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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

#321

Post by rcxdude »

torben-friis wrote: post #130
jcynix wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of millions in revenue and three acquisitions in 2024 — what’s behind Bending Spoons’ success? | Sifted https://sifted.eu/articles/bending-spoons-italy-startup-ipo So private equity is behind it.

Yeah, but AFAIK that means people buying companies, leaving them with a skeleton crew and milking the remaining users as long as possible. How does that fit with expensive hiring sprees? If anything I’d expect them to be continuously shedding absorbed employees.

Being a part of that skeleton crew likely involves different skills to building the product in the first place.

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

#322

Post by supoxblade »

Invictus0 wrote: post #313
Quarrelsome wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 A: the business goes bankrupt, investors lose money, customers lose the product, all employees get fired. 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?

Here's the rub: Vimeo was profitable, and had no debt. Per their last public filing(s), in 2025 the company had: - ~$400M expenses - ~$420M revenue (therefore ~$20M profit for the year) - ~$300M of cash in the bank (no debt)

Vimeo has not had major growth in recent years, but it was making progress, however slowly. Just nowhere near the 10x expectations out there. Nobody was going to lose anything.

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

#323

Post by Animats »

tom_m wrote: post #317
muglug wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People use Vimeo?

They used to have a free tier with no ads, and I still have some videos on there. All new stuff goes on Peertube.

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

#324

Post by refulgentis »

Nextgrid wrote: post #295
refulgentis wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "except if you're selling AI - then it's ok to sell inference at a major loss and figure out monetization later" So the dynamic you attributed to ZIRP is alive and well, just wearing different clothes. Your original framework was "ZIRP allowed this, now real capitalism is correcting it." Now it's "this is permanent, it just rotates themes." These are different arguments. > "Investing in a Ponzi can still be profita…

I'm making the argument that past bubbles like ZIRP, blockchain and now AI have given many engineers the illusion that "engineering" the same product forever is a sustainable endeavor. Turns out that's not the case and with each bubble popping more and more people get a rude awakening. Some are able to jump on another bubble and keep the gravy train going, but might be left in the dust in the next one and so on. If a…

You've fully retreated:

You started by calling engineers "deadweight" that Bending Spoons correctly cuts. Now they're victims who were "conned" and given "illusions" and deserve sympathy for their "unpleasant wake up call."

These are incompatible framings. Deadweight is culpable. Victims of a con aren't. Which is it?

> I suggest taking a short position on Bending Spoons

Strip-mining is often profitable. That's not the disagreement. The disagreement is whether "profitable" validates your original framing that the workers being cut are deadweight rather than, by your new admission, ordinary people who were lied to by the actual decision-makers.

Note also the lack of understanding of finance, coupled to parroting pop-finance, continues. You're trying valiantly to hammer phrases we all know, into meanings they don't have. They sound epic, and are very "law of nature" feeling. I understand the appeal. Anyways, you cannot short a company without a stock.

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

#325

Post by nness »

usrusr wrote: post #40
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…

What's hard to understand? They switch the companies from growth (no matter the cost) to revenue extraction (even if it will eventually fade) Minimum viable cost of keeping the lights on. And sometimes they even compromise a little, "let's spend a tiny bit more and see how much growth we can get from that"

Not the concept, how it can be profitable given the price of their acquisitions.

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

#326

Post by Nextgrid »

reaperducer wrote: post #318
Nextgrid wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes, the point of business is to make profit, not to be a charity. 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 pric…

> No one said it was.

Fair enough, a minority of businesses are run as public benefit corporations. But the vast majority is ran to generate profit. Bending Spoons especially.

> I wouldn't want to be just another tool to "extract" things from my customers

I assume you're independently wealthy and acquired said wealth from a generous donor who gave it to you with no expectations in return?

Because otherwise we're all "extracting" something.

I take pride in my work too and I believe the prices I charge for my services are fair - but nevertheless if I gave the choice to my clients between paying me for those services or getting them for free, they'd prefer free.

> This the type of thinking that gave us Windows 11

What's giving us enshittification and the terrible quality of software nowadays is the lack of healthy competition, because of lacking anti-trust enforcement and adversarial interoperability being effectively illegal. Companies thus take their customers hostage and raise prices/decrease quality.

Ideally we'd just make competition in tech a reality again which would put a limit on enshittification.

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

#327

Post by sammularczyk »

stenuto wrote: post #103

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!)

There's another Vimeo alternative at https://framerate.tv - not sure which came first!

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

#328

Post by MattRix »

tom_m wrote: post #317
muglug wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People use Vimeo?

They have a product where you can make your own whitelabeled video site, which is used by some popular services, ex. Dropout.

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

#329

Post by nness »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #165
ragall wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually they're paying very competitive salaries. For example: https://jobs.bendingspoons.com/positions/67c6dc18c70c531d6db... .

> Typically, we offer individuals at the start of their career an annual salary of £85,797 in London and €66,065 elsewhere in Europe. That would be excellent pay for a junior engineer in Italy.

An annual salary of £85,797 in London for a junior is impressive, too.

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

#330

Post by cadamsdotcom »

stenuto wrote: post #260
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) - Fas…

Sounds good. I’d suggest niching down and talking to some customers to see who genuinely cares about those things - as they might turn out (tragically I know) to be things only techies care about.

Fair warning.. when we hear talk to customers we are tempted to reply “I talked to customer in my mind and they love my thing!”

But unfortunately customers in our minds don’t have money :)

There’re either customers out there, or if not there's learning about why youtube has almost 100% market share..

Wishing you genuine luck and success!

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