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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

#281

Post by ahmadyan »

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 -…

why do you think the previous management team couldn't pull an Elon and fire 80% of the engineering staff themselves? why they needed an external leadership to take over and do it?

Part that i can't wrap my head around was at least in case of twitter, it was a hostile take over. In case of Vimeo, it didn't look hostile at all.

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

#282

Post by Remnant44 »

csallen wrote: post #271
serf wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

While you may be correct in the sense that, in a public acquisition statement, people should be inferring enormous context and not taking anything said at face value.

It's simultaneously true that this is the farthest thing from effective, honest, and clear communication. Reading between the lines here is required precisely because we all know that any acquisition statements made are, at best heavily coded, if not completely just fluff.

You can recognize that and still get angry that it's par for the course for such things to be not just devoid of useful information, but often actively deceiving.

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

#283

Post by hi_hi »

csallen wrote: post #231
growt wrote: 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.

You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! :-)

Those words weren't truth. Truth would have been to state the intent to fire employees in order to maximise profit. This was always going to be the outcome, and it was expected, why not just state it clearly?

Again, when truth becomes a grey area that is to be manipulated for maximising profits that benefit a minority of privileged individuals, we should be concerned and at the least, not normalise it with "its just business".

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

#284

Post by x0x0 »

serf wrote: post #251
Invictus0 wrote: post #219

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…

Bending Spoon's business model has been -- at least for a decade -- buying companies that didn't operate profitably; stopping or slowing ongoing eng investments; and operating them profitably. Often that involves raising prices, but everyone is adults here.

Nobody lied. Vimeo will continue to operate, and probably will even have targeted ongoing development.

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

#285

Post by input_sh »

yieldcrv wrote: post #258
publicdebates wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've read this same comment for every model since GPT-3.

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

#286

Post by Nextgrid »

captain_coffee wrote: post #166
Nextgrid wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hourly rates are inherently risky for clients - you're asking them to part with money with no guaranteed outcome, so there's a natural ceiling where the financial risk becomes untenable regardless of your expertise and reputation. Clients don't buy hours though, they buy solutions. They have problems costing them money or preventing revenue and they'll pay a percentage of that value to solve it. When you price based…

OK so in this case how do you set the price? Based on the final solution to be delivered? Can you give one (or a few) concrete examples by any chance? I am not sure if I fully understood what you meant exactly with your (detailed) reply.

You judge how valuable the solution is to your customer and then structure your pricing to maximize your profits while still being palatable to your client.

Let's say your client has a problem that will bring them 1k/hr of revenue when fixed. You think you can fix it in an hour.

You could quote them 5k/hour, because you think you can fix it in one hour and you estimate it'll take them at least 5 hours to find and talk to someone else who could fix it. This is a big gamble for the client, what if you don't fix it or take longer? The client balks.

Now let's say you offer a "reasonable" hourly rate like 150/hr. Your client is happy to take the gamble because 150 is peanuts compared to the value they get if you do fix it. Client takes the deal, you fix the problem, but you got paid peanuts.

Now let's say you offer them a no-fix-no-fee rate of 5k. The client is happy to take it because once the problem is solved it takes them just 5 hours to go back in profit, and they risk nothing if you end up not solving the problem. They take the deal, you fix it in an hour, the client happily pays you 5k, netting an hourly rate of 5k/hour.

Same hourly rate as the first scenario, yet the first scenario will cause everyone to balk while the second one is a steal for the client (in reality, you can actually charge more than 5k, how much more depends on your reputation and sales skills).

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

#287

Post by Quarrelsome »

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

some people look at business as making money for the sake of making money. However other people look at making money as a means to better society. This goes back over a century to the Quaker run businesses, like Lloyds, Rowntree, Cadburys, etc.

You can imagine if your ultimate aim was to improve society, then acquiring a firm but having to sack a bunch of employees as somewhat of a failure.

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

#288

Post by akavi »

ryandrake wrote: post #267
csallen wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A reasonable person, when told "Company A is buying and will operate Company B," would interpret that as "all of Company B" including its assets, liabilities, cash, property, patents, AND employees. They would not think "Well, ackshually, they're just buying the corporate entity itself, which doesn't technically involve keeping the employees..."

Only if you believe the primary purpose of a corporation is to provide employment, as opposed to generating profit for its shareholders.

(To be clear, I think the latter is both descriptively true and normatively good)

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

#289

Post by specialist »

f33d5173 wrote: post #141
wavemode wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics are different because the industries are fundamentally different. Software is never "finished" the way a building is finished. More features can always be added to software. If those new features create new product lines and attract new revenue, then the software engineers' salaries are more than paying for themselves. But, this obviously carries risk, that the new thing you develop won't be worth as mu…

The businesses they acquire are ones whose revenue has not appreciably grown in many years. They are being sold because the prior owner does not believe they can improve the business any more. Any profit bending spoons earns they can run off and invest in another business if they like. They don't bother investing in the businesses they purchase because they believe, like the previous owner believed, that there is no…

Just like Computer Associates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates

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

#290

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #240
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private equity (what's being described here) has more political influence than "society" because money.

Society has more money and way more votes than PE. I'm going to quote A Bugs Life (1998) of all things here: > Hopper: You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life! It's not about food, it's about keeping those ants in line. In our case, it's more like a million to one

I suspect that the free cash flow of those who seek fewer regulations of this sort on thing exceeds the free cash flow of those who seek more.

People that are being squeezed by PE have less money to wield as political influence partially because they are being squeezed by PE.

The ones doing the squeezing are ok with that.

The people who are uninvolved, who fit into neither box, don't care enough or don't have enough money they're able & willing to part with. They also don't have fancy accountants or corporate accounts to expense it to.

This is the local optimum.

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