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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

#301

Post by mrtksn »

evilduck wrote: post #163
mrtksn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon Musk acquired Twitter and fired %80 of the employees and it was just fine. I bet there's so many more people that can be let go from all tech industry. It's mature and product discovery is mostly locked behind advertisement so what's left is exploitation. If you think about it, as long as you don't mingle much with the product that works it keeps working indefinitely. It's no different than running Excel or What…

Losing tens of billions of dollars on a company now ruined down to single digit billions of revenue is a weird thing to describe as "just fine". That looks like abject failure as a business.

Fire the engineers but don't do the nazi stuff. The software functions just fine, lack of engineers isn't the reason of the downfall of Twitter. If anything, it's better product than ever, it's just that it harbors too many deplorable people.

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

#303

Post by skrtskrt »

jjice wrote: post #36
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…

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 would be nice if there were a common way for essentially feature-complete SaaS businesses to carry on and maintain some expected level of quality, security updates, and support without endless pressure to expand revenue or slash costs.

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

#304

Post by dabinat »

Vimeo’s prices are insanely low for what they’re offering. You could not host on AWS and match them on price, nor probably even Hetzner. I never knew if they built out custom infrastructure or if they’ve just been losing money this whole time.

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

#305

Post by Nextgrid »

ahmadyan wrote: post #281
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.

I wonder if existing management had a lot of social ties to the existing workforce so that they couldn't easily get away doing that themselves without a big hit to their reputation.

Letting someone else do the dirty work allows them to disassociate themselves from the (predictable) outcome and frame it as just business.

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

#306

Post by yieldcrv »

input_sh wrote: post #285
yieldcrv wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

so have I and this time I wrote it, this broken clock only has to be right once, forever

its beneficial to check it

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

#307

Post by aeonfox »

Remnant44 wrote: post #282
csallen wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 co…

> Reading between the lines

Tbf, and in support of your broader point, there's no reading between the lines, because genuine intent is indistinguishable from deception with this kind of stuff, because the latter imitates the former. There's only expecting the worst, and being only occasionally wrong.

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

#308

Post by Nextgrid »

reaperducer wrote: post #121
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 -…

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 A very analytical, technological, short-sighted view of things. But not necessarily how the customers think. For many customers, a company that isn't growing is shrinking. If a company isn't willing to invest in growth, that's a red flag. I mentioned the Vimeo thing in a mee…

> the head of Communications immediately said he's going to start looking for alternatives.

He's gonna start looking for alternatives and then most likely find nothing that matches the featureset vs price of the current solution + the cost of switching, and the matter will quickly disappear.

Last time AWS or Cloudflare was down a lot of noise was made and a lot of people started looking for alternatives too - and everyone forgot about it a week later.

> Only for the company.

Yes, the point of business is to make profit, not to be a charity. Bending Spoons believes they can extract enough profit off Vimeo to justify the purchase price, either by reducing expenses, raising prices or both. This may still be palatable to the customers if they don't have any better option.

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

#309

Post by corderop »

TheGreatWave wrote: post #247

An interesting aspect is that they acquire US companies, where it is legally possible to lay off employees. In Italy, where BS is based, firing employees is much more difficult

They acquired European companies in the past and did similar things (e.g. Komoot). They are in the process of acquiring Eventbrite, where a big part of the workforce is located in Spain, and the feeling is that they are going to do the same there.

It will probably take more time due to legal processes and severance packages may be better, but I don't think this is going to stop them, let's see.

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

#310

Post by muglug »

Animats wrote: post #261

Is there a solid source for this? Vimeo laid off most of their operation in Israel recently.[1] At least according to "www.calcalistech.com", which seems to be some minor news source in Israel. Their comment was that the office was damaged in a recent war. Rebuilding may not have been worth it. Their headquarters is in New York. [1] https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjtjgbabzx

Bending Spoons understandably don’t want a final percentage out there, because the more people know about this, the less likely they are to use Vimeo.

Most everyone I knew there was just laid off, with a skeleton crew that’s been asked to stay on until April.

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