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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

#251

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

it's not immoral to fire people.

it's immoral to lie to people.

very few people can do the mental gymnastics required to equate " we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together " to "you're all getting fired."

at some point in the now far-distant past CEOs used to make heartfelt speeches and memos to a soon-to-be-downsized staff about how hard decisions had to be made and blah-blah-blah; now it's more about sequestering the decision makers away from the damaged goods while projecting daisies and sunshine for would-be investors.

The game has shifted far from the human factor into a purely financial/investor loop. Good for some people but generally worse for people .

And before I hear it : Yes it was always about money, but business wasn't always about investors . That projection of liability to a remote party is exactly the issue.

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

#252
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.

Yes. It's a zero trust society. Nobody can trust anybody else. The only thing that's trusted is money in a bank account... And we really shouldn't be trusting our eyes there because the money is backed by nothing and there is no reliable consensus between different banks (look at the details of correspondant banking and factor in things like the Eurodollar, stablecoins...).

It's like; the thing we trust the most cannot be trusted but so long as we keep using money in its current form, this implicit form of trust is devaluing the trust of everything else that's not money.

Our relationship with money sets the bar for all other relationships. If it's a deceptive relationship and we tolerate it, we will tolerate every other relationship which is equally deceptive. We become accustomed and tolerant to a certain level of deception. We are also emboldened to deceive others.

Our relationship with money is highly deceptive and getting worse over time. We can expect to see the same trend in our relationships.

I think money CAN buy trust; it works by devaluing the entire concept of trust to the level that it can afford to buy it outright. It maintains a monopoly on trust.

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

#253
post #212

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

It shouldn't be surprising that different people on a discussion site have different opinions about the same thing.

Comments like the above one refer to community vibes, the types of comments that will get you lots of praise/upvotes.

So while individuals have different beliefs, the "average expected top comment" for communities like HN is usually pretty predictable, and hence the cognitive dissonance of the community on the whole can be called out.

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

#254
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…

[deleted]

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

#255
post #190
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.

Yes, this occurred to me also. If that is how he intended it, it is extremely disingenuous, at best, and another example of manipulation.

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

#256
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't even say it's "technically" the truth. It's just the truth. Nothing in the statement even comes close to implying that there wouldn't be layoffs. Hell, one of the quotes even mentions "focus", which if anything is a euphemism or hint for downsizing in these kinds of statements, not the opposite.

"excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses"

There's no hint of laying off all the staff here though. Now it sounds like they "were" excited to lay off people to maximize profits.

Maybe "unlock even greater focus for our team" means to unlock their focus to find other jobs but it's quite perverse. I agree with the OP, that "Words no longer appear to mean things"

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

#257
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…

As others mentioned, the statement seems true.

But even more, it seems like the statement implies layoffs if they are acquiring a startup or growth-orient company. Bending Spoon is saying they intend to run the web site/web app as-is and make money. That means they will discard employees who have been employed with hope of growing/pivoting/etc the company. In start-ups, that can be a lot of the employees.

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

#258

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 -…

Exactly why I charge $999/hour for my software consulting. To the doubters, laugh all you want, but I've been doing this for literal decades , and will absolutely slaughter LLM generated code in terms of code reliability and maintainability amortized over 5 years.

Have you tried Claude Opus 4.5 within Claude Code?

it's only been released for two months but its changed the calculus entirely

if its been over two months since you've tried any LLM generated code solution, or are still occasionally copy pasting code requirements into a browser chat session as if its still 2023, then I can't put any weight into the opinion

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

#259
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

it's not immoral to fire people. it's immoral to lie to people. very few people can do the mental gymnastics required to equate " we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together " to "you're all getting fired." at some point in the now far-distant past CEOs used to make heartfelt speeches and memos to a soon-to-be-downsized staff about how hard decisions had to be made and blah-bl…

This was exactly my sentiment.

Going from "you're fine" to "you're fired", when it was always going to be "you're fired".

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

#260

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?

Thank you!

There aren't any end-to-end open source video host solutions out there from what I can tell. DIY ffmpeg + a CDN is a great way to go. But quickly erodes when you want all the other niceties that are table-stakes today (like storyboards, subtitles, chapters, etc.).

I'll have all the niceties, but I plan to differentiate mainly on performance and quality.

- Higher quality compression (via AV1 encoding) - Fast load times worldwide (Framerate's custom player is 18kb gzipped versus 200kb+ for vidstack/mux) - Better publishing experience (bulk editing options, team collaboration, etc.)

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