants to replace SV engineers with Italian engineers to save money. They are a first and foremost private equity company, Don't forget. There's no loyalty to any group.

They don't replace engineers with engineers, they just put enough staff in place to leave the machine working.

And yes, they in-house the engineering part, but the fact they are Italian is just because Bending Spoons is Italian and their offices are in Milan.

Bending Spoons pays its own engineers very well, an entry level junior position starts at 75k+ euros, which in Italy is a senior+ engineer salary.

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