BendingSpoon CEO: "At Bending Spoons, we acquire companies with the expectation of owning and operating them indefinitely, and we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together"
Vimeo CEO: "We are excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses"
Words no longer appear to mean things. While this isn't a surprise, it provides another data point that there can be no trust given to leaders words. I find it sad as it simply re-inforces this behaviour and normalises it.
After reading through the other comments about bending spoons and reading yours again: the bending spoons CEO is technically telling the truth! They intend to run the acquired companies forever. After cutting most of the staff, but he didn’t say that part of course.
I wouldn't even say it's "technically" the truth. It's just the truth. Nothing in the statement even comes close to implying that there wouldn't be layoffs. Hell, one of the quotes even mentions "focus", which if anything is a euphemism or hint for downsizing in these kinds of statements, not the opposite.
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.
Imagine what would happen if we tried these actions like we do for real murder trials.
"CEO John Doe is found Guilty of maiming Company B to the point of bleeding it dry of its funds, resulting in bankruptsy. Due to person-hood laws, we sentence you to life in prison. Thank you for your attention on this matter."
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 need to keep the full team of builders around then something is wrong and you may want to seek a refund for the original builders' fees since they did not actually finish building it.
Builders and electricians and tradesmen either work as contractors and take that into account (charging higher rates to compensate for the sporadic nature of the work) or work full-time for companies who then resell their services on building projects (charging accordingly to ensure there is enough revenue to pay a full-time payroll of said tradesmen).
Tech was an outlier in this case because ZIRP allowed companies to retain full engineering teams to keep "engineering" the product even once product-market-fit has been achieved and the product has been stabilized and finished. This gave a lot of engineers the illusion that perpetual "engineering" of a single product/service is a sustainable model and career.
Bending Spoons' business model is to buy finished products, cut off the deadweight and keep operating the product and actually making profit off the finished product, which was always a normal thing in every other industry.
For tech people that see themselves as builders, this should be normal and expected - they should charge competitive rates for their services taking into account the expectation that they're building something for someone else to make money off once it's built and that they won't be part of it once that's done (unless they want to negotiate an actual stake in the company). For tech people that don't, this is a difficult wake up call, but the earlier the better - the old situation was never sustainable to begin with.
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 do need some semblance of a tech team or people that can do the tech work on contract.
At some point a tech product is "finished" as in a mature, stable product and adding new things to it isn't going to do 10x in revenue. Its probably really hard for the product and tech teams involved to admit though.
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 much as you spent. Bending Spoons doesn't want risk, hence their decision.
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.
There’s also the much more common case of a competitor coming in with a similar product that has a few more features matching the customers’ requirements… which explains the endless product development treadmill that companies find themselves on.
Software doesn’t win by being “finished” it wins by out competing other software
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.
The businesses they acquire are ones whose revenue has not appreciably grown in many years. They are being sold because the prior owner does not believe they can improve the business any more.
Any profit bending spoons earns they can run off and invest in another business if they like. They don't bother investing in the businesses they purchase because they believe, like the previous owner believed, that there is no more juice to squeeze from that particular lemon.
I'm not really sure this argument makes sense. Plenty of software I've built is finished, it does the thing I need it to do and I haven't touched it in years. Adding features just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time, doubly so in a business context.
It’s a mystery to me, almost every product on market has serious user-facing issues that never get fixed. As if every company indeed have no development team, while all of them retain teams of developers.
The fact that it's the norm for the builders of mature software to stick around can lead to some gross engineering inefficiencies. For instance, a lot of Evernote's backend infrastructure was manually managed [0]:
With Evernote, Bending Spoons identified that the backend needed a complete rewrite. They moved from a monolithic architecture running on manually provisioned virtual machines to a microservices architecture with managed databases, significantly improving performance and scalability.
It's easy for companies to fall into such pits of inefficiency because climbing out of those pits entails utterly gutting the headcount [*].
I wonder if the same is true at Vimeo, which employed ~250 engineers [1], which seems high for a mature product that's deliberately conservative (most of Vimeo's customers are B2B whitelabelers, for whom a constantly changing product is a massive downside.) It's not like video codecs or storage systems or web standards are changing daily. I would imagine a well-engineered codebase from 10 years ago would work well today with only minimal changes, mostly centered around updating libraries for security patches. The fact that they had 250 engineers on staff who presumably did more than play ping-pong all day makes me wonder if the codebase was not, in fact, well-engineered.
[*] Imagine the equivalent for a building: "we don't have automatic circuit breakers in this building; instead, we have a 24 hour staff of electricians who measure current with an ammeter and manually cut the power if it gets too high."
> With Evernote, Bending Spoons identified that the backend needed a complete rewrite. They moved from a monolithic architecture running on manually provisioned virtual machines to a microservices architecture with managed databases, significantly improving performance and scalability.
And accidentally turned it into a shitty product in the process :-)
Exactly why I charge $999/hour for my software consulting. To the doubters, laugh all you want, but I've been doing this for literal decades, and will absolutely slaughter LLM generated code in terms of code reliability and maintainability amortized over 5 years.
Won't be giving exact figures but that's my business model as well - I charge a premium because my job for clients is to make myself obsolete. If I "deliver" something that needs my constant presence then I haven't actually delivered. Of course, my price is high upfront because I'm budgeting in the fact that I strive to be out of there as soon as feasible instead of trying to stick around.
Some clients are ok with it, some don't; this is normal and what a competitive market should look like. I tell clients openly when my premium service is not the right fit for their current requirements or budget, and there are cases where cheaper labor or LLMs are absolutely a better fit (and they should come back once when/if they outgrow the cheaper, lower-quality product).
Hourly rates are inherently risky for clients - you're asking them to part with money with no guaranteed outcome, so there's a natural ceiling where the financial risk becomes untenable regardless of your expertise and reputation.
Clients don't buy hours though, they buy solutions. They have problems costing them money or preventing revenue and they'll pay a percentage of that value to solve it. When you price based on solution value rather than time, your effective hourly rate merely becomes a function of your efficiency and expertise delivering said solution.
They key to achieving such a rate comes down to your sales and business skills: understanding what to sell, how to structure it to maximize your earnings and make it palatable for the client.
For example I generally avoid hourly billing except as a filter for time-wasters. Instead, consultancy becomes a loss leader for the real business: deeply understanding client problems and delivering high-value solutions. Clients happily pay premium rates when they see the price as a fraction of the solution's worth to them.
I only resort to quoting (quite high) hourly rates where it's clear the client just wants consultancy/advice (basically a glorified IT/business support) as a way to make it worth my time and gently encouraging them to bounce (I openly suggest more cost-effective options and refer them there).
I'd love to do this and have a quite marketable resume, but it is extremely, extremely, unclear to me how you build a clientele or where you'd even start.
Only road I can imagine is highly specialized industry, with money, that often has time-sensitive needs, and smart management that knows how to recognize value or trusts their tech management. And even then I think you'd have to start in the coal-mines version of it, $50K/year flat salary, and building a reputation without management taking credit for your successes, somehow.
Once you have them on the phone, you can not only better understand their problem but also demonstrate your skill and credibility in a way no resume or branding could.
At that point it's just a sales game - generally you'd avoid hourly rates and sell them a solution (see my other comment) which will maximize your effective hourly rate while being structured in a way that's very good value for the client. Hourly should be a last resort, at which point generally you'd rather have the client bounce, so you quote a high rate.
I'll offer a specific solution that takes me a week of full time work (14 hours each day -- I'm focused) for about $10k, which is roughly $150/hour if you want to calculate it that way, or another specific solution that takes me 3 weeks of 10 hour days for $15k which amounts to $100/hour. And like any good consultant, I'll eat the cost if I'm wrong. Other times I'll charge $40k when I know it will take a few months of dedicated work and I have to really lock in.
In practice, I never actually charge hourly. So the $999/hour is really Schrodinger's rate.
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 meeting this morning, and the head of Communications immediately said he's going to start looking for alternatives.
You can make all the analogies and excuses you like, but look at Vimeo's sister properties (Evernote, etc.) Are they better off since they were gutted? Are they delivering more value to the customers, or just funneling money to the parent company and its investors?
I think a better analogy is some big Wall Street investment company buying up nursing homes, and making lots of noises about "efficiency." That never works out well for the patients/customers. Only for the company.
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.
I put it to not-tech people as: "[insert_ridiculous_valuation] is because you can fire everyone tomorrow and keep operating"
> "Tech was an outlier in this case because ZIRP allowed companies to retain full engineering teams to keep "engineering" the product despite it being essentially finished."
This is wrong, though, it's unnecessarily tying in a pop-finance obsession with ZIRP.
Unnecessary is the right word because it's not necessary for the rest of your post, you could cut it out and it wouldn't affect your argument or anyone's understanding.
Wrong is the right word because the dynamics it assumes are fantastical - companies took on debt to fund bloated engineering teams because no one noticed the engineering was done?
Additionally, ZIRP didn't induce this, this stuff happened, exactly the same, during ZIRP as well. Saw it in the iPad point of sale industry in early to mid 2010s.
A real finance nerd would point out ZIRP would in fact induce more of this behavior. It makes it cheaper for private equity/entities like Bending Spoons to take on debt to buy out companies and strip mine them. (strip mine being my word for this behavior)
> companies took on debt to fund bloated engineering teams because no one noticed the engineering was done
ZIRP allowed a lot of "businesses" to exist that wouldn't in a conventional, competitive capitalistic environment. Businesses in quotes because there was never any reasonable potential for profitability, but it didn't matter because VC money was cheap. Building a sustainable business is hard, playing "startup founder" and having that lifestyle subsidized by VCs is easier.
In that case, (over)engineering was part of the performance art that was required to keep your only revenue source: the next funding round. There was never any incentive to "finish" the product because doing that would put your business model (or lack thereof) to the test and stop the music. On the other hand, as long as cheap money is around you could endlessly "engineer" and pivot and bullshit around, chasing the next funding round and using that to pay yourself/your friends decent salaries.
During the ZIRP era it was all about "engagement" and DAUs/MAUs, then it was blockchain, and now it's all about AI. For those that have run out of grifts, they fold or "incredible journey" and get sold for pennies on the dollar to entities like Bending Spoons that do notice there are bloated engineering teams that can be cut.
You hold ZIRP caused this, then cite crypto and AI as continuations, both post-ZIRP. Which is it?
> as long as cheap money is around you could endlessly "engineer" and pivot and bullshit around
I lived this in a particular industry firmly inside the ZIRP era. It doesn't begin to describe how things actually worked. Even if ZIRP is synonymous with endless money to you, on their end, they still had to choose how to allocate it, and it was finite. You're not going to a bank for a loan, you beg people with experience in software to believe you're trending up.
> During the ZIRP era it was all about "engagement" and DAUs/MAUs, then it was blockchain, and now it's all about AI.
Do you genuinely believe DAUs/MAUs stopped mattering once crpyto, then AI, arrived?
Your argument requires believing that engineers collectively ran a con that no investor, board member, or executive noticed for a decade, and the only people who figured it out were PE firms after 2022. That's conspiracy theory dressed in finance vocabulary.
The leveraged buyout model you're praising as "normal capitalism" is itself subsidized by cheap debt. You've correctly identified that cheap money distorts incentives. You've just misidentified which side of the transaction is the distortion.
ZIRP was the era of where any tech startup was seen as a good investment no matter how stupid. Take any stupid business that doesn't work, say you do it with tech, get millions thrown at you. Then it was blockchain - same story, conventional business that doesn't work, but with blockchain - boom, instant money. Now the same with AI.
> you beg people with experience in software to believe you're trending up
Considering how much stupid shit I've seen funded (that quietly "incredible journey'd" away or folded by now) I don't think much begging was involved. Capital was desperate to find a place, no matter how ill-advised. Everyone in the startup food chain enjoyed it.
> Do you genuinely believe DAUs/MAUs stopped mattering once crpyto, then AI, arrived?
What started mattering is a clear path to monetize said DAUs/MAUs. You can't just show up with (potentially flawed) analytics saying you have DAUs and you're gonna figure out monetization later. Now you need to actually figure it out now and show up with analytics + proof of actually monetizing those users. Well, except if you're selling AI - then it's ok to sell inference at a major loss and figure out monetization later.
> collectively ran a con that no investor, board member, or executive noticed for a decade
"Investing" in a Ponzi can still be profitable as long as you get out before it collapses. There was a lot of passing around the hot potatoes between VCs too, so a VC can rightfully determine something to be a scam, but still invest if they believe SoftBank will happily hold the bag (and those guys ended up taking a lot of bags).
> "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 profitable as long as you get out before it collapses... a VC can rightfully determine something to be a scam, but still invest"
You've just moved the con from engineers to VCs. If investors knowingly played hot potato, then engineers weren't running a grift, they were employees doing jobs while capital played musical chairs above their heads.
So which is it: were engineers "deadweight" padding out finished products, or were they ordinary workers caught in a game VCs were knowingly playing? Because "VCs knew it was a scam but invested anyway" is a very different story than "engineers tricked everyone into thinking the product wasn't finished."
You're retreating into "everyone knew it was fake."
> 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 Europe in 2023. Evernote then shut down the Linux and older legacy versions of the app, and then proceeded to place heavy restrictions on the app’s free tier in 2024.
> In another example, Bending Spoons acquired WeTransfer in July 2024 and then laid off 75% of its staff a few weeks after. A couple months later, WeTransfer began limiting free users to 10 transfers per month.
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 after a 1-3 years, so they wouldn't make enough of a return from their existing customers to justify the investment...
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 people that go "eh" and just deal with the cost increase and stagnated features.
It was like that with WeTransfer too. Fine company that had been profitable for years, but with little hope of getting ever 10x bigger again. I used to work there and had already left by the time of the acquisition, but all the old colleagues I've spoken to said the same.
The main business was throwing off gobs of money and there were SO MANY failed projects to try and find new revenue streams. Everyone who was not being pushed by the PE owners could see that they would never account to even 1% of the revenues of the main product. It was only a matter of time before someone came in, said "the main business is fine as is" and fired the people who were involved in the moonshots then sat back and raked in the cash. Sure, it will probably not last forever. But if it brings in millions per year for 15-20 years until the company dies, then that is probably an outcome Bending Spoons is fine with.
For a hosting space like Vimeo, I'd be surprised if this gave them 5 years. And remember, they acquired Vimeo for over a billion dollars.
This isn't like some B2C 5-10 dollar a month service. Video hosting is notoriously expensive and paying clients will quickly see other alternatives if they see smoke. These are already people with specialized needs that the main market leader (Youtube) cannot fulfill. They are "active", so to speak.
> These are already people with specialized needs that the main market leader (Youtube) cannot fulfill.
Isn't this just a bigger reason why these people won't leave? Assuming the acquirer isn't dumb enough to remove the core benefit that comes from their highest paying customers, they will keep providing those, and those customers won't churn. And I think this is a safe assumption, considering it's the primary goal and focus of the people at the acquirer.
And honestly this is probably fine. If the main business can't grow and there have been a few years of attempts to produce complementary businesses with no success, that's a good sign that the business should be moved into a "return money to owners" model.
Sadly, "return money to owners" ends more like the owner selling off the company and leaving all the workers under them in freefall. And people wonder why loyalty is dead.
The owner got a big pay package from the sale on top of usually being one of the more highly compensated employees at such companies. What do you mean by "the owner didn't get paid"?
>No one wonders why loyalty is dead.
I see you missed the recent narrative of "Gen Z is lazy" and "most managers avoid hiring Gen Z" out there. I assure you many managers are baffled, bit blame the (relative) children instead of seeing how work culture has shifted since they were that age
This is correct. You're buying a cashflow. Bending Spoons has optimized their model for very specific types of cashflow enterprises to aggregate into their portfolio.
I use Harvest to track hours and expenses and to invoice my customers. Bending Spoons apparently bought them a while ago and just eliminated the shell company around Harvest.
Based on my experience with Evernote, I don't trust Bending Spoons, and I'm wondering if I should look for a different time-tracking and invoicing system.
I've been in the same boat as you and replaced it last year but still pay for harvest (grandfathered pricing) until I can be sure I don't need it. I'm almost up to renewal and haven't used it at all since trying app.solidtime.io
I'll be honest it's not as good as harvest. The mac app is a bit buggy, it's not as easy to add manual time, and you need to pay for pdf export. But having said that I've found the free version to cover 90% of my use of the paid version of harvest
I use Harvest for my freelance invoicing and started seeing the huge notice at the top of the app and was wondering how this was going to impact my stuff going forward. I'm also very leery having gone through a horrible Evernote experience.
If anybody has any good alternatives, I'm all ears.
Been a paiyng Evernote customer since its launch. I unsubscribed at the beginning of 2025 after 7/8 years of shitty releases, not fixing old bugs, and new useless features.
I don't user Evernote very often, but I have a bunch of stuff stored in there and use it basically in a read-only mode. For a long time I was able to get the $36 / year plan which I felt pretty good about. It was a great app and service which I didn't use very much, so that felt like a fair price and I felt good about supporting them at that level. Basically every time I opened Evernote, I was paying $2.
But then the price tripled and for me, it's too much. I'll pay $2 per session, but not $5.
I remember their CEO (Phil Libin I think) on their podcast explaining how they were building a 100 year company. I really wanted to believe that.
I use Obsidian now and like it, but it feels like they are going down the same path. They keep adding features that don't really fit the original editor-for-a-folder-of-markdown-files. I wish they would stop.
It's a bummer but the feature treadmill seems inescapable. Bending Spoons will probably be able to buy Obsidian for a very nice price in a few years and the Obsidian founders will do very well.
If everyone gets salaries and equity is paid for then everyone's done great. And then we can build another one, or an open source equivalent once all the money's been spent researching useful features, and then we're done.
It's worse. When a company like this is "mature", they don't try to appeal to new users. They instead squeeze what they can out of the existing user base, because that user base is probably already dying off. This isn't about attaining a steady state business, its about seeing how much of the toothpaste you can still squeeze out the bottle before it crusts up.
This practice is derogatorily called "vulture capitalism" for a reason. I hope the remaining engineers are either lining up for retirement or networking around for their next gig.
> I don't understand this model. Such significant layoffs would indicate that there is no real appetite for expansion or growth.
To play devil's advocate, maybe there's a point where a product or service needs to stop evolving and just be.
I have a Vimeo account that's been on auto-resubscribe for years. I couldn't tell you a single feature they've added in the last 5 years, but they host my videos, collect stats, and let me send links to my friends, and that's really all I want.
> 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
In the 80's people who did this were known as "corperate raiders". Nowadays it's just called business.
Vimeo employed somewhere north of a thousand people a year ago with 28% being in the engineering team (according to random google results - this isn't an area I have personal knowledge of). If they dropped from around 300 people to 15 that sounds like gutting - not trimming.
They will be hiring up but not the same people. Bending Spoons tends to replace high silicon valley wages with high Italy wages which is a considerable saving.
It sounds like they're trying to extract as much money as possible from a SaaS subscription service that's no longer actually paying any devs.
From my perspective as a one-time (but no longer) paying user of evernote - WTF am I paying for monthly if not to support a dev team?
Seriously - I get that there are infra costs for some of the services, and I wouldn't mind paying those costs plus a reasonable upcharge, but I'm sure as fuck not going to pay a company $100+ a year subscription to store under a GB of data.
So now I host bookstack and I pay backblaze ~$0.22/m to back up all my notes, which is much closer to real costs for these services if they're not under development.
Genuine question, why not use a free Git service or something
I pay for Sourcehut now, but until recently I was using a free private GitHub account to sync my notes in Obsidian. It works fine and cost me nothing (at least nominally).
Corporate raiders is a bit of a different concept. That implies a hostile takeover. Like aggressively buying up shares in order acquire a majority stake and set company policy against the wishes of other insiders.
Bending Spoons is what we'd call vulture capitalists which have and continue to exist. Basically they buy weakening businesses and carve them up for parts, selling anything of value and squeezing max revenue of whatever is left.
> Basically they buy weakening businesses and carve them up for parts, selling anything of value and squeezing max revenue of whatever is left.
People say this like it's a bad thing, but without "vulture capitalists", struggling companies would default and banks would attempt to do the same, except they are much worse at it and even more people would lose their jobs.
It's called butt cigar investing or corporate raiding.
They acquire startups and companies without a huge growth potential but modest cash flow and little profits.
They cut the operating expenses to the minimum and jack up the prices to sky rocket profits till their mathematical models will tell them they will profit on the investment.
SaaS is the detriment to society. Static feature software continually updated and changed to create a faux justification for $20 of your money a month, keeping you on an endless treadmill to in order to work with all your old data.
Sometime in the late 00's they realized people were still happily using software from the 90's, because it worked for their needs, and well, we can't have that...
Why would it be detrimental to society? Many companies have developed all the products they're likely to ever develop, so why would you maintain the same level of operational costs as when you expected growth? There's no guarantee that the prices charged before the acquisition were sustainable either.
They don't just maintain these products, they enshittify them to extract the maximum possible profit from captive users, until someone else comes in and build everything from scratch all over again.
This is crazy inefficient yet it's not captured in our economic theories, so we're essentially blind to it.
Not much you can do. The alternative is bankruptcy that does a similar thing to workers. But it at least doesn't let the company make blatant lies of a PR statement.
The main thing to do is make it so you can't just lay off people as easily as you can in the US for pretty much no reason. But it seems workers are still too divided to really come together and achieve such 9initiatives. Be it unions, pressuring their governments to make new laws, or simply chastising and boycotting companies who engage on such actions.
Society has more money and way more votes than PE. I'm going to quote A Bugs Life (1998) of all things here:
> Hopper: You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life! It's not about food, it's about keeping those ants in line.
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 engineer who is now a venture capital investor, respectfully, I think your beef is with capitalism, not with the institutional investors.
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 Equity (PE) fit.
Reminder that restructure often means a company working just fine, but whose assets outstrip what PE can buy it for, so they strip it to the bones. Or they leverage it with debt against assets then pay that money to themselves for consulting, account/hr services that they force the company to outsource to other PE companies. Nothing is 'created' through this process, now value added, nor it is healthy capitalism as the company could have continued fine without this added leveraged debt that was purely used to profit PE.
There are now more private equity funds in the USA than McDonalds. The maximum wealth extraction of every single thing in people's lives is not viable for a continuing healthy society.
The Bending Spoons business model is right out of the private equity playbook. Buy a business with good revenue, cut cost to turn this into a consistent revenue stream, generate annual returns.
This is not like making a small 20 person self funded company.
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"
You're assuming all or most paying customers are paying attention. That is sometimes not the case. For example folks/businesses who forgot they signed up. Alternatively it could be that the cost to switch is too painful.
What if there isn't a feasible path for expansion and growth? Vimeo already has contracting revenue, it's either in the maturity or decline phase.
Some customers will churn, some will stay, Bending Spoons are the masters of this model so will have made an assumption on how revenue will change across the next 5-10 years+, but I would assume that they aren't forecasting extreme growth, and instead are calculating that net profit can be changed from c$30m to c$139m within existing revenue, so if they can keep revenue at/near current levels without growth, they can end up with a much more profitable business.
Bear in mind that same revenue doesn't necessarily mean the same number of customers - it can also mean raising prices and having less customers. Bending Spoons might estimate that if they double prices, half their customers might leave - this would still be BRILLIANT for profit, as while revenue would stay the same, some costs would half, and thus profit might jump from c$140m to c$250m based on some napkin math!
For example, they bought the German hiking and cycling app Komoot. It's a mature app in terms of functionality, with a stable user base. There's little chance of hypergrowth with this type of app. It's also complicated to switch apps because transferring routes, collections, photos, etc. to another service is difficult.
They laid off 90% of the teams. They migrated the app to their infrastructure to pool costs. Since then, there has been no further development of the service.
It's also complicated to switch apps because transferring routes, collections, photos, etc. to another service is difficult.
Not really, sync everything through Strava, and then drop whichever service you don't want. Basically any bike ride I've done in the past decade is on 3+ services because they all sync.
I imagine a lot of companies have contracts with Vimeo and switching costs are real. They'll likely stick with Vimeo if they manage to maintain their offering to the level it exists at today. In the long term I think it guarantees death but they will be able to extract plenty of money before that happens.
They did the same thing with Komoot and other apps. I don't understand where the money comes from and how they are planning to keep this portfolio growing.
It seems to all be debt financed, i.e. just a private equity model slightly specialized for tech. The "innovation" is that Bending Spoons has an in-house engineering team it seems they try to keep constant yet scale out to all the acquisitions. I hadn't looked into them much before, but https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma... is an interesting report -- though not focused on the finance side.
(For Komoot) Did they, though? I am aware of the layoffs, but after that they slightly redesigned the app, collected the poll for next year's requested features, the lifetime maps option is still there to buy etc. If not for HN, I wouldn't have noticed any change in the direction that it's going in.
I suspect that the VAST majority of users want their saas tools to do today what they did yesterday, and so stopping active development of new features is actually a positive - no sudden Liquid Ass is going to appear in a program in maintenance mode.
This requires reinvesting profits into the company. It sounds like they choose not to do that, but instead switched to cashing in.
If the profits are stable and supported by a fraction of the workforce, then why keep the rest around? Clearly a shitty thing to do, but business-wise it makes sense.
My best guess is that a part of it is replacing US (or in this case Israeli) devs with much cheaper Italian/European ones, earning ~a quarter of their US counterparts and working longer hours, as Bending Spoons has an extremely competitive hiring process, and is probably the highest paying tech company in Italy
This is just my personal opinion, but if they didnt change the price of Evernote and never made any changes, I probably would remain a customer for a very very long time. There is a high switching cost for me to use any app to move all my docs, and notes.
I dont know if the same can be said for Vimeo, though
One of the advantages of their business model is that it's low risk. Find a business you can get cheap enough, shut off all investment related to growth or product improvement, and use the product's moat to get as much cash as possible from current customers. Business doesn't have to be about expanding into new markets or growing revenue. If I had to guess, there's not much of a market for the companies they're acquiring because everyone else is looking for growth.
So it's sort of a "white-dwarf maker" company. Pick a company with a steady cashflow, eject all the fluff that made it a big star, and collect the remaining energy / cash until the core cools down. The end state is a cold slab of iron, and nothing new is going to happen to the acquired business ever since, but the plentiful (if dwindling) cashflow will be collected without any obstacles.
The growth comes from increasing subscription value, not from adding users. They bet that the platform is sticky enough for the users that they’ll slowly boil the frog until there’s no more equity left.
Bait and switch is something completely different.
If you started buying Evernote 10 or 15 years ago, and use it a lot, then Evernote gets acquired and the terms change, that's shitty but is not remotely a "bait and switch."
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.
What I understand from listening to the management from various podcasts, it was a mix of shipping the most minimum impactful features with the leanest product team needed and then jacking up the price every year for the people that can't move away from these products.
The long tail of revenue is not only a substantial sum, but decays more steadily than growth. This is a low risk investment that still turns a profit.
It's also not their only investment or even necessarily their own money. Individual holding companies don't tell you much about the larger pool of money they come from.
you're absolutely right, they're not positioned for expansion or growth. you're very close to seeing the private capital dark pattern that's become a huge part of our economics lately. let me illustrate for you how they make money by decoupling the company's success from the investors' success
1) borrow a bunch of money to buy the company - this is called a leveraged buyout
2) once you're in control, have the company assume the debt you took on in order to buy it. you as the buyer are now free and clear, and the company is now responsible for paying back the money you borrowed to buy it. the end result of this transaction is that the company now owns stock that is less desirable because the company is more leveraged
3) make huge cuts everywhere and use the money "saved" by divesting from your own future to pay yourself as a consultant
The company is now in the extremely fragile position of not being able to spend to respond to the market because all of their income is going to servicing debt and paying the members of the private capital group. the "investors" aren't actually invested at all because even if the stock they hold becomes worthless they didn't pay anything for it in the first place, the company did. the thing limps along for as long as it can keep bringing in some small amount of income for the "investors" to skim off the top of, then it inevitably dies like anything riddled with parasites will, the company declares bankruptcy and they sell the copper out of the walls in order to pay back the loan used to take the company private in the first place
Look at the companies they're acquiring - it's 100% about getting user data and tertiary monetization, and they're making bank. They couldn't care less about what the companies they buy supposedly do.
This is the same model Computer Associates used to run back in the day. Find product with marginal profit but dedicated user base, cut costs, increase pricing and milk it until the next product comes along.
Is this any different than the SaaS business model, except a 3rd party bought the company to strip it?
Everything SaaS these days, hell every subscription these days seems to involve product enshittification + rising pricing. Is this the end game of the financialization of everything?
Oh, it will - but they don't care. I'm sure they'll eek out 1.5b from their 1.3b acquisition and be happy as clams.
It certainly is depressing to look at what was built and what could be made of it but most of the folks with money lack the creativity or skill to actually build a lasting business. Just burn it down and rob it on the way out - such is the modern economy.
I mean, Broadcom / VmWare is basically doing the same, just more for enterprise level software.
OTOH - if Vimeo has given up all hope of further new features, then giving current users the chance to keep going isn't completely evil, even if it's at a higher price. VmWare is basically doing the same, and lots of customers are leaving, and those who aren't may still eventually do so, etc. (Edit: what if the alternative was Vimeo shutting down?)
Think of vintage car parts - if you absolutely want to restore that '30s Ford (keep using 20+ year old software) - someone offering an OEM-equivalent part for 3x what it cost back in the day (even adjusted for inflation) may actually still be good value - because what other alternatives are there?
Now - does it suck for the employees? Sure. One thing an econ prof said back in the late 90s (who loved to guest-lecture to CS/SWEng students): your job as a software person is to put other people out of work by automating stuff they used to do manually. Are you ok with that? Because if you're not, you should go into a different industry right now. Feels much worse when it's programmers getting the axe due to finance types, but not unexpected.
Elon Musk acquired Twitter and fired %80 of the employees and it was just fine.
I bet there's so many more people that can be let go from all tech industry. It's mature and product discovery is mostly locked behind advertisement so what's left is exploitation.
If you think about it, as long as you don't mingle much with the product that works it keeps working indefinitely. It's no different than running Excel or WhatsApp, especially when the servers are managed by 3rd party providers these days.
Losing tens of billions of dollars on a company now ruined down to single digit billions of revenue is a weird thing to describe as "just fine". That looks like abject failure as a business.
An interesting aspect is that they acquire US companies, where it is legally possible to lay off employees. In Italy, where BS is based, firing employees is much more difficult
This is potentially disastrous to content on the web. Vimeo provides a platform-as-a-service known as OTT, that powers well known branded streaming services, like Criterion Channel, HistoryHit, Dropout, DIRTVision, Speed 51, URLTV, Armflix, MHz Choice, Trinity Broadcasting Network, SommTV, IndieFlix, BroadwayHD, Full Moon Features, etc.
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!)
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?
Probably they will also fire remaining 15 people and move everything to Italy.
Their strategy is to
- fire everyone,
- give product to very small but ambitious team of people
- cut free version of the product to minimum even if does not make a sense to have a free version such as 5 video upload per month etc (they are doing this just to avoid backlash from users and community)
- use every possible dark pattern exist to get every penny from the users
- Buy a product that has name recognition overshadowed by a monopolistic company and the leadership is trying to make a pivot and failing terribly.
- Leadership is aggressively rebranding to appease a takeover. They keep doing the most basic forbes council op-ed title moves to make the product appealing.
- It is not a parts-shop, the team is used to sense of "eh what you are going to do about it". It is a signboard and patents that you can use to hostage bigger companies.
- The takeover company has figured out maintenance engineering. You buy the product, you cull the team because they are not a growth engine. You focus on maintenance, and you milk the brand. Any eastern European or LATAM team can approve an automated version bump PR and send out "let's jump on a call" email.
Heck, even Tai fricking Lopez bought Radio Shack under similar pretense.
That's partially due to history: Vimeo was split out of CollegeHumor, and CollegeHumor became Dropout. (Both were part of IAC and were spun out/sold off.)
Dropout originally only used Vimeo for video distribution. They switched to Vimeo for OTT only after running their own with a team of developers and finding it to be an unexpectedly hard task. I think I learned that in the Sam Reich Hank Green Decoder interview.
Well, some good news is that if you've ever wanted to build a new video streaming platform there are a bunch of companies that'd love to sign up.
I'm sure dropout et all will be able to continue with their same level of functionality in the short term but I can imagine the bills they'll be receiving will be escalating quickly.
Dropout's CEO has been pretty open about the company, and he described their early efforts as 'Brutal'
> No! We tried, but people don’t realize this. The first rendition of Dropout was built on Vimeo OTT’s API, but it was our own product. We employed something like eight sophisticated engineers at IAC to build our own product around it, and it was brutal. Which is to say, it’s just very hard to do very well. And these were great engineers.
I routinely see job postings by them in my local dev circles, significantly above market rate, and the offers seem to keep reappearing forever. Their site namedrops known apps and services like wetransfer but otherwise seems to be just buzzwords.
Are they VC buying existing IPs?
What is exactly going on?
I guess that companies which get bought might be a bit "overstaffed" from the startup phase or because planned further development. If one removes this staff, you need less people to minimally maintain a running app. But itcs just a guess, you'll loose knowhow too, when drastically reducing your staff.
I describe Bending Spoons as an Italian private equity company. The CEO openly admits that the business model involves buying companies and trying to squeeze as much profit out of them.
Yes bending spoon will stop growing these companies and stop add features. These role will be just replaced by engineers and employee in Italy, where bending spoon is form, and where people cost many times less than in the US.
Italy is like a higher quality India in a sense.
Bending Spoons pays very high rates for their own engineers.
Of course if your comparison is Bay Area or Zurich, there's no match, but if you exclude such outliers (where the compensation is what it is due to the insane costs of living and competition for talent) they are paying rates higher than pretty much any other part of the world.
They pay rates that are closer if not higher than London or Munich averages (which are very high).
> Italy is like a higher quality India in a sense.
Italian salaries [0] aren't significantly different from Indian salaries [1] in tech, especially in major hubs like Bangalore [2].
Also, a European dismissing Indian developer quality doesn't bode well as your governments are signing an FTA [3] and a security and defense partnership [4] with India in a couple days.
If companies like Google [5], Broadcom [6], and Nvidia [7] can afford to pay EU level salaries in India and decided to heavily invest in hiring in India, it shows that Indian talent can't be underestimated.
This comment from e98cuenc seems extremely prescient.
> Everybody loves to hate BendingSpoon, but there is a lesson here. They consistently rewrite the code of their acquisitions with a tiny team, fire everybody and are able to maintain and improve the product. They basically skip everything but engineers, and they are kept at a minimum. Feedback from users is the products they take over 1) become more expensive, 2) they ship features waaaay faster.
It looks like next generation private equity, and my guess is more houses will start copying them
Considering what Bending Spoons did to Meetup.com after buying the site, I wouldn't trust them to improve a product. Here are some of the issues I noticed.
- Group searches consistently return irrelevant results across multiple cities. As a test, I tried searching for soccer groups in Dallas, Texas, and one of the results was for a backgammon group. Users will also often have a hard time finding events I host on Meetup.
- An organizer being charged $357.98 per year to host a group on Meetup.com.
- The pages for my Meetup events are full of clutter and duplicate data, while relevant information such as RSVPs is hidden.
- My Meetup.com home page is full of pointless distractions, including a banner asking me to become an organizer when I already organize events.
- When editing an event, Meetup shows an option to generate a description by using generative AI. Generative AI is a scam and I try to avoid it.
That being said, you are right that they are becoming more expensive and ship features faster. I describe Bending Spoons as Italian private equity.
As a heavy Meetup user, I can say that Bending Spoons absolutely fixed some glaring, long-standing bugs. But their massive price increases have really driven people away, and some of their attempts to grab more money (Meetup+) really rankled a lot of people. Also, search still sucks.
Honestly, I wish more businesses would do this. It turns out that grandiose dreams make grandiose staffing, but a lot of great business ideas would thrive and bloom if the gardeners would just prune them back more often.
Wonder what this means for vimeo/psalm, the static analyzer for PHP, which has recently seen some new life breathed into it after long neglect. Psalm has credible alternatives in PHPStan and now Mago, but it would still be a loss to see it go unmaintained again.
I was wondering what I used by this company because I saw the name yesterday. It's Harvest, and I was thinking yesterday how the sign up and pricing page seems more or less abandoned. Guess it's time to roll my own version
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 terrified and literally scrambling for a backup plan.
Youtube also doesn't let you replace an already-uploaded video while maintaining the URL, which is incredibly painful if you need to edit a posted video for whatever reason.
If it's a small number of videos, specifically ones that are unlikely to go viral, then a self-hosted or externally paid hosted peertube site might be a good option.
Vimeo you manage your brand and presentation. YouTube you have little control over where or how your video is presented.
Vimeo also provides VOD for some large brands and media companies.
Yeah, it's this. It's a hosting platform, not a social media platform. You see a ton of people who have short films, art projects, commercial portfolios and stuff like that hosted at Vimeo. They don't need/want comments, discoverability, or to deal with things like automated DRM takedowns. Clean, simple, video hosting.
I built my own course presentation platform (for my own courses, not as a thing I resell), but I wasn't going to host my own videos. I use Vimeo. It's great: I upload to them, embed an iframe, job done. I don't care about maintaining a video player or bandwidth or subtitles or…
Literally the week after I launched my thing, they got bought. I have no idea what I'll do if they go to shit.
i have made https://codekeep.io for storing snippets, have similar features to evernote. all users will get free pro membership now. if you are thinking about moving , please consider codekeep too.
I just cancelled my account that I've had for about 10 years... maybe longer. I barely used it, but it's now >$100/year for my plan. I had maybe 15 videos uploaded that I would share occasionally.
I used to be an indie filmmaker and used it to host features when nothing else could. I’ve been paying since 2008. The price would go up but they were great so I let it be.
What I've always found unusual (but not necessarily bad) about BS is ... how come a company that came out of nowhere starts buying tech companies here and there? Billion dollar deals? In cash?
It can't be just a few "enthusiastic" random guys (as they portray), you need a lot of capital to pull that off.
IMO they're someone's family office with an obfuscated name.
Edit: and my comment suddenly goes to the bottom despite having several upvotes ... definitely not sus.
The founder recently went on invest like the best and explained it top to bottom, they started as a broke agency and grew from there quite fast. I forget the details but I would imagine they are financed quite heavily by LP's
Someone has actual financial plan. I know a unknown thing for VC and startups. If they do and can calculate reasonable rat of return on acquisition it makes sense for lot of investors. Especially when they start to have proven record.
Having paying customers, stopping giving things away for free and then cutting costs like wages and moon shots projects. A software starts to be tech again. That is marginal unit costs really do work.
From the previous press about the aquisition:
BendingSpoon CEO: "At Bending Spoons, we acquire companies with the expectation of owning and operating them indefinitely, and we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together"
Vimeo CEO: "We are excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses"
Words no longer appear to mean things. While this isn't a surprise, it provides another data point that there can be no trust given to leaders words. I find it sad as it simply re-inforces this behaviour and normalises it.
After reading through the other comments about bending spoons and reading yours again: the bending spoons CEO is technically telling the truth! They intend to run the acquired companies forever. After cutting most of the staff, but he didn’t say that part of course.
I wouldn't even say it's "technically" the truth. It's just the truth. Nothing in the statement even comes close to implying that there wouldn't be layoffs. Hell, one of the quotes even mentions "focus", which if anything is a euphemism or hint for downsizing in these kinds of statements, not the opposite.
Nothing the bending spoons ceo said isn’t true. They are still operating Vimeo.
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.
Of course words don't actually mean anything.
I've been through this myself once upon a time I was at a company and the way they described it is they just changed owners habitually.
Within about 4 months of this ownership change they fired my entire office. Luckily I was already some place new.
Things happen. Times change. It's just as important to know when to throw in the towel as it is to know when to persevere.
The acquisition concluded in November 2025, only 2 months ago.
That statement was from September. I can even dig up the discussion here on the annoucement:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
Reading the comments there, I shouldn't be surprised at this maneuver.
These are the things that happen - taking a company and strangling it to make a 10% short term return.
It’s like of funny, we give corporations personhood, but the type of person that can be owned by another person, or murdered for profit
Imagine what would happen if we tried these actions like we do for real murder trials.
"CEO John Doe is found Guilty of maiming Company B to the point of bleeding it dry of its funds, resulting in bankruptsy. Due to person-hood laws, we sentence you to life in prison. Thank you for your attention on this matter."
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 need to keep the full team of builders around then something is wrong and you may want to seek a refund for the original builders' fees since they did not actually finish building it.
Builders and electricians and tradesmen either work as contractors and take that into account (charging higher rates to compensate for the sporadic nature of the work) or work full-time for companies who then resell their services on building projects (charging accordingly to ensure there is enough revenue to pay a full-time payroll of said tradesmen).
Tech was an outlier in this case because ZIRP allowed companies to retain full engineering teams to keep "engineering" the product even once product-market-fit has been achieved and the product has been stabilized and finished. This gave a lot of engineers the illusion that perpetual "engineering" of a single product/service is a sustainable model and career.
Bending Spoons' business model is to buy finished products, cut off the deadweight and keep operating the product and actually making profit off the finished product, which was always a normal thing in every other industry.
For tech people that see themselves as builders, this should be normal and expected - they should charge competitive rates for their services taking into account the expectation that they're building something for someone else to make money off once it's built and that they won't be part of it once that's done (unless they want to negotiate an actual stake in the company). For tech people that don't, this is a difficult wake up call, but the earlier the better - the old situation was never sustainable to begin with.
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 do need some semblance of a tech team or people that can do the tech work on contract.
At some point a tech product is "finished" as in a mature, stable product and adding new things to it isn't going to do 10x in revenue. Its probably really hard for the product and tech teams involved to admit though.
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 much as you spent. Bending Spoons doesn't want risk, hence their decision.
> 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.
There’s also the much more common case of a competitor coming in with a similar product that has a few more features matching the customers’ requirements… which explains the endless product development treadmill that companies find themselves on.
Software doesn’t win by being “finished” it wins by out competing other software
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.
The businesses they acquire are ones whose revenue has not appreciably grown in many years. They are being sold because the prior owner does not believe they can improve the business any more.
Any profit bending spoons earns they can run off and invest in another business if they like. They don't bother investing in the businesses they purchase because they believe, like the previous owner believed, that there is no more juice to squeeze from that particular lemon.
I'm not really sure this argument makes sense. Plenty of software I've built is finished, it does the thing I need it to do and I haven't touched it in years. Adding features just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time, doubly so in a business context.
It’s a mystery to me, almost every product on market has serious user-facing issues that never get fixed. As if every company indeed have no development team, while all of them retain teams of developers.
It is simple. A productive developer can either:
* Fix things
* Build new things
Add to this that things naturally break. Try a git reset to 1 year ago and deploy that to prod, for example.
Add to that new features tend to add new bugs.
If you finish the backlog, you’ll get laid off,
the backlog keeps being increased (by you and your manager at times),
so it never gets finished.
Seems easy enough to explain.
There has to be a dragon being fought to account for all this money. Even if the dragon is bs.
Sometimes the dragon is technical debt.
When you’re historical Google, building three or more competing chat platforms…? That’s pretty much bs.
Downvote away, but consider a reply explaining why.
The fact that it's the norm for the builders of mature software to stick around can lead to some gross engineering inefficiencies. For instance, a lot of Evernote's backend infrastructure was manually managed [0]:
It's easy for companies to fall into such pits of inefficiency because climbing out of those pits entails utterly gutting the headcount [*].I wonder if the same is true at Vimeo, which employed ~250 engineers [1], which seems high for a mature product that's deliberately conservative (most of Vimeo's customers are B2B whitelabelers, for whom a constantly changing product is a massive downside.) It's not like video codecs or storage systems or web standards are changing daily. I would imagine a well-engineered codebase from 10 years ago would work well today with only minimal changes, mostly centered around updating libraries for security patches. The fact that they had 250 engineers on staff who presumably did more than play ping-pong all day makes me wonder if the codebase was not, in fact, well-engineered.
[0] https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma...
[1] https://www.unifygtm.com/insights-headcount/vimeo
[*] Imagine the equivalent for a building: "we don't have automatic circuit breakers in this building; instead, we have a 24 hour staff of electricians who measure current with an ammeter and manually cut the power if it gets too high."
> With Evernote, Bending Spoons identified that the backend needed a complete rewrite. They moved from a monolithic architecture running on manually provisioned virtual machines to a microservices architecture with managed databases, significantly improving performance and scalability.
And accidentally turned it into a shitty product in the process :-)
Exactly why I charge $999/hour for my software consulting. To the doubters, laugh all you want, but I've been doing this for literal decades, and will absolutely slaughter LLM generated code in terms of code reliability and maintainability amortized over 5 years.
Won't be giving exact figures but that's my business model as well - I charge a premium because my job for clients is to make myself obsolete. If I "deliver" something that needs my constant presence then I haven't actually delivered. Of course, my price is high upfront because I'm budgeting in the fact that I strive to be out of there as soon as feasible instead of trying to stick around.
Some clients are ok with it, some don't; this is normal and what a competitive market should look like. I tell clients openly when my premium service is not the right fit for their current requirements or budget, and there are cases where cheaper labor or LLMs are absolutely a better fit (and they should come back once when/if they outgrow the cheaper, lower-quality product).
How do you get clients on that rate? Genuinely curious
Hourly rates are inherently risky for clients - you're asking them to part with money with no guaranteed outcome, so there's a natural ceiling where the financial risk becomes untenable regardless of your expertise and reputation.
Clients don't buy hours though, they buy solutions. They have problems costing them money or preventing revenue and they'll pay a percentage of that value to solve it. When you price based on solution value rather than time, your effective hourly rate merely becomes a function of your efficiency and expertise delivering said solution.
They key to achieving such a rate comes down to your sales and business skills: understanding what to sell, how to structure it to maximize your earnings and make it palatable for the client.
For example I generally avoid hourly billing except as a filter for time-wasters. Instead, consultancy becomes a loss leader for the real business: deeply understanding client problems and delivering high-value solutions. Clients happily pay premium rates when they see the price as a fraction of the solution's worth to them.
I only resort to quoting (quite high) hourly rates where it's clear the client just wants consultancy/advice (basically a glorified IT/business support) as a way to make it worth my time and gently encouraging them to bounce (I openly suggest more cost-effective options and refer them there).
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.
I'd love to do this and have a quite marketable resume, but it is extremely, extremely, unclear to me how you build a clientele or where you'd even start.
Only road I can imagine is highly specialized industry, with money, that often has time-sensitive needs, and smart management that knows how to recognize value or trusts their tech management. And even then I think you'd have to start in the coal-mines version of it, $50K/year flat salary, and building a reputation without management taking credit for your successes, somehow.
The hard part is to get the client on the phone.
Once you have them on the phone, you can not only better understand their problem but also demonstrate your skill and credibility in a way no resume or branding could.
At that point it's just a sales game - generally you'd avoid hourly rates and sell them a solution (see my other comment) which will maximize your effective hourly rate while being structured in a way that's very good value for the client. Hourly should be a last resort, at which point generally you'd rather have the client bounce, so you quote a high rate.
That last part is exactly why I charge $999/hour.
I'll offer a specific solution that takes me a week of full time work (14 hours each day -- I'm focused) for about $10k, which is roughly $150/hour if you want to calculate it that way, or another specific solution that takes me 3 weeks of 10 hour days for $15k which amounts to $100/hour. And like any good consultant, I'll eat the cost if I'm wrong. Other times I'll charge $40k when I know it will take a few months of dedicated work and I have to really lock in.
In practice, I never actually charge hourly. So the $999/hour is really Schrodinger's rate.
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 meeting this morning, and the head of Communications immediately said he's going to start looking for alternatives.
You can make all the analogies and excuses you like, but look at Vimeo's sister properties (Evernote, etc.) Are they better off since they were gutted? Are they delivering more value to the customers, or just funneling money to the parent company and its investors?
I think a better analogy is some big Wall Street investment company buying up nursing homes, and making lots of noises about "efficiency." That never works out well for the patients/customers. Only for the company.
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.
I think you're entirely correct.
I put it to not-tech people as: "[insert_ridiculous_valuation] is because you can fire everyone tomorrow and keep operating"
> "Tech was an outlier in this case because ZIRP allowed companies to retain full engineering teams to keep "engineering" the product despite it being essentially finished."
This is wrong, though, it's unnecessarily tying in a pop-finance obsession with ZIRP.
Unnecessary is the right word because it's not necessary for the rest of your post, you could cut it out and it wouldn't affect your argument or anyone's understanding.
Wrong is the right word because the dynamics it assumes are fantastical - companies took on debt to fund bloated engineering teams because no one noticed the engineering was done?
Additionally, ZIRP didn't induce this, this stuff happened, exactly the same, during ZIRP as well. Saw it in the iPad point of sale industry in early to mid 2010s.
A real finance nerd would point out ZIRP would in fact induce more of this behavior. It makes it cheaper for private equity/entities like Bending Spoons to take on debt to buy out companies and strip mine them. (strip mine being my word for this behavior)
> companies took on debt to fund bloated engineering teams because no one noticed the engineering was done
ZIRP allowed a lot of "businesses" to exist that wouldn't in a conventional, competitive capitalistic environment. Businesses in quotes because there was never any reasonable potential for profitability, but it didn't matter because VC money was cheap. Building a sustainable business is hard, playing "startup founder" and having that lifestyle subsidized by VCs is easier.
In that case, (over)engineering was part of the performance art that was required to keep your only revenue source: the next funding round. There was never any incentive to "finish" the product because doing that would put your business model (or lack thereof) to the test and stop the music. On the other hand, as long as cheap money is around you could endlessly "engineer" and pivot and bullshit around, chasing the next funding round and using that to pay yourself/your friends decent salaries.
During the ZIRP era it was all about "engagement" and DAUs/MAUs, then it was blockchain, and now it's all about AI. For those that have run out of grifts, they fold or "incredible journey" and get sold for pennies on the dollar to entities like Bending Spoons that do notice there are bloated engineering teams that can be cut.
You hold ZIRP caused this, then cite crypto and AI as continuations, both post-ZIRP. Which is it?
> as long as cheap money is around you could endlessly "engineer" and pivot and bullshit around
I lived this in a particular industry firmly inside the ZIRP era. It doesn't begin to describe how things actually worked. Even if ZIRP is synonymous with endless money to you, on their end, they still had to choose how to allocate it, and it was finite. You're not going to a bank for a loan, you beg people with experience in software to believe you're trending up.
> During the ZIRP era it was all about "engagement" and DAUs/MAUs, then it was blockchain, and now it's all about AI.
Do you genuinely believe DAUs/MAUs stopped mattering once crpyto, then AI, arrived?
Your argument requires believing that engineers collectively ran a con that no investor, board member, or executive noticed for a decade, and the only people who figured it out were PE firms after 2022. That's conspiracy theory dressed in finance vocabulary.
The leveraged buyout model you're praising as "normal capitalism" is itself subsidized by cheap debt. You've correctly identified that cheap money distorts incentives. You've just misidentified which side of the transaction is the distortion.
ZIRP was the era of where any tech startup was seen as a good investment no matter how stupid. Take any stupid business that doesn't work, say you do it with tech, get millions thrown at you. Then it was blockchain - same story, conventional business that doesn't work, but with blockchain - boom, instant money. Now the same with AI.
> you beg people with experience in software to believe you're trending up
Considering how much stupid shit I've seen funded (that quietly "incredible journey'd" away or folded by now) I don't think much begging was involved. Capital was desperate to find a place, no matter how ill-advised. Everyone in the startup food chain enjoyed it.
> Do you genuinely believe DAUs/MAUs stopped mattering once crpyto, then AI, arrived?
What started mattering is a clear path to monetize said DAUs/MAUs. You can't just show up with (potentially flawed) analytics saying you have DAUs and you're gonna figure out monetization later. Now you need to actually figure it out now and show up with analytics + proof of actually monetizing those users. Well, except if you're selling AI - then it's ok to sell inference at a major loss and figure out monetization later.
> collectively ran a con that no investor, board member, or executive noticed for a decade
"Investing" in a Ponzi can still be profitable as long as you get out before it collapses. There was a lot of passing around the hot potatoes between VCs too, so a VC can rightfully determine something to be a scam, but still invest if they believe SoftBank will happily hold the bag (and those guys ended up taking a lot of bags).
> "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 profitable as long as you get out before it collapses... a VC can rightfully determine something to be a scam, but still invest"
You've just moved the con from engineers to VCs. If investors knowingly played hot potato, then engineers weren't running a grift, they were employees doing jobs while capital played musical chairs above their heads.
So which is it: were engineers "deadweight" padding out finished products, or were they ordinary workers caught in a game VCs were knowingly playing? Because "VCs knew it was a scam but invested anyway" is a very different story than "engineers tricked everyone into thinking the product wasn't finished."
You're retreating into "everyone knew it was fake."
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 Europe in 2023. Evernote then shut down the Linux and older legacy versions of the app, and then proceeded to place heavy restrictions on the app’s free tier in 2024.
> In another example, Bending Spoons acquired WeTransfer in July 2024 and then laid off 75% of its staff a few weeks after. A couple months later, WeTransfer began limiting free users to 10 transfers per month.
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 after a 1-3 years, so they wouldn't make enough of a return from their existing customers to justify the investment...
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 people that go "eh" and just deal with the cost increase and stagnated features.
It was like that with WeTransfer too. Fine company that had been profitable for years, but with little hope of getting ever 10x bigger again. I used to work there and had already left by the time of the acquisition, but all the old colleagues I've spoken to said the same.
The main business was throwing off gobs of money and there were SO MANY failed projects to try and find new revenue streams. Everyone who was not being pushed by the PE owners could see that they would never account to even 1% of the revenues of the main product. It was only a matter of time before someone came in, said "the main business is fine as is" and fired the people who were involved in the moonshots then sat back and raked in the cash. Sure, it will probably not last forever. But if it brings in millions per year for 15-20 years until the company dies, then that is probably an outcome Bending Spoons is fine with.
For a hosting space like Vimeo, I'd be surprised if this gave them 5 years. And remember, they acquired Vimeo for over a billion dollars.
This isn't like some B2C 5-10 dollar a month service. Video hosting is notoriously expensive and paying clients will quickly see other alternatives if they see smoke. These are already people with specialized needs that the main market leader (Youtube) cannot fulfill. They are "active", so to speak.
> These are already people with specialized needs that the main market leader (Youtube) cannot fulfill.
Isn't this just a bigger reason why these people won't leave? Assuming the acquirer isn't dumb enough to remove the core benefit that comes from their highest paying customers, they will keep providing those, and those customers won't churn. And I think this is a safe assumption, considering it's the primary goal and focus of the people at the acquirer.
And honestly this is probably fine. If the main business can't grow and there have been a few years of attempts to produce complementary businesses with no success, that's a good sign that the business should be moved into a "return money to owners" model.
Sadly, "return money to owners" ends more like the owner selling off the company and leaving all the workers under them in freefall. And people wonder why loyalty is dead.
Well, the workers already got paid for their time; the owner didn't for their time and (more importantly) risk.
No one wonders why loyalty is dead.
The owner got a big pay package from the sale on top of usually being one of the more highly compensated employees at such companies. What do you mean by "the owner didn't get paid"?
>No one wonders why loyalty is dead.
I see you missed the recent narrative of "Gen Z is lazy" and "most managers avoid hiring Gen Z" out there. I assure you many managers are baffled, bit blame the (relative) children instead of seeing how work culture has shifted since they were that age
This is correct. You're buying a cashflow. Bending Spoons has optimized their model for very specific types of cashflow enterprises to aggregate into their portfolio.
I use Harvest to track hours and expenses and to invoice my customers. Bending Spoons apparently bought them a while ago and just eliminated the shell company around Harvest.
Based on my experience with Evernote, I don't trust Bending Spoons, and I'm wondering if I should look for a different time-tracking and invoicing system.
I've been in the same boat as you and replaced it last year but still pay for harvest (grandfathered pricing) until I can be sure I don't need it. I'm almost up to renewal and haven't used it at all since trying app.solidtime.io
I'll be honest it's not as good as harvest. The mac app is a bit buggy, it's not as easy to add manual time, and you need to pay for pdf export. But having said that I've found the free version to cover 90% of my use of the paid version of harvest
I use Harvest for my freelance invoicing and started seeing the huge notice at the top of the app and was wondering how this was going to impact my stuff going forward. I'm also very leery having gone through a horrible Evernote experience.
If anybody has any good alternatives, I'm all ears.
Yes.
Terrible for those laid off but perhaps not for Evernote customers if it means there isn’t unwelcome feature creep.
Been a paiyng Evernote customer since its launch. I unsubscribed at the beginning of 2025 after 7/8 years of shitty releases, not fixing old bugs, and new useless features.
I don't user Evernote very often, but I have a bunch of stuff stored in there and use it basically in a read-only mode. For a long time I was able to get the $36 / year plan which I felt pretty good about. It was a great app and service which I didn't use very much, so that felt like a fair price and I felt good about supporting them at that level. Basically every time I opened Evernote, I was paying $2.
But then the price tripled and for me, it's too much. I'll pay $2 per session, but not $5.
I remember their CEO (Phil Libin I think) on their podcast explaining how they were building a 100 year company. I really wanted to believe that.
I use Obsidian now and like it, but it feels like they are going down the same path. They keep adding features that don't really fit the original editor-for-a-folder-of-markdown-files. I wish they would stop.
It's a bummer but the feature treadmill seems inescapable. Bending Spoons will probably be able to buy Obsidian for a very nice price in a few years and the Obsidian founders will do very well.
If everyone gets salaries and equity is paid for then everyone's done great. And then we can build another one, or an open source equivalent once all the money's been spent researching useful features, and then we're done.
Just unmitigated bug and software rot creep.
It's worse. When a company like this is "mature", they don't try to appeal to new users. They instead squeeze what they can out of the existing user base, because that user base is probably already dying off. This isn't about attaining a steady state business, its about seeing how much of the toothpaste you can still squeeze out the bottle before it crusts up.
This practice is derogatorily called "vulture capitalism" for a reason. I hope the remaining engineers are either lining up for retirement or networking around for their next gig.
> I don't understand this model. Such significant layoffs would indicate that there is no real appetite for expansion or growth.
To play devil's advocate, maybe there's a point where a product or service needs to stop evolving and just be.
I have a Vimeo account that's been on auto-resubscribe for years. I couldn't tell you a single feature they've added in the last 5 years, but they host my videos, collect stats, and let me send links to my friends, and that's really all I want.
> 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
In the 80's people who did this were known as "corperate raiders". Nowadays it's just called business.
"corporate raiders" are a definitely real thing.
That usually means stripping the company for parts. Bending Spoons is just trying to run the company sustainably.
Vimeo employed somewhere north of a thousand people a year ago with 28% being in the engineering team (according to random google results - this isn't an area I have personal knowledge of). If they dropped from around 300 people to 15 that sounds like gutting - not trimming.
They will be hiring up but not the same people. Bending Spoons tends to replace high silicon valley wages with high Italy wages which is a considerable saving.
[delayed]
Typical bean counters, firing all the people with institutional knowledge up front, and then hoping their cheaper labor can figure things out.
Meanwhile, the users are the ones who lose out. Classic.
It sounds like they're trying to extract as much money as possible from a SaaS subscription service that's no longer actually paying any devs.
From my perspective as a one-time (but no longer) paying user of evernote - WTF am I paying for monthly if not to support a dev team?
Seriously - I get that there are infra costs for some of the services, and I wouldn't mind paying those costs plus a reasonable upcharge, but I'm sure as fuck not going to pay a company $100+ a year subscription to store under a GB of data.
So now I host bookstack and I pay backblaze ~$0.22/m to back up all my notes, which is much closer to real costs for these services if they're not under development.
Genuine question, why not use a free Git service or something
I pay for Sourcehut now, but until recently I was using a free private GitHub account to sync my notes in Obsidian. It works fine and cost me nothing (at least nominally).
I've heard vulture capitalist used to refer to that too
Corporate raiders is a bit of a different concept. That implies a hostile takeover. Like aggressively buying up shares in order acquire a majority stake and set company policy against the wishes of other insiders.
Bending Spoons is what we'd call vulture capitalists which have and continue to exist. Basically they buy weakening businesses and carve them up for parts, selling anything of value and squeezing max revenue of whatever is left.
> Basically they buy weakening businesses and carve them up for parts, selling anything of value and squeezing max revenue of whatever is left.
People say this like it's a bad thing, but without "vulture capitalists", struggling companies would default and banks would attempt to do the same, except they are much worse at it and even more people would lose their jobs.
It's called butt cigar investing or corporate raiding.
They acquire startups and companies without a huge growth potential but modest cash flow and little profits.
They cut the operating expenses to the minimum and jack up the prices to sky rocket profits till their mathematical models will tell them they will profit on the investment.
Rinse and repeat.
Have there been any serious legal efforts to make this less profitable? It's very clearly detrimental to society.
SaaS is the detriment to society. Static feature software continually updated and changed to create a faux justification for $20 of your money a month, keeping you on an endless treadmill to in order to work with all your old data.
Sometime in the late 00's they realized people were still happily using software from the 90's, because it worked for their needs, and well, we can't have that...
Why would it be detrimental to society? Many companies have developed all the products they're likely to ever develop, so why would you maintain the same level of operational costs as when you expected growth? There's no guarantee that the prices charged before the acquisition were sustainable either.
They don't just maintain these products, they enshittify them to extract the maximum possible profit from captive users, until someone else comes in and build everything from scratch all over again.
This is crazy inefficient yet it's not captured in our economic theories, so we're essentially blind to it.
Not much you can do. The alternative is bankruptcy that does a similar thing to workers. But it at least doesn't let the company make blatant lies of a PR statement.
The main thing to do is make it so you can't just lay off people as easily as you can in the US for pretty much no reason. But it seems workers are still too divided to really come together and achieve such 9initiatives. Be it unions, pressuring their governments to make new laws, or simply chastising and boycotting companies who engage on such actions.
Private equity (what's being described here) has more political influence than "society" because money.
Society has more money and way more votes than PE. I'm going to quote A Bugs Life (1998) of all things here:
> Hopper: You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life! It's not about food, it's about keeping those ants in line.
In our case, it's more like a million to one
This is just how capitalism works in a competitive environment: it allocates capital as efficiently as possible.
I despise their business model, but it is what it is.
It really doesn't have to "be what it is". We can strive for actual change. But everyone's still too cushy for that, it seems.
In the Reagan loving greed of the 1980s this was considered vile, movies were made and the people that did it excluded from polite company.
HN: VC is a cancer, businesses don't need to grow forever at all costs, products can be finished, what we need is sustainable small companies
Also HN: No, not like that
Alright, so is vimeo finished product then?
Why not come out and say this?
Also another thing but other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699#46709164 points out how Vimeo wants to replace SV engineers with Italian engineers to save money.
They are a first and foremost private equity company, Don't forget. There's no loyalty to any group.
They don't replace engineers with engineers, they just put enough staff in place to leave the machine working.
And yes, they in-house the engineering part, but the fact they are Italian is just because Bending Spoons is Italian and their offices are in Milan.
Bending Spoons pays its own engineers very well, an entry level junior position starts at 75k+ euros, which in Italy is a senior+ engineer salary.
It shouldn't be surprising that different people on a discussion site have different opinions about the same thing.
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 engineer who is now a venture capital investor, respectfully, I think your beef is with capitalism, not with the institutional investors.
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 Equity (PE) fit.
Reminder that restructure often means a company working just fine, but whose assets outstrip what PE can buy it for, so they strip it to the bones. Or they leverage it with debt against assets then pay that money to themselves for consulting, account/hr services that they force the company to outsource to other PE companies. Nothing is 'created' through this process, now value added, nor it is healthy capitalism as the company could have continued fine without this added leveraged debt that was purely used to profit PE.
Imagine a world where you can't complain if something is directionally correct in what you want done.
Me: can you take out the trash? My kid: dumps trash on the front lawn.
Me: people are speeding a lot, can we do something about it? Cops: shoots anyone speeding in the face.
But I guess I can't say anything about it, because they're just doing what I want!
There are now more private equity funds in the USA than McDonalds. The maximum wealth extraction of every single thing in people's lives is not viable for a continuing healthy society.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/05/private-equity-consolidation...
An important clarification if you're not familiar with the industry: A PE firm will often have multiple funds.
There are not more PE firms than McDonalds in the USA.
The Bending Spoons business model is right out of the private equity playbook. Buy a business with good revenue, cut cost to turn this into a consistent revenue stream, generate annual returns.
This is not like making a small 20 person self funded company.
It’s almost as if HN were a community of voices instead of just one…
The Goomba Fallacy strikes once again
This fallacy's pretty cool and first time I Heard of it!
Do you know other fallacies like this which are less known but as interesting (that you or others might know of) probably?
Thanks for sharing the name of the phenomenon! I was not aware of it before.
Yes, we're are all individuals! Yes, we're all different!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY
(I'm not.)
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"
You're assuming all or most paying customers are paying attention. That is sometimes not the case. For example folks/businesses who forgot they signed up. Alternatively it could be that the cost to switch is too painful.
What if there isn't a feasible path for expansion and growth? Vimeo already has contracting revenue, it's either in the maturity or decline phase.
Some customers will churn, some will stay, Bending Spoons are the masters of this model so will have made an assumption on how revenue will change across the next 5-10 years+, but I would assume that they aren't forecasting extreme growth, and instead are calculating that net profit can be changed from c$30m to c$139m within existing revenue, so if they can keep revenue at/near current levels without growth, they can end up with a much more profitable business.
Bear in mind that same revenue doesn't necessarily mean the same number of customers - it can also mean raising prices and having less customers. Bending Spoons might estimate that if they double prices, half their customers might leave - this would still be BRILLIANT for profit, as while revenue would stay the same, some costs would half, and thus profit might jump from c$140m to c$250m based on some napkin math!
For example, they bought the German hiking and cycling app Komoot. It's a mature app in terms of functionality, with a stable user base. There's little chance of hypergrowth with this type of app. It's also complicated to switch apps because transferring routes, collections, photos, etc. to another service is difficult.
They laid off 90% of the teams. They migrated the app to their infrastructure to pool costs. Since then, there has been no further development of the service.
They are cost killers of the internet.
> Since then, there has been no further development of the service.
That's not true, the website and app both got a major redesign after acquisition.
It's also complicated to switch apps because transferring routes, collections, photos, etc. to another service is difficult.
Not really, sync everything through Strava, and then drop whichever service you don't want. Basically any bike ride I've done in the past decade is on 3+ services because they all sync.
I think by routes he means the trails database, not user activity
Oh I can do it but I am not really representative of the average user.
Plus I have a lot of points of interest, note, picture, that I could request via gdpr but not easy to reuse and couldn't be imported into Strava.
Strava isn't better than Komoot on this regard.
> customers of a depreciating SaaS product surely churn after a 1-3 years, so they wouldn't make enough of a return
You might think that. Then there's Earthlink and AOL still collecting $5 or $6/mo per mailbox as their cash cow.
They recently bought AOL too!
I imagine a lot of companies have contracts with Vimeo and switching costs are real. They'll likely stick with Vimeo if they manage to maintain their offering to the level it exists at today. In the long term I think it guarantees death but they will be able to extract plenty of money before that happens.
They did the same thing with Komoot and other apps. I don't understand where the money comes from and how they are planning to keep this portfolio growing.
It seems to all be debt financed, i.e. just a private equity model slightly specialized for tech. The "innovation" is that Bending Spoons has an in-house engineering team it seems they try to keep constant yet scale out to all the acquisitions. I hadn't looked into them much before, but https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma... is an interesting report -- though not focused on the finance side.
It's a vampire economy. No one has any new ideas
(For Komoot) Did they, though? I am aware of the layoffs, but after that they slightly redesigned the app, collected the poll for next year's requested features, the lifetime maps option is still there to buy etc. If not for HN, I wouldn't have noticed any change in the direction that it's going in.
I suspect that the VAST majority of users want their saas tools to do today what they did yesterday, and so stopping active development of new features is actually a positive - no sudden Liquid Ass is going to appear in a program in maintenance mode.
> appetite for expansion or growth
This requires reinvesting profits into the company. It sounds like they choose not to do that, but instead switched to cashing in.
If the profits are stable and supported by a fraction of the workforce, then why keep the rest around? Clearly a shitty thing to do, but business-wise it makes sense.
My best guess is that a part of it is replacing US (or in this case Israeli) devs with much cheaper Italian/European ones, earning ~a quarter of their US counterparts and working longer hours, as Bending Spoons has an extremely competitive hiring process, and is probably the highest paying tech company in Italy
Actually they're paying very competitive salaries. For example: https://jobs.bendingspoons.com/positions/67c6dc18c70c531d6db....
I can't see any salaries there but presumably they're going to be competitive for Europe, which is roughly half the competitive salary in America.
There are plenty of competent devs outside America. I can't see any reason why you'd want to pay American salaries if you're a global company.
They are also very good at pooling their infrastructure and software stack. This accounts for a significant portion of the costs.
This is just my personal opinion, but if they didnt change the price of Evernote and never made any changes, I probably would remain a customer for a very very long time. There is a high switching cost for me to use any app to move all my docs, and notes.
I dont know if the same can be said for Vimeo, though
I would still be a happy Evernote customer if they hadn't rewritten all the apps from scratch.
One of the advantages of their business model is that it's low risk. Find a business you can get cheap enough, shut off all investment related to growth or product improvement, and use the product's moat to get as much cash as possible from current customers. Business doesn't have to be about expanding into new markets or growing revenue. If I had to guess, there's not much of a market for the companies they're acquiring because everyone else is looking for growth.
So it's sort of a "white-dwarf maker" company. Pick a company with a steady cashflow, eject all the fluff that made it a big star, and collect the remaining energy / cash until the core cools down. The end state is a cold slab of iron, and nothing new is going to happen to the acquired business ever since, but the plentiful (if dwindling) cashflow will be collected without any obstacles.
Sometimes solutions end up solving problems that don't need constant featuritis.
Maybe they're deciding to maximize locked in revenue and margin.
Laying off so many people doesn't seem signal the greatest confidence to the market, maybe they'll explain it as some kind of efficiency alignment.
After all, Twitter is still operating on some level after 75% layoffs?
The growth comes from increasing subscription value, not from adding users. They bet that the platform is sticky enough for the users that they’ll slowly boil the frog until there’s no more equity left.
It is called bait and switch.
And the company name referring to bending spoons (Uri Geller) gives away the way they see themselves.
According to Wikipedia, the name is a reference to that scene from The Matrix.
Bait and switch is something completely different.
If you started buying Evernote 10 or 15 years ago, and use it a lot, then Evernote gets acquired and the terms change, that's shitty but is not remotely a "bait and switch."
Are these hostile takeovers? buying a competitor out through a PE deal could be cheap relative to competing with them.
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.
Basically a loan.
What I understand from listening to the management from various podcasts, it was a mix of shipping the most minimum impactful features with the leanest product team needed and then jacking up the price every year for the people that can't move away from these products.
Its just private equity for software
The long tail of revenue is not only a substantial sum, but decays more steadily than growth. This is a low risk investment that still turns a profit.
It's also not their only investment or even necessarily their own money. Individual holding companies don't tell you much about the larger pool of money they come from.
you're absolutely right, they're not positioned for expansion or growth. you're very close to seeing the private capital dark pattern that's become a huge part of our economics lately. let me illustrate for you how they make money by decoupling the company's success from the investors' success
1) borrow a bunch of money to buy the company - this is called a leveraged buyout
2) once you're in control, have the company assume the debt you took on in order to buy it. you as the buyer are now free and clear, and the company is now responsible for paying back the money you borrowed to buy it. the end result of this transaction is that the company now owns stock that is less desirable because the company is more leveraged
3) make huge cuts everywhere and use the money "saved" by divesting from your own future to pay yourself as a consultant
The company is now in the extremely fragile position of not being able to spend to respond to the market because all of their income is going to servicing debt and paying the members of the private capital group. the "investors" aren't actually invested at all because even if the stock they hold becomes worthless they didn't pay anything for it in the first place, the company did. the thing limps along for as long as it can keep bringing in some small amount of income for the "investors" to skim off the top of, then it inevitably dies like anything riddled with parasites will, the company declares bankruptcy and they sell the copper out of the walls in order to pay back the loan used to take the company private in the first place
Vimeo isn't really SaaS though.
Of course it is?
Look at the companies they're acquiring - it's 100% about getting user data and tertiary monetization, and they're making bank. They couldn't care less about what the companies they buy supposedly do.
This is the same model Computer Associates used to run back in the day. Find product with marginal profit but dedicated user base, cut costs, increase pricing and milk it until the next product comes along.
Seems to be very common nowadays for PE
Is this any different than the SaaS business model, except a 3rd party bought the company to strip it?
Everything SaaS these days, hell every subscription these days seems to involve product enshittification + rising pricing. Is this the end game of the financialization of everything?
To be honest, how much staff do you need to run a file transfer service.
I’d love to see how this impacts their bottom line
Sure short term it’s more “focused” and “greedy”
But the damage to the community and acquisition through a free tier must drop those numbers in an impactful way
Oh, it will - but they don't care. I'm sure they'll eek out 1.5b from their 1.3b acquisition and be happy as clams.
It certainly is depressing to look at what was built and what could be made of it but most of the folks with money lack the creativity or skill to actually build a lasting business. Just burn it down and rob it on the way out - such is the modern economy.
I mean, Broadcom / VmWare is basically doing the same, just more for enterprise level software.
OTOH - if Vimeo has given up all hope of further new features, then giving current users the chance to keep going isn't completely evil, even if it's at a higher price. VmWare is basically doing the same, and lots of customers are leaving, and those who aren't may still eventually do so, etc. (Edit: what if the alternative was Vimeo shutting down?)
Think of vintage car parts - if you absolutely want to restore that '30s Ford (keep using 20+ year old software) - someone offering an OEM-equivalent part for 3x what it cost back in the day (even adjusted for inflation) may actually still be good value - because what other alternatives are there?
Now - does it suck for the employees? Sure. One thing an econ prof said back in the late 90s (who loved to guest-lecture to CS/SWEng students): your job as a software person is to put other people out of work by automating stuff they used to do manually. Are you ok with that? Because if you're not, you should go into a different industry right now. Feels much worse when it's programmers getting the axe due to finance types, but not unexpected.
It's interesting to think about which current companies will be acquired by BS in the future. Evernote and WeTransfer were huge ten years ago.
Elon Musk acquired Twitter and fired %80 of the employees and it was just fine.
I bet there's so many more people that can be let go from all tech industry. It's mature and product discovery is mostly locked behind advertisement so what's left is exploitation.
If you think about it, as long as you don't mingle much with the product that works it keeps working indefinitely. It's no different than running Excel or WhatsApp, especially when the servers are managed by 3rd party providers these days.
Losing tens of billions of dollars on a company now ruined down to single digit billions of revenue is a weird thing to describe as "just fine". That looks like abject failure as a business.
It's fine because revenue is not important. Elon Musk has made that clear openly and repeatedly.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-misquotes-princess...
https://people.com/elon-musk-tells-disney-other-advertisers-...
If it wasn’t for all the political histrionics we would all be celebrating Elon’s amazing abilities.
An interesting aspect is that they acquire US companies, where it is legally possible to lay off employees. In Italy, where BS is based, firing employees is much more difficult
This is potentially disastrous to content on the web. Vimeo provides a platform-as-a-service known as OTT, that powers well known branded streaming services, like Criterion Channel, HistoryHit, Dropout, DIRTVision, Speed 51, URLTV, Armflix, MHz Choice, Trinity Broadcasting Network, SommTV, IndieFlix, BroadwayHD, Full Moon Features, etc.
No, not the Criterion Channel, too! Hopefully they can migrate to a different service without too much fuss.
Watermelon+, too!
I assume they’re pulling a Broadcom here - the big OTT customers will not be able to easily escape, if at all, without major effort.
Little folks can run, but Bending Spoons won’t care here. They want to milk the enterprise video agreements.
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!)
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?
Building video streaming is easy. Selling video streaming is difficult.
damn framerate looks good
Probably they will also fire remaining 15 people and move everything to Italy.
Their strategy is to
- fire everyone,
- give product to very small but ambitious team of people
- cut free version of the product to minimum even if does not make a sense to have a free version such as 5 video upload per month etc (they are doing this just to avoid backlash from users and community)
- use every possible dark pattern exist to get every penny from the users
The strategy is simple.
- Buy a product that has name recognition overshadowed by a monopolistic company and the leadership is trying to make a pivot and failing terribly.
- Leadership is aggressively rebranding to appease a takeover. They keep doing the most basic forbes council op-ed title moves to make the product appealing.
- It is not a parts-shop, the team is used to sense of "eh what you are going to do about it". It is a signboard and patents that you can use to hostage bigger companies.
- The takeover company has figured out maintenance engineering. You buy the product, you cull the team because they are not a growth engine. You focus on maintenance, and you milk the brand. Any eastern European or LATAM team can approve an automated version bump PR and send out "let's jump on a call" email.
Heck, even Tai fricking Lopez bought Radio Shack under similar pretense.
I have no hope for Vimeo.
BS took over Evernote and I cancelled the subscription after a year. Their idea of value for the customer vs the price is not realistic.
Bending Spoons: Wow, they gave us money for a year!
Just realized the acronym for Bending Spoons is BS. Seemingly appropriate.
In my youth -- the mid-90s -- one of the most scathing slurs our circle of friends could bestow on a person was that they were 'a spoon-bender'.
Uri Geller being a … well, this is a family site. Finish that yourself.
This is the Bending Spoons model: acquire companies that have some core user base and traction with VC money.
Lay off the entirety of the staff. Focus on price modeling.
Depending on the particular software they may or may not invest some internal engineering in keeping the money flowing.
Rinse and repeat.
Italian LinkedIn hails them as one of the most innovative companies, whereas to me they seem to fall in the butt cigar business.
I just recently found that Vimeo is hosting MST3K, with free playback of the original episodes (Joel and Mike).
So for selfish reasons this makes me sad. I'm guessing MST3K will need to find another host, perhaps with less generous terms.
Edit: I really hope that doesn't mean RiffTrax will also have problems.
Hmmm... I just learned that mst3k has even more moving parts at the moment: https://www.byteseu.com/1717645/
They are also the backend for Dropout, which has just shy of 1m paid subscribers.
So I understand your selfish sadness feelings.
https://vimeo.com/customers/dropout
That's partially due to history: Vimeo was split out of CollegeHumor, and CollegeHumor became Dropout. (Both were part of IAC and were spun out/sold off.)
Dropout originally only used Vimeo for video distribution. They switched to Vimeo for OTT only after running their own with a team of developers and finding it to be an unexpectedly hard task. I think I learned that in the Sam Reich Hank Green Decoder interview.
Well, some good news is that if you've ever wanted to build a new video streaming platform there are a bunch of companies that'd love to sign up.
I'm sure dropout et all will be able to continue with their same level of functionality in the short term but I can imagine the bills they'll be receiving will be escalating quickly.
Dropout's CEO has been pretty open about the company, and he described their early efforts as 'Brutal'
> No! We tried, but people don’t realize this. The first rendition of Dropout was built on Vimeo OTT’s API, but it was our own product. We employed something like eight sophisticated engineers at IAC to build our own product around it, and it was brutal. Which is to say, it’s just very hard to do very well. And these were great engineers.
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/781331/hank-green-sam-reich...
And Criterion :(
Can someone in the know explain Bending Spoons?
I routinely see job postings by them in my local dev circles, significantly above market rate, and the offers seem to keep reappearing forever. Their site namedrops known apps and services like wetransfer but otherwise seems to be just buzzwords.
Are they VC buying existing IPs? What is exactly going on?
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.
I guess that companies which get bought might be a bit "overstaffed" from the startup phase or because planned further development. If one removes this staff, you need less people to minimally maintain a running app. But itcs just a guess, you'll loose knowhow too, when drastically reducing your staff.
They hire at higher pay because they want people that can/are willing to do the job of multiple people
They are private equity, which is where your company ends up if they fail to 10x and/or go public
I describe Bending Spoons as an Italian private equity company. The CEO openly admits that the business model involves buying companies and trying to squeeze as much profit out of them.
Bending Spoons did the same thing with Evernote. Laid off US staff. Closed their Redwood City offices and hired a dev team in Italy to take over.
Small correction, they didn't hire a dev team in Italy to take over. They are an Italian company with their own engineering.
Wonder how many of these people were still at the company: https://vimeo.com/173714
I just realized that video is old enough to vote.
Yes bending spoon will stop growing these companies and stop add features. These role will be just replaced by engineers and employee in Italy, where bending spoon is form, and where people cost many times less than in the US. Italy is like a higher quality India in a sense.
Bending Spoons pays very high rates for their own engineers.
Of course if your comparison is Bay Area or Zurich, there's no match, but if you exclude such outliers (where the compensation is what it is due to the insane costs of living and competition for talent) they are paying rates higher than pretty much any other part of the world.
They pay rates that are closer if not higher than London or Munich averages (which are very high).
> Italy is like a higher quality India in a sense.
Italian salaries [0] aren't significantly different from Indian salaries [1] in tech, especially in major hubs like Bangalore [2].
Also, a European dismissing Indian developer quality doesn't bode well as your governments are signing an FTA [3] and a security and defense partnership [4] with India in a couple days.
If companies like Google [5], Broadcom [6], and Nvidia [7] can afford to pay EU level salaries in India and decided to heavily invest in hiring in India, it shows that Indian talent can't be underestimated.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy
[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/india
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/eu-nears-historic-trade-...
[4] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/eu-proceed-security-defe...
[5] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
[6] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/broadcom/salaries/software-...
[7] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/nvidia/salaries/software-en...
4 months:
Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
This comment from e98cuenc seems extremely prescient.
> Everybody loves to hate BendingSpoon, but there is a lesson here. They consistently rewrite the code of their acquisitions with a tiny team, fire everybody and are able to maintain and improve the product. They basically skip everything but engineers, and they are kept at a minimum. Feedback from users is the products they take over 1) become more expensive, 2) they ship features waaaay faster. It looks like next generation private equity, and my guess is more houses will start copying them
I'm discovering Bending Sppon withn this thread, and I think they really got their business right. I hope they IPO soon
Enshitification As A Service (EaaS)
Considering what Bending Spoons did to Meetup.com after buying the site, I wouldn't trust them to improve a product. Here are some of the issues I noticed.
- Group searches consistently return irrelevant results across multiple cities. As a test, I tried searching for soccer groups in Dallas, Texas, and one of the results was for a backgammon group. Users will also often have a hard time finding events I host on Meetup. - An organizer being charged $357.98 per year to host a group on Meetup.com. - The pages for my Meetup events are full of clutter and duplicate data, while relevant information such as RSVPs is hidden. - My Meetup.com home page is full of pointless distractions, including a banner asking me to become an organizer when I already organize events. - When editing an event, Meetup shows an option to generate a description by using generative AI. Generative AI is a scam and I try to avoid it.
That being said, you are right that they are becoming more expensive and ship features faster. I describe Bending Spoons as Italian private equity.
As a heavy Meetup user, I can say that Bending Spoons absolutely fixed some glaring, long-standing bugs. But their massive price increases have really driven people away, and some of their attempts to grab more money (Meetup+) really rankled a lot of people. Also, search still sucks.
Honestly, I wish more businesses would do this. It turns out that grandiose dreams make grandiose staffing, but a lot of great business ideas would thrive and bloom if the gardeners would just prune them back more often.
Wonder what this means for vimeo/psalm, the static analyzer for PHP, which has recently seen some new life breathed into it after long neglect. Psalm has credible alternatives in PHPStan and now Mago, but it would still be a loss to see it go unmaintained again.
Psalm creator here!
Vimeo has not contributed any code to Psalm since I left in 2021.
Psalm is still in good hands!
I was wondering what I used by this company because I saw the name yesterday. It's Harvest, and I was thinking yesterday how the sign up and pricing page seems more or less abandoned. Guess it's time to roll my own version
What is Vimeo for as compared to YouTube or self-hosting video files?
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 terrified and literally scrambling for a backup plan.
Youtube also doesn't let you replace an already-uploaded video while maintaining the URL, which is incredibly painful if you need to edit a posted video for whatever reason.
Similar boat. Would appreciate hearing of options you end up considering.
If it's a small number of videos, specifically ones that are unlikely to go viral, then a self-hosted or externally paid hosted peertube site might be a good option.
Vimeo you manage your brand and presentation. YouTube you have little control over where or how your video is presented. Vimeo also provides VOD for some large brands and media companies.
Yeah, it's this. It's a hosting platform, not a social media platform. You see a ton of people who have short films, art projects, commercial portfolios and stuff like that hosted at Vimeo. They don't need/want comments, discoverability, or to deal with things like automated DRM takedowns. Clean, simple, video hosting.
I built my own course presentation platform (for my own courses, not as a thing I resell), but I wasn't going to host my own videos. I use Vimeo. It's great: I upload to them, embed an iframe, job done. I don't care about maintaining a video player or bandwidth or subtitles or…
Literally the week after I launched my thing, they got bought. I have no idea what I'll do if they go to shit.
I was surprised to see BS bought Harvest back in July. Was very low key but rumors of large price increases already surfacing
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454175
This is bad news for streaming platforms like Dropout, that use Vimeo as their backend.
New definition of "bending over" haha
Why isn't Vimeo listed on the Bending Spoons website? https://bendingspoons.com/products
Not sure I understand the point as my switching cost off Vimeo is negligible apart from finding a competitor.
Slack next?
Can someone give me some examples of private equity firms that aren't driven purely by avarice? I have a bet going with a colleague.
Your question doesn't really make sense. What business isn't driven by the goal of making money ultimately?
Every nonprofit.
If you are an LP a their fund this is what you would expect. Hate the player not the game.
Komoot gets shittier every week too. Takes way too many taps to plan a route, search still sucks, "go premium" in your face all the time.
Anything else worth considering other than youtube (or self-hosting if scale isn't an issue)?
i have made https://codekeep.io for storing snippets, have similar features to evernote. all users will get free pro membership now. if you are thinking about moving , please consider codekeep too.
Was this name inspired by Uri Geller?
More likely The Matrix, but the whole "psychic spoon bending" thing was of course made popular by Geller.
Thank you for reminding me I had an Evernote account. I just deleted it. Its been shit since Bleeding Spork took it over.
I just cancelled my account that I've had for about 10 years... maybe longer. I barely used it, but it's now >$100/year for my plan. I had maybe 15 videos uploaded that I would share occasionally.
I used to be an indie filmmaker and used it to host features when nothing else could. I’ve been paying since 2008. The price would go up but they were great so I let it be.
I guess I’ll be exporting everything today.
The client review capabilities was pretty nice when I used it once. It's not that the feature stopped working, but after COVID I had to pivot career.
This is actually my favorite Vimeo video of all time. I wish they would have made a TV show. This was just the pilot, but it's hilarious.
https://vimeo.com/86146321?share=copy&fl=cl&fe=ci
What I've always found unusual (but not necessarily bad) about BS is ... how come a company that came out of nowhere starts buying tech companies here and there? Billion dollar deals? In cash?
It can't be just a few "enthusiastic" random guys (as they portray), you need a lot of capital to pull that off.
IMO they're someone's family office with an obfuscated name.
Edit: and my comment suddenly goes to the bottom despite having several upvotes ... definitely not sus.
The founder recently went on invest like the best and explained it top to bottom, they started as a broke agency and grew from there quite fast. I forget the details but I would imagine they are financed quite heavily by LP's
https://colossus.com/episode/luca-ferrari-building-bending-s...
Someone has actual financial plan. I know a unknown thing for VC and startups. If they do and can calculate reasonable rat of return on acquisition it makes sense for lot of investors. Especially when they start to have proven record.
Having paying customers, stopping giving things away for free and then cutting costs like wages and moon shots projects. A software starts to be tech again. That is marginal unit costs really do work.
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
They're a Milan, Italy company so don't get a lot of visibility in the US.
Money laundering?
This is AGI.