AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

https://www.axios.com/2025/10/29/aol-bending-spoons-deal

by jmsflknr • 9 months ago

287 272 9 months ago

axios.com

neom• 9 months ago

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

Interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476

JohnClark1337• 9 months ago

So companies go there to die

jimnotgym5• 9 months ago

Another way to look at it: When a companies bubble bursts, when people realise that it is just a note taking app (or whatever), and that its never going to grow 10x again, VC investors want shot of it.

Without a constant stream of new investment, the company simply can't afford to be loaded up with SV staff producing features that nobody will pay for. Bending Spoons change the business model to 'normal business'. They move to much cheaper European staff, stop work on nonsense 'features', concentrate instead on servicing their existing customers with a stable platform and well thought out incremental advances.

So they take businesses that are dying because nobody will give them free money any more, and make them into real sustainable businesses that can stand on their own two feet?

kbar13• 9 months ago

holy smokes this is worse for consumers and employees than being bought by PE

pavel_lishin2• 9 months ago

In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote.[19] The acquisition was concluded in January 2023.[20] In July 2023, Evernote laid off all of its existing staff and announced it would relocate to Europe to be closer to Bending Spoons' headquarters.[21]

Damn.

marstall• 9 months ago

How does that possibly work? How do they continue with zero of the staff?

xp844• 9 months ago

This is exactly how European companies do when they acquire American ones, especially "Tech" companies that have well-paid technical staff. You can hire in Eastern Europe for far less, and can hire in Western Europe for still a significant bargain compared to what engineers and associated people make in California - plus, dealing with an 8+ hour time difference is brutal compared to keeping it all in Europe.

A friend I know is going through such an acquisition, funny thing is it's a European company acquiring his, but owned by an American PE firm. The American PE firm knows that cutting-edge tech is developed by expensive engineers on the West Coast, but when it's time to milk a more mature company for cash flow, you want cheaper European staff.

qingcharles• 9 months ago

I'm still waiting to see how they complete destroy Vimeo they just bought.

dancc• 9 months ago

Someone wrote about Bending Spoons' history and playbook:

https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma...

I enjoyed this part:

No On-Call Rotations: Bending Spoons aims to build systems so reliable that they eliminate the need for on-call rotations. This is unusual in the tech industry, where on-call duties are standard to promptly address system issues.

For most of their products, they have no on-call schemes at all. Engineers are encouraged to think through all corner cases to ensure robustness, knowing there is no fallback like an on-call team.

everfrustrated6• 9 months ago

I wonder if that's got lost in translation somewhere. I can understand not having on-call operations teams (an anti-pattern) but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Unless they mean to say its part of all devs job expectations and not a paid extra.

hamdingers• 9 months ago

Seems reasonable if they're putting most of their acquisitions into maintenance mode. In my experience the vast majority of outages are caused by bad deploys of new code or configuration.

Copenjin• 9 months ago

Is anyone surprised that you can build stuff that require no support for years? I do, know people that do. Thinking about robustness is the default path.

croisillon• 9 months ago

oh wow and they got Vimeo and WeTransfer too!?

dotcoma3• 9 months ago

And Komoot and Meetup, and of course Evernote.

A_Duck• 9 months ago

And clearly they're hard at work whitewashing that page... check the Talk Page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bending_Spoons

internetter• 9 months ago

Bending Spoons is correctly following the [[Wikipedia:Conflict of interest]] process. They are pointing out information which could be improved and are requesting an independent party confirm they are correct. They disclosed their conflict. All companies are allowed and encouraged to do this. Not many do.

Source: I'm a wikipedia editor unaffiliated with bending spoons.

Edit: I see another complaint about IP editing. I am looking into this.

mooreds• 9 months ago

https://archive.is/Ouc0B

alberth• 9 months ago

At one time, AOL had a market cap of $200B

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-intern...

bdcravens• 9 months ago

When Verizon sold it and Yahoo, they were sold for less than 2% of their peak market cap

https://www.axios.com/2021/05/04/verizon-aol-yahoo-valuation...

ec109685• 9 months ago

That is a silly comparison. The alibaba assets of Yahoo were carved out before it was sold to Verizon was worth $58.62B.

ascagnel_2• 9 months ago

I always look at the AOLTimeWarner merger as the thing that broke them, distracting them at the moment they should've been prepping to roll out broadband. I also look at that merger through the lens of "don't fight a land war in Asia" in terms of breaking empires -- "don't let your company acquire Warner Bros.".

JustExAWS• 9 months ago

AOL did exactly the right thing. They knew their stock was overvalued and did some shady accounting to prop their stock up until the acquisition and it immediately crashed.

How could they “get into broadband”? They weren’t going to be able to create the last mile infrastructure. We see how that worked out for Google.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...

bsimpson• 9 months ago

At the turn of the millennium, they were valuable enough to buy Warner Bros.

everfrustrated6• 9 months ago

We'll probably be saying the same about a lot of AI companies as well....

dylan604• 9 months ago

at the end of the last tech bubble, Herman Miller chairs were available for cheap. wonder what the score from the ashes will come this round?

NickC25• 9 months ago

what does AOL even do these days? genuinely curious.

tartoran• 9 months ago

I wasn't even aware they were still around until a couple of days ago I received an email from an aol.com domain. Best bet is they're just a dead mall.

mikestew• 9 months ago

It wasn't until the end of last month that they finally turned off dialup:

https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discont...

And I have people in my contacts whose active email ends in "@aol.com".

ascagnel_2• 9 months ago

At least for my parents, there was a real fear of losing access to their 20+ year old email address if they stopped paying. I don't know if it was founded on anything, but it got them to keep paying through a decade-plus of non-AOL broadband.

Jordan-117• 9 months ago

In addition to ads on their web properties, they still have a sizeable (though aging) userbase that they milk for unnecessary services. I cancelled my mom's AOL subscription years ago and they were charging something like $25/mo when the only thing she used was their (free) email service -- though of course during the cancellation they touted things like antivirus and ID theft protection that she apparently had access to. It's a legacy of when people paid them for their internet access -- no telling how many retirees (or estates) continue paying each month.

underlipton4• 9 months ago

"Unexamined legacy subscriptions paid without a thought," is another way of saying, "Has too much money." If this is a widespread Boomer phenomenon, it explains a lot. I still kick myself for spending 6x MVNO pricing on my cell phone plan with a legacy carrier whose features I didn't need.

pndy• 9 months ago

They got own branded Chromium with extra features: https://youtu.be/z_NpZmk61Qo

flakiness• 9 months ago

This podcast episode has a couple of guests from that company. Recommend to whoever interested in this company: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...

dep_b• 9 months ago

If I would work at AOL I would start polishing up my resumé. They usually fire 80% after acquisition.

everfrustrated6• 9 months ago

AOL was already owned by private equity so I'd imagine not much left to cut.

jjice• 9 months ago

I don't know much about Bending Spoons, but I associate them with Evernote now. Not sure if Evernote's downfall is associated with them or predates them.

I never used Evernote, that's just what I hear. From what I've seen over the years, people don't like the way the product has moved and they really don't like the frequent price increases for not product change.

avrionov• 9 months ago

Evernote was in decline in more than 5 years before their sale to Bending Spoons. The sale didn't improve anything, because Bending Spoons act as private equity. They layoffs, moving the job to cheaper locations and increasing the prices.

4ndrewl• 9 months ago

Someone's got to cover the costs of all those non-paying users.

20 years from Bending Spoons will be the final resting place of Anthropic.

ekjhgkejhgk• 9 months ago

For all the shit that PE gets, what you described is probably the best outcome possible from the POV of shareholders. If done well it should increase earnings per share. It's perhaps the best you can hope for in a situation where the company has been in decline for 5 years and you have no levers to effect change as a small shareholder.

This only works profitably because the users let themselves be stepped on, of course. But then again users who put their notes into a remote company's computer are those kind of people.

DHPersonal• 9 months ago

Bending Spoons has taken at least one of the apps I’ve used and stuffed them full of subscription models in a pretty blatant attempt to wring as much money out of the existing user base before the app becomes obsolete.

bonzini• 9 months ago

It's quite likely that the app was bleeding money before. Whether they're wringing money or being responsible with their finances I can't tell, but consider that the alternative could have been no app at all.

JSR_FDED• 9 months ago

Evernote sucked by that time. Their user-driven support forums were so obviously a ploy to string along users while nothing changed. As a dev it was glaringly obvious to me they were milking not investing. Moving to Apple Notes was the simplest and best decision.

rhetocj232• 9 months ago

Bending Spoons is a joke company that buys company with hopes to restructure them to meet some nonsensical financial numbers made up in an excel spreadsheet.

ramon156• 9 months ago

Still have no idea why they have so many job applications, they don't actually hire.

lormayna• 9 months ago

AFAIK (I am Italian) they have a very long and difficult hiring process, comparable to a FAANG.

ChrisArchitect2• 9 months ago

Everytime I hear Bending Spoons it's just ugggh. Too much money. It feels so predatory. And for what? Absorb and abuse the userlist or whatever they're actually trying to get ahold of.

nticompass• 9 months ago

RIP AOL: 1983 - 2025

rootbear2• 9 months ago

Verizon handed their email service over to AOL some years ago. I wonder if this will be the end for my unused @verizon.com account.

mattmaroon4• 9 months ago

Somehow, my very first email, Hotmail (which was the only option when I got it really) is the only one from the 90s that is still kicking.

dotcoma3• 9 months ago

Yahoo! Mail is still working

doodlebugging• 9 months ago

Earthlink remains great.

Macha2• 9 months ago

AOL mail and Verizon mail had both been migrated to the yahoo mail backend when I left the company. This one kind of feels like a weird acquisition to me as that’s the story for a lot of AOL properties these days - a differently branded front end to the same services as their Yahoo counterpart. It would surely be much more costly to run AOL outside Yahoo as now you need to spread the costs of maintaining all that across fewer users

rootbear2• 9 months ago

Ah, yes, you are correct, I had forgotten it was Yahoo that took over Verizon mail.

WarOnPrivacy• 9 months ago

Verizon handed their email service over to AOL some years ago. I wonder if this will be the end for my unused @verizon.com account.

Yeah. I have some biz clients with long-held verizon.net email accounts. Ever since 2017, verizon.net has felt like some barely-there netherverse, where the laws of physics keep upending themselves for funsies.

In this analogy, the laws of physics are pop/imap/smtp settings (and auth req), which aren't at all well-tethered. I suspect the engineers have the server settings printed on D&D dice; I think they reroll their mail servers whenever the game isn't exciting enough.

So what happens to those biz email accounts now - now that the entire AOL snowglobe has been picked up by a different corporate toddler? I have no way to tell.

ChrisArchitect2• 9 months ago

Press release: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251029086811/en/Ben...

jacobgkau3• 9 months ago

People usually mention Evernote when Bending Spoons is brought up, but I also know them as purchasing Meetup (after it was already sort of struggling) and, more recently, entering an agreement to purchase Vimeo (of which I'm a paid user).

AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Yahoo!. Some of the still-relevant tech news sites like TechCrunch and Engadget were apparently moved from AOL to being directly under Yahoo! a few years ago. So I'm not too worried about AOL, but it's interesting how often I've heard about Bending Spoons in relation to brands I know over the past few years.

(Edit: AOL deleted all of my childhood emails back in the 2010s-- on an account that had previously been part of a paid AOL family subscription for years-- after I failed to sign into my account for more than 6 months, which also contributes to my current feeling that it's dead to me.)

jrochkind1• 9 months ago

It sounds like Bending Spoons is where old tech products go to die? I guess that's private equity for you.

dangus2• 9 months ago

That seems to be the opposite of what the article suggests, they seem to hold on long-term and invest in technology improvements.

cestith• 9 months ago

I’ve heard the same evaluation of SoftBank, IBM, and Micro Focus/OpenText/Rocket Software. There’s some truth in that, but you can still get Visual Cobol even after a number of ownership changes. https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/cobol/visual-c...

zaptheimpaler• 9 months ago

Understandably people don't like Bending Spoons - they fired the whole dev team on Evernote, and the price has gone way up too.. but as a user I have to say Evernote the product has gotten better and better since the acquisition. They've improved performance and have great new features every month.

sauercrowd• 9 months ago

I think the reality is most of these are already dead, and a PE firm taking over is giving them one more chance

al_borland2• 9 months ago

Yahoo tried that business model and it didn’t go too well for them. Maybe we’ll see Bending Spoons but Tumblr and Flickr next.

bigbuppo• 9 months ago

They're the CA/Broadcom of as-a-service.

insane_dreamer• 9 months ago

They bought Komoot recently.

7moritz7• 9 months ago

They are digital private equity essentially

vjvjvjvjghv• 9 months ago

Bending Spoons are the GOAT enshittifiers. Meetup has become a mess where you constantly get popups for their premium accounts and the price changes almost every week. The site is also quite buggy

jacobgkau3• 9 months ago

Bending Spoons bought Meetup in Janaury 2024. I recall Meetup's pricing getting crappified before that, and their website's always been a mess. So imo, we can't point to Bending Spoons as the cause of that, necessarily.

(This is a similar story to Vimeo; they've been forcing a pricing scheme update gradually over the past year, and now Bending Spoons is buying them. I'm sure some people will get the timeline mixed up since it's so close and claim that Bending Spoons raised the prices.)

Shared404• 9 months ago

Apollo Global Management

Oh hey, the company that orchestrated my first layoff!

Highly recommend Plunder (ISBN: 978-1541702103) for those who want to learn more about the enshittification these companies bring.

acomjean• 9 months ago

Meetup.. the promise of meetup was the organizers pay a fee so the members don’t have too.

My partner organized one a decade ago.

I’m still a member of a couple but now they’re really going after group members with ads and upsells. It still works but has become kind of icky.

Bending spoons, the name just sends up red flags as parlor trickery.

riffraff4• 9 months ago

I'm pretty sure the name is after the scene in "the matrix" (there is no spoon etc).

jacobgkau3• 9 months ago

Yeah, I was a paying Meetup member for a short bit back around 2018-2019 when I hosted events with my own group, and have been a very active attendee of others' groups (but no longer an organizer of my own group) since 2020 on. I feel like the payment situation hasn't actually gotten that much worse-- the price for organizers that can be achieved with coupons is similar to what it was before, and attendees don't actually have to pay-- but they've made it feel a lot worse by making organizers dig for coupons and trying to trick attendees into thinking they need to pay.

But I think most of those changes happened before Bending Spoons bought Meetup. I don't think it was a situation where everything was great, then Bending Spoons bought them and it started going to crap (which I've heard some people in these groups retroactively claiming recently).

netsharc• 9 months ago

Meetup now is weird.. they hide everything behind blurs (for example people's last names), but the blurs are CSS, and one could modify the CSS and get the obscured info.

I think it also advertises "get premium to see gender ratios"...

jen729w• 9 months ago

Bending spoons, the name just sends up red flags as parlor trickery.

'Spoon bender' was a deep insult in my circle when we were ~18. In honour of the ur-bender, Uri.

BryantD4• 9 months ago

Vimeo is the really interesting case for me, because they are the white label hosting providers for a large number of niche streaming services -- Criterion Channel comes to mind, for example. Evernote failing is sad but lower on indirect effects. Vimeo going down would leave a noticeable hole in the streaming world.

muglug• 9 months ago

Vimeo won’t “go down” anytime soon. It might get worse/more expensive, but it’s not in imminent danger. And it’s also not the only white-label provider around, either.

Mistletoe2• 9 months ago

Is this why Criterion streaming quality is so poor? It’s completely unacceptable for a service that is supposed to pride itself on loving movies and preserving them. Sometimes the scene will be dark and I will descend into some sort of weird 8 bit pixel world.

darknavi• 9 months ago

Dropout as well I think.

everfrustrated6• 9 months ago

Actual press release https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251029086811/en/Ben...

stabbles• 9 months ago

They bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still did a major redesign of the app and website afterwards. I expected outages, but so far it works like before.

BozeWolf• 9 months ago

Except that it now has ten times the number of reminders popping up to please subscribe for premium, even though I already have the world maps package, so they got some of my money already.

IncreasePosts2• 9 months ago

This might just be an accounting trick.

A lot of mature products act as a lottery ticket printing machine for the rest of the company - spend the cash on some other concept and hope that new thing becomes a stand alone product on its own.

Now that komoot is owned by a parent company, instead of printing lottery tickets that other employees are scratching off, the cash is being sent up to the parent company, who may just have employees in another entity being funded by the money from komoot.

elAhmo2• 9 months ago

It was mostly a cosmetic redesign, no functionality has been significantly changed. Websites don't just stop working after people are fired immediately, but they slowly die or become home for parasites. Twitter is a great example of this.

NumberCruncher2• 9 months ago

They bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still did a major redesign

This sounds like "doing a major redesign" would be something positive. I'm a paying customer since ages and use the app on daily basis. The new design adds nothing except confusion, at the same time they broke the app on my smartwatch. I'm pretty much thinking about switching apps because I don't see myself buying a new watch just because of this.

Some companies would be better off with less bored designers. This is exactly the same situation like a couple of years ago, when Spotify every week rearranged the GUI and every week I had to relearn how I can reach the same functionality. Back then I had to use the App Store to give feedback, but I see now I can do the same directly in the Komoot app. They're gonna have something to laugh about...

jimnotgym5• 9 months ago

Some companies would be better off with less bored designers.

The comment you are replying to says they laid off 80% of them!

bluedino• 9 months ago

I'm still using an email that is one of the AOL domains, mostly for accessing legacy sites that were around at that time.

I lost access to it during an iPhone upgrade, I paid $12.95 or something for a 'premium' membership that allowed me to have the password reset by a REAL LIVE PERSON.

logifail2• 9 months ago

I'm still using an email that is one of the AOL domains

ProTip: Honestly, just buy your own domain, control your own email address(es)...

mlyle2• 9 months ago

> mostly for accessing legacy sites that were around at that time.

skrebbel• 9 months ago

Wow way to miss the point

suzzer992• 9 months ago

I think my mom spends several hours a week talking to a live person at Compuserve because she lost her password or various other reasons. They don't seem to be under any time pressure and are happy to chat with her as long as she wants.

kyleee• 9 months ago

Better price than better help. Probably better than better help’s counseling, too

sdairs• 9 months ago

Least offensive Bending Spoons acquisition to date. I don't really mind if they kill this one?

nostrademons• 9 months ago

Far cry from the AOL - Time Warner merger, where AOL purchased Time Warner for $183B, creating a company with a combined $350B market cap.

jandrese2• 9 months ago

Yes, there is much less money to set on fire this time.

ryandrake• 9 months ago

There are plenty of other companies setting much more money on fire these days. The money furnace business model is as healthy as ever.

ottah• 9 months ago

Why would it even be worth that? Patents? Copyrights? Certainly not the trademark.

mattmaroon4• 9 months ago

Revenue. They’ve still got millions of email/portal users and they own LifeLock, Lastpass, and a bunch of other crap. They are still rumored to do nearly a half billion a year in revenue and the margins are good.

dotcoma3• 9 months ago

Then 1.5 B is a steal!

jrflowers• 9 months ago

they own LifeLock, Lastpass

AOL owns neither of these

ano-ther• 9 months ago

Can someone enlighten me on the economics of such a deal?

From what I know about acquisitions, valuations are in the range of 10-12 times annual EBITDA (or perhaps even profits). This would mean that AOL is making 150 million a year. Is that correct?

Invictus02• 9 months ago

From the first sentence of the half-page article: "AOL still drives hundreds of millions of dollars of free cash flow"

wat10000• 9 months ago

Interesting choice to give your company the name of a notorious fraud.

exasperaited2• 9 months ago

The name comes from the Matrix, supposedly. But yeah, they seem more Uri Geller than anything else.

sharkjacobs• 9 months ago

That "incredibly loyal user base," as he called it, could be better served with greater investments in AOL's product and user experience, he noted.

I think there's something kind of astute here, which is that anyone who is still using AOL products at this point is someone who is very resistant to changing "email and web content properties" providers, and is likely willing to passively tolerate additional enshittification and monetization

silisili• 9 months ago

Yeah, for another 10 years or so tops.

On the other hand, they are the easiest demographic to scam out of money, which seems fitting for a company like AOL.

tanepiper• 9 months ago

Proof we are in the weirdest timeline

elAhmo2• 9 months ago

Not sure how actively AOL is used, probably not really, but anything Bending Spoon touches is entshitified soon after. They most recently bought Komoot, and have already made questionable choices with a lot of firings and promoting paid plans. Same has happened to Meetup.

It is a sad reality that this company keeps buying good products and making it hostile for users who made it good, such as in the Komoot's or Meetup's case.

reaperducer• 9 months ago

Not sure how actively AOL is used

Perhaps more than you think.

I was recently looking through an e-mail distribution list that my company uses and was surprised how many @aol.coms were on there. Easily hundreds.

People in the tech bubble vastly underestimate the number of @aol.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, @earthlink.net and other legacy e-mail addresses regular people still use. After all, it's their e-mail address. Why would they ever change it?

jimnotgym5• 9 months ago

promoting paid plans

You might say, however, that a business that wants you to actually for a product is a real sustainable business.

apparent• 9 months ago

That "incredibly loyal user base," as he called it, could be better served with greater investments in AOL's product and user experience, he noted.

Sure, but isn't the user base also incredibly aged, and literally dying off? They're also not very tech-savvy or likely to embrace new offerings.

If anything, it seems like the opportunity is to reclaim the old brand and try to make it a thing with Gen Alpha kids or something, via kitsch and some genuinely useful offerings (like more email storage than gmail, or something).

WillAdams• 9 months ago

Some of us would have been willing to pay --- still annoyed all my members.aol.com pages were first defaced by ads (I would've paid extra to not have such) and then went away (I'd've been willing to pay a reasonable fee to keep them online).

This does however explain why a bunch of accounts I forgot to log into for a couple of years are gone.

gregjw• 9 months ago

Bending Spoons hoovering up old notable names

olalonde• 9 months ago

It comes down to 50$ per monthly active user. I wonder how they plan to recoup that.

exasperaited2• 9 months ago

I didn't know AOL was still alive.

Dead now though. Bending Spoons is the kiss of death.

arresin• 9 months ago

Is boomer goodwill that valuable?

jlarocco• 9 months ago

I had never heard of Bending Spoons before.

Their Wikipedia article makes them sound like kind of a failure, but the entire second half of the page is talking about all of their acquisitions, more than one of which cost over $1 billion.

So what am I missing? How did this company get so much money?

jimnotgym5• 9 months ago

I guess by offering consistent long term cashflows you can attract classic institutional investors, and banks. Europe is much better at that than it is at finding VC cash for a moonshot

xandrius3• 9 months ago

Dark-patterns all the way.

They have tiny internal teams split per product with the sole purpose of hiding the "not now" button as much as possible to increase trials and purchases.

Absolutely cancer of a company, run away if you see their name on anything.

Ekaros• 9 months ago

Maybe they just run companies like they should be run when VC money runs out. Which is somewhat hard for consumers that have gotten used to getting everything for free.

ZIRP era with free flowing money, probably did lot of bad in this respect. Running products cost actual money. And those surviving on advertising is more limited group.

Tarsul• 9 months ago

I noticed that, too. If one only had the wikipedia article to go on, it would appear that they made way too much money with the covid app for Italy. Which is probably true, but probably not billions?! So, after reading another article[1] (which does not really give strong pointers but leads to) my conclusion would be that they simply somehow became a darling for investors and could finance all these big acquisitions.

[1]https://weeklysiliconvalley.com/bending-spoons-from-humble-b...

poemxo• 9 months ago

Part of me wonders how much of that 1.5B is the value of all those chat logs.

rchaud• 9 months ago

Chat logs from AOL Instant Messenger, which shut down in 2017, and was obsolete for almost a decade prior to that?

Macha2• 9 months ago

And in common with other first wave chat products had entirely client side chat logs anyway.

leoc• 9 months ago

A good effort, but not at the level of “Twitter Acquires Magic Pony” or the unmatchable “Salesforce Acquires Slack”.

jmspring• 9 months ago

In all honesty, Bending Spoons acquiring AOL will probably have better synergy across their portfolio than Salesforce buying Slack. Having worked at SF, even working in dev rel/infra ops, it was mostly "slack who?". That acquisition was more like the Skype/Lync - aka, not really integrated, but tried - as opposed to MS buying GitHub and mostly keeping it independent.

mkhalil• 9 months ago

1.5 billion used to be an absolute ridiculous number to pay for a company not long ago. AOL? 1990s AOL?

But with 5 trillion dollar companies these days that are "worth" more than the entire GDP of Germany, why not. It's not real. It's just a number on a computer at this point.

holden_nelson• 9 months ago

Highly recommended the Bending Spoons episode of The Pragmatic Engineer podcast. They address the layoffs head-on and talk about some of their other unconventional stuff like no on-call. https://pca.st/episode/11464df6-e1cc-4b8f-a64d-a4de9a9ec170

card_zero• 9 months ago

Footnote: Netscape.

xandrius3• 9 months ago

Alright, if anyone is still using AOL: get the hell out of it. Bending Spoons is probably one of the companies I loathe the most from what I know from outside and even more from insider's knowledge.

Anything they touch turns into dark pattern ridden turds.

I honestly wish there was a page with all the products they purchased, so that I can avoid them forever.

e40• 9 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45749641

cyrialize3• 9 months ago

My wife's grandparents use and pay for AOL. I think they pay for a premium package? All I know is that it handles their internet, web browsing, and email.

One day they had issues setting it up, so they call a help line. They ended up being scammed, and paid this person ~$200 to fix their issue. After it happened, they immediately called me up and asked if they were scammed.

I told them that unfortunately, they were. Surprisingly though, the scammer did actually fix their issue.

Thorrez• 9 months ago

Was it really a scam then? Or just extremely overpriced?

cyrialize3• 9 months ago

My apologies, I should've been more clear!

The scam was that this service is actually free provided by AOL. The grandparents shouldn't have ever been charged, they just ended up finding scammers that actually knew how to fix the issue.

x187463• 9 months ago

Are you using the word scam to describe AOL overcharging for helpdesk service or was the helpdesk not affiliated with AOL and they just happened to know how to fix the problem (or maybe they caused it?)?

cyrialize3• 9 months ago

My apologies, I should've been clear!

AOL doesn't charge for any helpdesk service at all. It explicitly says on their website that all helpdesk services are free and they'll never charge you.

The scam was that the scammers had a fake helpdesk service that showed up that my wife's grandparents ended up paying for.

The scammers did actually fix the issue, but the scam was that the grandparents should have never been charged!

paulbjensen• 9 months ago

Looking at the portfolio of businesses that Bending Spoons has, it's like a who's-who of 2010s startups.

It'll be interesting to see what they do with AOL. That business itself was an amalgamation of other businesses over time, so they may find a mirror image of themselves once they start to dig into the weeds.

ajross• 9 months ago

End of an era. (Well, OK, the era ended long ago, this is just the long-delayed tombstone I guess). Those of us coming out of the pre-boom internet always sneered, but those floppies they'd pack into every magazine were the gateway for the rest of the world.

justin66• 9 months ago

Even though we all complained (perhaps not in so many words) about the eternal September and the damage done by opening things up to a larger number of people, the early AOLers were paradigms of intellectual curiosity and urbanity compared to what came later.

estimator7292• 9 months ago

Honestly I'm shocked that AOL is still worth that much.

firefax• 9 months ago

I hope they bring back AIM

AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

Related Stories