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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

#451

Post by input_sh »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #410
input_sh wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read this same comment for every model since GPT-3.

That's because it's been true for every major new model release since GPT-3. HN is full of people who tried the free version of ChatGPT a couple of years ago, got a load of random hallucinated slop, and concluded it was all a bunch of useless hype. They enjoy parroting a lot of obsolete stuff they read once about stochastic parrots, without the slightest sense of irony. When I was growing up, my old man recalled engi…

I don't know whose thoughts you're trying to attribute to me, but I've been pretty up-to-date myself (while still keeping myself to a $20/month budget that I switch between providers every few months).

Every generation has at best been a 5% improvement, and nothing revolutionary compared to the last generation. Absolutely no significant improvements between me selecting say Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Claude Sonnet 4, or Claude Sonnet 4.5. Still the same somewhat useful tool for specific purposes, still not good enough to be let loose on production, still not better than what I can do myself with 10 or so years of experience.

Genuinely useful from time to time? Sure, I agree completely. Anywhere near being revolutionary enough as people here insist on gaslighting themselves to be? Absolutely not. Not even remotely.

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

#452

Post by ewheeler »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #249
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 -…

I think a better analogy than building construction is cars. You need to do active maintenance and fix things on cars to keep them running, you may even change out a radio or wheels, etc. like minor feature development, but you're not likely to change out the design of the engine and transmission. You definitely don't need the design crew from the car manufacturer around, aka Product Mgmt, to do maintenance but you d…

I'd suggest commercial aircraft as an even better analogy than cars.

Most of the ongoing costs you mention for cars still apply--but there are also the occasional (possibly dramatic) changes to the interior 'cabin product' like new seats and entertainment systems, new fabrics/branding, new business class seats/pods, changes in seat layouts, etc in order to remain competitive in their market segment. Cars rarely have such significant refreshes, but software products often have analogous design and UX overhauls that are also intended to try to keep the software competitive in its market segment. And again airlines don't need to engage the specific airframe manufacturer like Boeing or Airbus for these, but they do need some semblance of a tech team that have certain domain expertise in aircraft engineering constraints.

Airframes also have major overhauls called MROs (Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul) about every 6-10 years, which again does not require the original manufacturer but does require significant engineering expertise. To me this is akin to certain ongoing software maintenance activities like updating a codebase to use newer library versions, major database version updates, API or SDK version compatibility, etc.

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

#453

Post by lotsofpulp »

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…

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

This seemed to end pretty well. He overpaid for it, but the website kept functioning without issues.

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

#454

Post by lotsofpulp »

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.

Twitter was not a hostile takeover.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...

> Twitter's board publicly and unanimously accepted the buyout offer for $44 billion

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

#455

Post by cik »

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

Calcalist is the news source for the tech community here in Israel. Admittedly the English site is complete rubbish compared to the Hebrew site - but it's still THE local source.

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

#456

Post by viraptor »

breakingcups wrote: post #435
MattRix wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A notable difference to their (somewhat) contemporary, Nebula. Nebula made the choice to develop their own services, to also own the customer billing relation. Dropout relies on Vimeo for all that.

Are there other services doing whitelabel video sites? (Apart from porn, I'm sure there is a few) I only know of Floatplane providing whitelabel for William Osman's sauceplus.com recently.

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

#457

Post by lotsofpulp »

bicepjai wrote: post #100
dotBen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your comment is referring to the bending spoons business model, it's worth pointing out they are not VC, they are private equity. If your comment is referring to the software company's exiting to provide a return to shareholders, that happens all the time whether it's venture-backed or privately owned. The owners of privately held bootstrapped companies still want an exit one day too. As an open source software en…

Not in the startup world beyond what I pick up on HN, but this distinction was helpful. My mental model going forward: - If a company is still validating the business model and optimizing for rapid growth, it’s typically a Venture Capitalist (VC) fit. - If a company is already established and the play is to improve operations, scale, or restructure (often involving a change of control), it’s typically a Private Equit…

Publicly listed companies buying businesses would be a third “fit”.

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

#458

Post by d--b »

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 -…

That's not true at all though.

Car makers don't make a car and dismiss the entire engineering team.

Sure, you could do that, but eventually people are going to move on from your only car that's old and clunky.

That's exactly Bending Spoons model. Cut all the expenses, let the product die slowly. In the meantime you might have made more money than you put in to buy the product and the team.

It's basically bankrupcy management.

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

#459

Post by jollyllama »

Nextgrid wrote: post #352
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Replying here because GP makes a good distinction, and your point still holds.

I would point out that there are a few alternate models:

1) You use the maintenance headcount to build, and you just build that much slower.

2) You have an org that wants to stay the same size and move from project to project. In that case, some subset of your staff, are, at any one time, revisiting old projects for updates/maintenance, and some other portion are working on building a new thing. This is probably the strongest paradigm, because you can leverage common platforms between solutions.

Unfortunately, of course, either of this is at odds with the current approach to business/capital, in which once an opportunity emerges, everything is thrown at it as quickly as possible.

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

#460

Post by fuzzfactor »

hahahahhaah wrote: post #160
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 -…

I don't think you need ZIRP or even VC to have successful software companies that reinvest in features. You need a low marginal cost of manufacturing, aka the floppy disk.

Yep, and then CDROMs really bumped it up to the next level for Microsoft.

Pop music CD's had been popular for years before data CDROMs became available and more common.

Stars like Michael Jackson were raking in the bucks and their record companies even more.

Then by the mid '90's Windows was too sizable and unwieldy for most people to install from floppy any more, and consumer PCs started having CD reader/players standard.

Microsoft CDs started flying off the shelf at 10x the retail price the record companies were charging for music CD's.

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