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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

#331

Post by swat535 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #151
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…

> Software is never "finished" Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. If you keep reinvesting your revenue forever into "engineering" the product there's going to be a time where a competitor comes in with a finished product matching your customers' requirements and snatches him from you by both charging less and making a profit.

> Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite.

The reason why software companies grow, is because businesses demands growth.

I suppose you could build a simple, small app and leave it on "maintenance" (even then, it's going to be difficult due to crumbling infra) but real world products don't work that way.

Companies want to scale, add features and expand to various verticals. They also have to compete with other companies , there is regulations, compliance and never ending list of incoming features from sales, marketing and customers.

Elon Musk famously attempted to run Twitter "lean", and look how that ended.

Unless you are able to curb the corporate greed, you will need to grow your engineering team.

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

#332

Post by Nextgrid »

refulgentis wrote: post #324
Nextgrid wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I guess that was poor framing on my part from the beginning; I used the term deadweight meaning overhead that can be cut, not implying culpability one way or another.

Which positions are culpable or victims is besides the point here (I have other comments on ZIRP related threads if you are interested, where I do make direct accusations).

> ordinary people who were lied to by the actual decision-makers

Were they truly lied to? They got paid for years of service. Now whether they got lied to by Bending Spoons denying there will be layoffs I don't know (or whether the lie matters - for all we know they got a fair severance package, at least in places where that is legally mandated?).

But for those who started their career in the "good days", I would say they got misled by an environment that rewarded raw engineering without concern for the business outcome of said engineering (and often rewarded over engineering in fundamentally unsustainable businesses). Now the business outcome is suddenly becoming the most important thing and these people are taken by surprise.

---

Now it's clear you have some kind of beef with me; I'm either talking complete shit, or I struck a nerve. Maybe a bit of both. Either way I will not pursue this conversation further - best of luck!

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

#333

Post by makeitrain »

supoxblade wrote: post #322
Invictus0 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For a company that makes a flat $20 mil per year, how long will it take to make back the $1.4 billion they paid for it?

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

#334

Post by refulgentis »

Nextgrid wrote: post #332
refulgentis wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I guess that was poor framing on my part from the beginning; I used the term deadweight meaning overhead that can be cut, not implying culpability one way or another. Which positions are culpable or victims is besides the point here (I have other comments on ZIRP related threads if you are interested, where I do make direct accusations). > ordinary people who were lied to by the actual decision-makers Were they truly…

I don't have some kind of beef with you. I react personally too in these long discussions, don't begrudge you the impression.

Just saw what I thought was youth, but it was a fellow older fellow*, so chased the interlocution more than I usually would because I was curious and wanted to make sure there wasn't insight I had missed and you were speaking loosely (as is normal, we are not robots)

re: motivation, I took a lot of pride in not taking money back in prime ZIRP, early-mid 2010s and felt it was vindicated by what I saw happen to competitors.

What I saw was proto-"Bending Spoons" behavior. Frankly, Bending Spoons seems ethical and right-headed at its face. i.e. after 30 seconds with their website. but what do I know.

What I saw was private equity rollup iPad-based point of sale software who couldn't justify another round, and let the business owners using their point of sale systems flounder until they got the energy to switch. Explicitly. the rug pull wasn't just on engineering or further development of the system, it was support too. That might sound stupid (who needs support w/software?), but its necessary for point of sale due to credit card processing. Multiple companies, same playbook.

Cheers & apologies, I went too far, I left you feeling like it was a grudge.

FWIW it's also important to me because I want a fellow wide-eyed college-dropout-waiter soaking in HN from a small town to know VCs involved in these messes will continue acting as they have post ZIRP, as you've established.

* via your HN profile, not stalking off site or based on username

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

#335

Post by VladVladikoff »

donohoe wrote: post #76
VladVladikoff wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our business uses Vimeo because we get a discounted rate on acami CDN via their bulk purchasing power. YouTube is free but that comes with a lot of headaches. For example not being able to hide the recommended videos at the end of a video, which annoyed our clients in the past when we did use YouTube. YouTube also needs to be public to be embeddable, which also created issues for us. However this announcement has me…

Similar boat. Would appreciate hearing of options you end up considering.

We are probably just going to self host. We already self host several TB of images (proxied by CDNs) we are just going to do the same with our videos. Most of our videos are only watched for a few weeks before they are basically never viewed again. Our plan is currently to use backblaze for the older stuff their b2 storage is pretty affordable. Proxied by another server and a CDN so the popular stuff sits on the CDN and the older stuff is accessible but might take a few moments to bring up. This is acceptable to our business model.

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

#336

Post by insane_dreamer »

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 -…

the house is a bad analogy

the more appropriate analogy is a car company. They still need engineers because they need to keep coming out with new model and technology in order to remain competitive. Ford didn't fire its engineering team once it had built a car.

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

#337

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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 -…

Buildings are built according to a standard, legal code, with architectural drawings, inspections, standard components and dimensions, etc. The people who work on them are trained and certified in specific practices with specific tools and materials, and follow rigid guidelines. Most jobs are the same tools, same parts, same basic construction, same tasks, there are plans available, and most of the time it was inspected so it was done mostly in a way everyone understands and expects. Maintenance is very minimal, on the order of years, and it lasts decades if not centuries.

Software is more like industrial manufacturing. Besides the high cost of the machinery, if the machines stop working (which they do occasionally) you stop producing product, so you need someone on staff who is familiar with them to fix them. A friend of mine is one of several "night staff" at Hershey's that just sit there twiddling their thumbs until a candy machine stops working at 4am.

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

#338

Post by fsckboy »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #287
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

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.

>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.

if the two sides you describe agree on those definitions as mutually exclusive but in union describing the universal set of people, then they are both wrong.

as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin. you give somebody your money in exchange for something you want and would rather have: this creates happiness out of thin air.

if you think a better society is a happier society, then going into business to make money is the same as going into business to make society better.

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

#339

Post by HKH2 »

fsckboy wrote: post #338
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.

> 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. if the two sides you describe agree on those definitions as mutually exclusive but in union describing the universal set of people, then they are both wrong. as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the…

Society depends on long-term 'happiness'. Short-term 'happiness' often makes society worse.
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