Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 2:13 AM UTC

swat535 wrote: post #331

Nextgrid wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 verti…

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

There's only so much growth you can achieve in any vertical - the key is to realize when you've hit that limit and cut your losses. Unfortunately as a company employee you have no incentive to do that.

I doubt Vimeo would've sold if there was still lots of growth potential on the table. They've exhausted it, and for various factors were unable to cut costs internally.

Bending Spoons evaluated the situation and determined they can still extract a certain amount of profit by massively cutting costs - they gave chunk of said expected profit to the current owners, and are now implementing said strategy.

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

The decline of Twitter has all to do with Musk's politics and lack of any kind of strategy of the product (makes sense if you see it as his personal mouthpiece rather than a business). Tech-wise it seems to be working well enough. Cutting 80% of expensive engineering staff for a 1% drop in uptime of a non-critical service with no SLAs is a no-brainer.

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

#352

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 2:21 AM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #337

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 inspec…

> you need someone on staff who is familiar with them to fix them

But that maintenance headcount is much lower than the headcount necessary to build that machine. The same should be the case in tech - once the product is built and the groundwork laid, ongoing maintenance and minor alterations should not require anywhere near the headcount it took to build.

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

#353

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 2:27 AM UTC

paganel wrote: post #299

Nextgrid wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new features are an order of magnitude less complexity to build than the main feature - hosting video at scale, which is complete and just requires maintenance.

> hosting video at scale, I'm going on a limb here and saying that the scale that YouTube was running on back in 2010-2015 is not the same scale as now, and if they had left their whole infrastructure unchanged, a "finished product", so to speak, the site would have been feeling dated and would have eventually been killed off.

Without having access to the source code we can only speculate but I believe even in those days YouTube already outgrew vertical scaling and thus had to be built as a horizontally-scalable system. That is the hard part.

Adding extra nodes to an existing horizontally-scalable system (that has already been operating and has its bugs ironed out) is much easier.

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

#354

Post by lumost » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 2:27 AM UTC

rcxdude wrote: post #320

lumost wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The money comes from investors. Private Equity basically works by taking money from investors to buy companies and turn a profit with them, paying back the investors when they do so (it's a very illiquid and risky investment, so the advertised returns tend to be higher, but it does seem like a lot of firms are struggling to actually make it work).

Aye - it’s a simple business model, which seemed to work well in an era of low interest rates. However some of these tech buyouts seem quite myopic, making it almost appear like the goal was to shutdown the company.

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

#355

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 2:30 AM UTC

wavemode wrote: post #170

Nextgrid wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Potential revenue growth is only as finite as your ideas (and ability to execute on them). Just look at Google. They could have stopped writing new software at any point and been just fine. But in the long run they'd have missed out on trillions of dollars. As with everything in business, it comes down to risk/reward. Not every risk pays off, but some do.

But for every outlier that can perpetually keep unlocking new revenue streams with more features, there's probably 100 companies that burn themselves out trying to do the same and end up sold for pennies on the dollar.

The key is knowing when to stop. Unfortunately permanent employment does not provide an incentive for anyone involved to speak up when they think it's that time.

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

#356

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 2:32 AM UTC

daemin wrote: post #300

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…

It is absolutely true that software can be finished, it's just that software appears to be dead if it hasn't had any work done on it for years. You don't need to keep adding features and changing the software ad infinitum. Just like with your building analogy and with other car analogies presented here, software does need some maintanence every now and again to keep it up to date - with security fixes, compiling to a…

My argument is that the maintenance overhead of a finished product (or car, or building) should require much less effort than what it takes to build it - otherwise you should seek a refund from the original manufacturer(s).

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

#357

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 2:40 AM UTC

maint wrote: post #269

cowsandmilk wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing the bending spoons ceo said isn’t true. They are still operating Vimeo.

I worked at one of the companies that were acquired by Bending Spoons and really the only positive things I can say about them is: They are honest and stick to their word. It's a shitty business model, run by people who do not, in any way shape or form, care about people at all. But they are honest. So if you work at a company and BS comes knocking: relax, accept the severance money and start looking for something ne…

> where only people of a certain character can work

Out of curiosity, could you expand on this? Gutting engineering playgrounds and other inefficient crap to maximize ROI sounds like a fun challenge. It's essentially performance optimization but applied to a whole infrastructure as opposed to individual parts.

Applied through the proverbial front door a few months back to have a chat and unsurprisingly got a generic rejection, but wouldn't mind trying again using a better channel. Question is of course whether they'd be willing to pay enough to make it worthwhile.

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

#358

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 2:45 AM UTC

makeitrain wrote: post #333

supoxblade wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Presumably Bending Spoons believes they can optimize a lot of that 400M expenses while keeping revenue flat or even growing it. At least they believe enough to make a 1.4B bet on it.

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

#359

Post by stenuto » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 2:58 AM UTC

switchstance wrote: post #344

sammularczyk wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We did. https://framerate.tv

Looking good! Completely different products though.

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

#360

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 3:05 AM UTC

skrtskrt wrote: post #303

jjice wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of the pressure to expand revenue comes from within thanks to the flaws of permanent employment - you hired permanent employees at a discount compared to the equivalent contractor/temporary workforce in exchange for a promise of perpetual employment. These people will thus do their best to ensure their perpetual employment (they will never say "hey I think we've finished building your product, now you can lay us off to make profit").

You can of course sidestep that and use contractors for the initial build out - plenty of agencies and freelancers will give you a quote with various terms. It'll cost way more in the short term because you're essentially paying upfront the years of salary they would otherwise earn building the same thing as permanent employees, but at least it's an upfront, honest transaction with no expectation of loyalty. You can then hire a permanent skeleton crew for the continuous upkeep.

Want a turnkey Vimeo you can deploy on a cloud or truckloads of servers you can just rack up in a colo? If you have a spare 1.4B laying around, I'm sure that can be arranged.