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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

#241

Post by jlarocco »

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…

> I don't understand this model. Such significant layoffs would indicate that there is no real appetite for expansion or growth.

To play devil's advocate, maybe there's a point where a product or service needs to stop evolving and just be.

I have a Vimeo account that's been on auto-resubscribe for years. I couldn't tell you a single feature they've added in the last 5 years, but they host my videos, collect stats, and let me send links to my friends, and that's really all I want.

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

#242

Post by Aurornis »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #232
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

There are now more private equity funds in the USA than McDonalds. The maximum wealth extraction of every single thing in people's lives is not viable for a continuing healthy society. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/05/private-equity-consolidation...

An important clarification if you're not familiar with the industry: A PE firm will often have multiple funds.

There are not more PE firms than McDonalds in the USA.

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

#243

Post by huhtenberg »

Fnoord wrote: post #47
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 is called bait and switch. And the company name referring to bending spoons (Uri Geller) gives away the way they see themselves.

According to Wikipedia, the name is a reference to that scene from The Matrix.

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

#244

Post by bagels »

Invictus0 wrote: post #219
cowsandmilk wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's a large contingent on hacker news that still thinks it's some kind of moral failure to fire people

Obviously sometimes a business is unsustainable, and it's unavoidable, but it's pretty sociopathic to not consider that people are harmed by being laid off.

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

#245

Post by rkuykendall-com »

rmccue wrote: post #63
ortusdux wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are also the backend for Dropout, which has just shy of 1m paid subscribers. So I understand your selfish sadness feelings. https://vimeo.com/customers/dropout

That's partially due to history: Vimeo was split out of CollegeHumor, and CollegeHumor became Dropout. (Both were part of IAC and were spun out/sold off.)

Dropout originally only used Vimeo for video distribution. They switched to Vimeo for OTT only after running their own with a team of developers and finding it to be an unexpectedly hard task. I think I learned that in the Sam Reich Hank Green Decoder interview.

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

#246

Post by johnnyanmac »

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.

This is why I can't take any anti-immigration sentiments seriously in this country. An american founded company runs a business for 20 years, sells it off overseas, and the new owners kick all Americans out of the equation.

Response from America: "well that's just business, I guess". It was never about preserving American labor.

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

#248

Post by joelthelion »

tmp10423288442 wrote: post #227
joelthelion wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would it be detrimental to society? Many companies have developed all the products they're likely to ever develop, so why would you maintain the same level of operational costs as when you expected growth? There's no guarantee that the prices charged before the acquisition were sustainable either.

They don't just maintain these products, they enshittify them to extract the maximum possible profit from captive users, until someone else comes in and builds everything from scratch all over again.

This is crazy inefficient yet it's not captured in our economic theories, so we're essentially blind to it.

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

#249

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

Nextgrid wrote: post #106

I am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it. In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it -…

I think a better analogy than building construction is cars. You need to do active maintenance and fix things on cars to keep them running, you may even change out a radio or wheels, etc. like minor feature development, but you're not likely to change out the design of the engine and transmission. You definitely don't need the design crew from the car manufacturer around, aka Product Mgmt, to do maintenance but you do need some semblance of a tech team or people that can do the tech work on contract.

At some point a tech product is "finished" as in a mature, stable product and adding new things to it isn't going to do 10x in revenue. Its probably really hard for the product and tech teams involved to admit though.

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

#250

Post by WarmWash »

joelthelion wrote: post #205
epolanski wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SaaS is the detriment to society. Static feature software continually updated and changed to create a faux justification for $20 of your money a month, keeping you on an endless treadmill to in order to work with all your old data.

Sometime in the late 00's they realized people were still happily using software from the 90's, because it worked for their needs, and well, we can't have that...

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