311–320 of 522 posts
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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.
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…
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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.
Option B: the business stays afloat, investors make money, customers keep the product, some employees get fired with a severance.
You think option A is superior?
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…
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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…
I'd question why your "head of Communications" isn't already aware of alternative vendors for important pieces of their domain. After all, companies go out of business, get bought out, change pricing all the time. And Vimeo was bought out months ago - this person didn't start researching then, just in case? I'd suggest the CEO start "looking for alternatives" for this employee.
I don't like the guy, so it's not like me to defend him, but perhaps because he's busy being the head of the Communications department, instead of a tech nerd?
My company produces thousands of pieces of communication each year in many different forms. Video is a small part of what his department does, so you make the false assumption that this is an "important piece" of his domain.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn he doesn't have some internal cronjob to constantly search for alternatives to every single one of the (probably hundreds) of vendors we have around the world.
It's very weird that you feel that you're in a position to second-guess a person you never met, in a job you've never done, in a company you don't know, in an industry you also don't know. That's Olympic-level hubris.
4 months: Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
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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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 eve…
No one said it was. Where do you see that in this thread?
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.
Just listen to yourself. "Extract enough profit," "raising prices," and ending with You don't like it, too bad. You sound like the taxi industry before Uber.
This the type of thinking that gave us Windows 11, Adobe, and every other piece of technology that started good, but became crap.
It's also the reason new companies suddenly show up and eat the incumbent's lunch. Happens every day.
I'm glad I don't work for you or your company. I have pride in my work. I wouldn't want to be just another tool to "extract" things from my customers because "they don't have any better option."
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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 tal…
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No, they just come in and offer a lot of money to the current owners. Bending spoons are ruthless businesspeople but AFAIK they do offer a reasonable price for the businesses they acquire. (I used to work for WeTransfer and some time after I left it got acquired at about the price it was once considering IPO-ing at. This was apparently such a good offer that it took very little deliberation to agree to the deal.)
but where does the money come from? it seems like a good way to avoid regulatory scrutiny if your acquisition goal is to simply exit a competitor from the market.