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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699

by Daemon404 • 6 months ago

471 499 6 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

As expected. Almost the whole company is gone, less than 15 people left in engineering.

ChrisArchitect• 6 months ago

4 months:

Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302

bilekas• 6 months ago

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

altairprime2• 6 months ago

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.

Glawen• 6 months ago

I'm discovering Bending Sppon withn this thread, and I think they really got their business right. I hope they IPO soon

gulugawa2• 6 months ago

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.

red-iron-pine• 6 months ago

Enshitification As A Service (EaaS)

corderop2• 6 months ago

Actually the acquisition was closed on November 24th, so it was just in 2 months

ayhanfuat• 6 months ago

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.

nness3• 6 months ago

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...

didacusc2• 6 months ago

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.

gtowey• 6 months ago

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.

mlnj• 6 months ago

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.

sublinear• 6 months ago

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.

observationist• 6 months ago

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.

afavour• 6 months ago

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.

lumost3• 6 months ago

Are these hostile takeovers? buying a competitor out through a PE deal could be cheap relative to competing with them.

AznHisoka• 6 months ago

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

stefan_• 6 months ago

Its just private equity for software

jjice• 6 months ago

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.

usrusr• 6 months ago

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"

Recursing• 6 months ago

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

Fnoord• 6 months ago

It is called bait and switch.

And the company name referring to bending spoons (Uri Geller) gives away the way they see themselves.

nradov• 6 months ago

Vimeo isn't really SaaS though.

Beretta_Vexee4• 6 months ago

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.

bachmeier• 6 months ago

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.

reactordev• 6 months ago

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.

ratelimitsteve• 6 months ago

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

bradleybuda• 6 months ago

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

Closi• 6 months ago

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!

CodeWriter232• 6 months ago

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.

j45• 6 months ago

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?

nine_k• 6 months ago

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.

epolanski9• 6 months ago

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.

mynameisjody• 6 months ago

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.

huhtenberg2• 6 months ago

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.

jlarocco• 6 months ago

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.

muzani• 6 months ago

Startups focus on building assets, not revenue or profit.

Companies like Bending Spoons focus on buying these assets and turn them into $$$$$$$$, not sustainability or growth.

charliebwrites• 6 months ago

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

munk-a3• 6 months ago

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.

mrtksn2• 6 months 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.

fundad• 6 months ago

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-...

tonyedgecombe• 6 months ago

If it wasn’t for all the political histrionics we would all be celebrating Elon’s amazing abilities.

evilduck• 6 months ago

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.

chpatrick• 6 months ago

To be honest, how much staff do you need to run a file transfer service.

pnw• 6 months ago

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.

Eldt• 6 months ago

Seems to be very common nowadays for PE

walthamstow• 6 months ago

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.

mohsen1• 6 months ago

It's a whole business model. I know a Private Equity that bought AOL dial up business, laid off most staff and turned into a cash cow. Mostly because almost all customers are super old and can agree on anything "AOL" throws at them.

CoastalCoder2• 6 months ago

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.

ortusdux2• 6 months ago

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

didacusc2• 6 months ago

And Criterion :(

munk-a3• 6 months ago

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.

rmccue• 6 months ago

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.)

CoastalCoder2• 6 months ago

Hmmm... I just learned that mst3k has even more moving parts at the moment: https://www.byteseu.com/1717645/

johng2• 6 months ago

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.

coffeefirst• 6 months ago

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.

dylan604• 6 months ago

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.

johng2• 6 months ago

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

TheChaplain• 6 months ago

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.

apparent• 6 months ago

Just realized the acronym for Bending Spoons is BS. Seemingly appropriate.

jen729w3• 6 months ago

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.

solarkraft2• 6 months ago

Bending Spoons: Wow, they gave us money for a year!

johnnyanmac47• 6 months ago

spending X00 million dollars to get maybe $200 out of a user is certainly a flex.

chuckadams2• 6 months ago

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.

muglug2• 6 months ago

Psalm creator here!

Vimeo has not contributed any code to Psalm since I left in 2021.

Psalm is still in good hands!

amelius• 6 months ago

Was this name inspired by Uri Geller?

chuckadams2• 6 months ago

More likely The Matrix, but the whole "psychic spoon bending" thing was of course made popular by Geller.

jp1016• 6 months ago

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.

xnx• 6 months ago

What is Vimeo for as compared to YouTube or self-hosting video files?

RyanShook• 6 months ago

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.

fckgw• 6 months ago

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.

VladVladikoff2• 6 months ago

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.

BizarroLand• 6 months ago

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.

bobbylarrybobby• 6 months ago

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.

donohoe• 6 months ago

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

rvz• 6 months ago

This is AGI.

randomsc• 6 months ago

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

worldsavior• 6 months ago

I'll be surprised if those engineers don't want to leave the company themselves after these layoffs.

moralestapia• 6 months ago

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.

prmoustache• 6 months ago

Money laundering?

everfrustrated5• 6 months ago

They're a Milan, Italy company so don't get a lot of visibility in the US.

jcynix3• 6 months ago

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

Ekaros4• 6 months ago

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.

JayStavis• 6 months ago

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...

torben-friis2• 6 months ago

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?

jcynix3• 6 months ago

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.

torben-friis2• 6 months ago

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.

hadlock• 6 months ago

They are private equity, which is where your company ends up if they fail to 10x and/or go public

gulugawa2• 6 months ago

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.

WA• 6 months ago

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.

0xbadcafebee3• 6 months ago

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.

kotaKat• 6 months ago

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.

PyWoody• 6 months ago

No, not the Criterion Channel, too! Hopefully they can migrate to a different service without too much fuss.

george_perez• 6 months ago

Watermelon+, too!

pestkranker• 6 months ago

Why isn't Vimeo listed on the Bending Spoons website? https://bendingspoons.com/products

jorams• 6 months ago

That lists 6 products, Wikipedia lists 13. I can only guess at the reason for deciding what to put there, but it does say

Some of our most popular products

bovermyer3• 6 months ago

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.

jdmoreira• 6 months ago

If you are an LP a their fund this is what you would expect. Hate the player not the game.

ecshafer3• 6 months ago

Your question doesn't really make sense. What business isn't driven by the goal of making money ultimately?

hamdingers• 6 months ago

Every nonprofit.

hackable_sand• 6 months ago

What businesses are profit-driven? I would love to know so I can avoid them.

bovermyer3• 6 months ago

Non-profit organizations generally don't focus on profits, but they are usually classified as "businesses."

I suppose this is a matter of definitions. What do you define as a "business?"

6274672• 6 months ago

is it so different from founders (and founding team in a pyramid-scheme-like dynamic) that is looking for exit?

Joeboy• 6 months ago

Anything else worth considering other than youtube (or self-hosting if scale isn't an issue)?

psteinweber2• 6 months ago

We are quite happy with bunny(.net) stream. Very affordable and easy to use

stenuto4• 6 months ago

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!)

aarondf• 6 months ago

damn framerate looks good

mannyv• 6 months ago

Building video streaming is easy. Selling video streaming is difficult.

cadamsdotcom3• 6 months ago

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?

stenuto4• 6 months ago

Thank you!

There aren't any end-to-end open source video host solutions out there from what I can tell. DIY ffmpeg + a CDN is a great way to go. But quickly erodes when you want all the other niceties that are table-stakes today (like storyboards, subtitles, chapters, etc.).

I'll have all the niceties, but I plan to differentiate mainly on performance and quality.

- Higher quality compression (via AV1 encoding) - Fast load times worldwide (Framerate's custom player is 18kb gzipped versus 200kb+ for vidstack/mux) - Better publishing experience (bulk editing options, team collaboration, etc.)

sammularczyk• 6 months ago

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

switchstance• 6 months ago

We did. https://framerate.tv

Nextgrid24• 6 months ago

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.

publicdebates3• 6 months ago

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.

Nextgrid24• 6 months ago

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).

refulgentis6• 6 months ago

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.

captain_coffee3• 6 months ago

How do you get clients on that rate? Genuinely curious

yieldcrv3• 6 months ago

Have you tried Claude Opus 4.5 within Claude Code?

it's only been released for two months but its changed the calculus entirely

if its been over two months since you've tried any LLM generated code solution, or are still occasionally copy pasting code requirements into a browser chat session as if its still 2023, then I can't put any weight into the opinion

dostick• 6 months ago

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.

DANmode2• 6 months ago

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.

hahahahhaah2• 6 months ago

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.

refulgentis6• 6 months ago

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)

Nextgrid24• 6 months ago

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.

reaperducer3• 6 months ago

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.

Nextgrid24• 6 months ago

the head of Communications immediately said he's going to start looking for alternatives.

He's gonna start looking for alternatives and then most likely find nothing that matches the featureset vs price of the current solution + the cost of switching, and the matter will quickly disappear.

Last time AWS or Cloudflare was down a lot of noise was made and a lot of people started looking for alternatives too - and everyone forgot about it a week later.

Only for the company.

Yes, the point of business is to make profit, not to be a charity. Bending Spoons believes they can extract enough profit off Vimeo to justify the purchase price, either by reducing expenses, raising prices or both. This may still be palatable to the customers if they don't have any better option.

listenallyall2• 6 months ago

I'd question why your "head of Communications" isn't already aware of alternative vendors for important pieces of their domain. After all, companies go out of business, get bought out, change pricing all the time. And Vimeo was bought out months ago - this person didn't start researching then, just in case? I'd suggest the CEO start "looking for alternatives" for this employee.

MontyCarloHall• 6 months ago

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.

[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."

CiccioNizzo2• 6 months ago

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 :-)

johnnyanmac47• 6 months ago

It's easy for companies to fall into such pits of inefficiency because climbing out of those pits entails utterly gutting the headcount [*].

It's also simply because no one will give you clearance to get out of those pitfalls. When you grow, you're focused on features, not optimization.

Bending spoons' approach isn't to grow, so you finally get to optimize what you couldn't... assuming you weren't already laid off by then.

Imagine the equivalent for a building

buildings have regulations. And that word is still a boogeyman to many in the field of software.

wavemode4• 6 months ago

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.

f33d5173• 6 months ago

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.

Nextgrid24• 6 months ago

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.

Etheryte2• 6 months ago

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.

daemin2• 6 months ago

It is absolutely true that software can be finished, it's just that software appears to be dead if it hasn't had any work done on it for years. You don't need to keep adding features and changing the software ad infinitum.

Just like with your building analogy and with other car analogies presented here, software does need some maintanence every now and again to keep it up to date - with security fixes, compiling to a newer platform, integrating fixes from dependencies, etc. And yes while buildings may be finished they stil require regular maintance if they are used.

csomar• 6 months ago

Buildings are never finished either that's why you have HoA fees and even with that many buildings end up in disrepair.

ben_w2• 6 months ago

Software is never "finished" the way a building is finished.

On the contrary, it absolutely can be, in both directions.

Software can absolutely be "feature complete", and in the case of many products it would have been an improvement to say "we're done now" and switch from developing new features to maintenance-only mode, dealing only with API changes and new laws.

Some examples of where it should be "done" by some point include smart TVs and smart lightbulbs. I'm also old enough to remember the era of games where patches were rare and small, unlike the current experience of having to wait for Steam to install updates almost every day, and only then will allow me to see if the game I want to play and which worked yesterday now has a mandatory update that I also have to wait for (which is less often but still often enough to be annoying).

Even with MacOS, while I absolutely do appreciate all the behind the scenes stuff regarding security and so on, the last time I appreciated what they did with the UI in an update, the version branding scheme was still to name releases after cats.

Even as an iOS developer, although I can see what they're trying to do with SwiftUI, I find it worse than UIKit in basically every regard because the "magic" keeps not working and the "problem" it tried to solve was never (for me) a problem; with concurrency, they went from GCD to Combine which IMO was a step back, before going to async/await.

"Too many features" is also a problem for the developers, as it leads to them duplicating work. For example, the background sounds feature on my phone and the one on my HomePod each has its own list of sounds, they're not just two interfaces to the same underlying app even though the HomePod's OS is a fork of tvOS which is a fork of iOS.

(The other way around, the home I grew up in is now about twice the size it was when my parents bought it around 1970, judging from the Google areal view).

soerxpso• 6 months ago

More features can always be added to software

How does that make it different? More features could always be added to most buildings. You could keep adding rooms onto the side, update the floors/ceilings/walls every year to stay trendy, add a water feature, expand the basement with a tunnel network, etc.

hahahahhaah2• 6 months ago

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.

fuzzfactor• 6 months ago

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

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

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

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

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

mattbrewsbytes• 6 months ago

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.

ewheeler• 6 months ago

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

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

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

ahmadyan• 6 months ago

why do you think the previous management team couldn't pull an Elon and fire 80% of the engineering staff themselves? why they needed an external leadership to take over and do it?

Part that i can't wrap my head around was at least in case of twitter, it was a hostile take over. In case of Vimeo, it didn't look hostile at all.

Nextgrid24• 6 months ago

I wonder if existing management had a lot of social ties to the existing workforce so that they couldn't easily get away doing that themselves without a big hit to their reputation.

Letting someone else do the dirty work allows them to disassociate themselves from the (predictable) outcome and frame it as just business.

johnnyanmac47• 6 months ago

Maybe they could have. But they have 1.4 billion reasons to just walk away and either retire or try something else instead.

lotsofpulp3• 6 months ago

Twitter was not a hostile takeover.

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

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

insane_dreamer• 6 months ago

the house is a bad analogy

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

cirelli942• 6 months ago

But they don't reinvent the wheel at every new car.

0xbadcafebee3• 6 months ago

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

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

Nextgrid24• 6 months ago

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

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

johnnyanmac47• 6 months ago

Builders and electricians and tradesmen either work as contractors and take that into account

okay. Salaries office workers don't work on contracts. If they do, they know an end is in sight and renewal is not guaranteed. If companies want contractors, they should just do that.

Meanwhie, I'm sure your parents' generation for many industries expected to find one job and make a career around that company, maybe doing 1 or 2 hops based on circumstances. It was highly unusual to lay off everyone at the drop of a hat. This is not normal, and I don't think we should normalize it.

To use your metaphor, this is more like you are working on the 3rd room of some house and suddenly you are kicked out. Contractors take this into account, but you as a salaried worker just need to bite the bullet. This is companies having their cake and eating it to.

the old situation was never sustainable to begin with.

Tell that to the trillion dollar tech companies.

6274672• 6 months ago

plenty of software business rely on contractors dont they? im sure even pre-acquisition vimeo likely used contractors on many roles some even in "engineering" roles.

the idea that software is never done is a double edge sword: yes, its great to have a long term vision that keeps evolving and motivating people to continue to push boundaries. but it also creates this idea that "done" state is not possible or even desirable.

plenty of human (economic) activity is just operating, or maintaining. maybe some people who built products are happy to continue operating and operating it. not everyone, and certainly it would be hard to expecy society to guarantee employment under any circunstances.

i have never seen labor laws that prohibits lay off under any circunstances. some make it more onerous and/or more beneficial conditiona to employees than others. but certainly is it possible (and likely) that vimeo lay offs have been lawfull and even beneficial for many employees. i certainly know plenty of people who explicitly stick around "mature" organizations waiting for the fat check of layoff

cirelli942• 6 months ago

I don't think people where simply laid-off here, but replaced by the in-house developers and technologies of the platform of BS.

I see a lot of negative comments here on HN, and I partly agree, but no one is recognizing here their try to optimize.

pjc502• 6 months ago

The biggest piece of evidence for this worldview is the Twitter acquisition. A lot of people were very confident that it would quickly fall over after mass layoffs. That turned out not to be the case: the site can be kept running on a much lower staff.

They've not really been able to add new features to the backend, but on the other hand: old @Jack Dorsey Twitter was so bad about this that there were memes ("likes are now florps"). And the features they have added (indecent image autogeneration) have caused as much brand damage in Europe as the Nazi salute. Yet the site continues to stay up almost all the time.

(I don't think ZIRP is where the blame should lie, though. It's SaaS, which turns software into rentierism rather than purchase)

d--b• 6 months ago

That's not true at all though.

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

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

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

It's basically bankrupcy management.

xtiansimon• 6 months ago

“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…”

Do you include visual design/UI design in the engineering category? In the situation you describe does a completed product continue evolving visually, or does the design stay fixed, and gets bug fixes and such?

rswail3• 6 months ago

This is the same business model that Computer Associates used successfully in the 1990s, so it's not new to IT or technology.

The primary difference now is that the transition from bespoke IT on premises environments has been subsumed by the cloud hyperscalars and an entire hierarchy of products that use that infrastructure in a higher level of composability than in the past.

Products like SAP will continue to require engineering to maintain compatibility with the changes in its customers' requirements.

Products like MS-Word don't need that same level of feature work.

If a product is essentially feature complete then making the engineering a "maintenance only" support is about minimizing those support costs.

FormerBandmate• 6 months ago

The thing about this business model is that it inevitably falls apart when things break.

Bending Spoons doesn’t care (yet), but they’re not at the point where stuff has proven unsustainable

dzonga2• 6 months ago

Vista Equity operates along a similar model for SAAS

cut wasteful spending, find a way to increase revenue - milk the SAAS for a few years - then either sell it off or shut it down - or it can keep running as a lean cash generating machine

Vista Equity rotates operators within its holding companies

randito• 6 months ago

I've been through a Vista Equity acquisition. It was not pretty -- they slashed, consolidated and basically ran their one-size-fits-all playbook. The brought in their crew -- which is totally expected -- and then bought other companies in the same vertical. Of course, they all had different tech stacks.

(like ya said, operators is the right word. it felt icky)

At least for the first year, the acquired teams were able to run more or less the same but with new hyped-up-overly-aggressive Vista hotshot managers and then the sh*t-from-above just started raining down.

Also, they hired the worst sw architect / person I've ever had to work with. He wasted so much time and money.

deepsummer• 6 months ago

I understand your argument. But I have worked at two companies that worked pretty much like you described. They call it 'project-oriented'. They threw lots of engineers at projects, hired freelancers, and got it working as fast as possible. Once it was done, they only left a maintainer or two.

That model works fine for a few years. Then you need a bigger change. Often, the system is built on top of some enterprise project, heavily customized, and you stay at your outdated version until it becomes unsupported. The maintainers don't care, and often don't have the capability to upgrade, so they just leave it as long as it keeps working. Or maybe some law has been introduced and requires a bigger change. Or the market just changes, and you need to support new APIs, new payment methods, new integrations...

The maintainers tend to quit every 1-2 years and are replaced with someone only trained by the previous generation. With every generation, the maintainers get worse. After 3 generations, all product knowledge is gone. To make things worse, the maintainers do stupid things in the code because they don't fully understand it, and it begins to rot. In the worst case I know, no one even knew what branch was deployed on production and what the last changes were.

Then, after 5-10 years of decay, some requirement comes along that would require a major refactoring. Everybody is overwhelmed, no one understands the internals, and eventually they decide that it the project is now so outdated that the only solution is to replace it. Management doesn't care because they can blame their predecessors.

In my experience, that's how it always works. I know at least 5 major projects that took over a year to develop, and costing millions, in at least one case tens of millions, that died like that.

badc0ffee• 6 months ago

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.

bdougherty3• 6 months ago

The people in this video were mostly CollegeHumor people (I think there are 4 Vimeans in there), but the last one left about 10 years ago now.

poulsbohemian• 6 months ago

Not sure I understand the point as my switching cost off Vimeo is negligible apart from finding a competitor.

dwedge2• 6 months ago

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

xlaacid• 6 months ago

Thank you for reminding me I had an Evernote account. I just deleted it. Its been shit since Bleeding Spork took it over.

madjo80• 6 months ago

This is bad news for streaming platforms like Dropout, that use Vimeo as their backend.

k1rd• 6 months ago

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.

epolanski9• 6 months ago

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).

alephnerd• 6 months ago

Italy is like a higher quality India in a sense.

It's attitudes like this that rub decisionmakers who aren't of European heritage the wrong way.

Italian tech salaries [0] aren't significantly different from Indian tech salaries [1], especially in major hubs like Bangalore [2].

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.

Also, a European dismissing Indian engineering quality doesn't bode well as your governments that are signing an FTA [3] and a security and defense partnership [4] with India in a couple days, and with the Italian government soliciting Indian capital for infrastructure investment [8] and the French government soliciting Indian capital for defense [9] and infrastructure [10] investment.

[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...

[8] https://www.lagazzettamarittima.it/2025/10/30/rixi-in-india-...

[9] https://www.frstrategie.org/publications/defense-et-industri...

[10] https://fr.euronews.com/business/2025/07/03/limec-deviendra-...

hi_hi4• 6 months ago

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.

whalesalad• 6 months ago

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.

killingtime74• 6 months ago

The acquisition concluded in November 2025, only 2 months ago.

taurath• 6 months ago

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

johnnyanmac47• 6 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.

growt• 6 months ago

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.

csallen5• 6 months ago

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.

hi_hi4• 6 months ago

Yes, this occurred to me also. If that is how he intended it, it is extremely disingenuous, at best, and another example of manipulation.

gcr• 6 months ago

The Vimeo CEO is also right -- this action technically unlocks greater focus for their team!

999900000999• 6 months ago

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.

jongjong• 6 months ago

Yes. It's a zero trust society. Nobody can trust anybody else. The only thing that's trusted is money in a bank account... And we really shouldn't be trusting our eyes there because the money is backed by nothing and there is no reliable consensus between different banks (look at the details of correspondant banking and factor in things like the Eurodollar, stablecoins...).

It's like; the thing we trust the most cannot be trusted but so long as we keep using money in its current form, this implicit form of trust is devaluing the trust of everything else that's not money.

Our relationship with money sets the bar for all other relationships. If it's a deceptive relationship and we tolerate it, we will tolerate every other relationship which is equally deceptive. We become accustomed and tolerant to a certain level of deception. We are also emboldened to deceive others.

Our relationship with money is highly deceptive and getting worse over time. We can expect to see the same trend in our relationships.

I think money CAN buy trust; it works by devaluing the entire concept of trust to the level that it can afford to buy it outright. It maintains a monopoly on trust.

johnnyanmac47• 6 months ago

So are we just going to acept that words no longer mean anything and carry on through life distructing of everything we navigate through? That isn't the only way.

cowsandmilk• 6 months ago

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

Invictus03• 6 months ago

There's a large contingent on hacker news that still thinks it's some kind of moral failure to fire people

maint• 6 months ago

I worked at one of the companies that were acquired by Bending Spoons and really the only positive things I can say about them is: They are honest and stick to their word.

It's a shitty business model, run by people who do not, in any way shape or form, care about people at all. But they are honest.

So if you work at a company and BS comes knocking: relax, accept the severance money and start looking for something new. It will be over soon. And you also don't want to stay even if offered because it will be an entirely alien environment where only people of a certain character can work.

johnnyanmac47• 6 months ago

unlock even greater focus for our team

I guess that's the new buzzword for "by removing most of the team from the equation and focusing the rest on everything". Noted.

our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses

2 issues here

1. why would I trust a company who will flip around and remove nearly all its labor overnight?

2. I don't know how this move makes them more "innovative". You're just going to be burning out the very few people left to support the product.

I'm bold enough to call this a blatant lie.

joe_the_user• 6 months ago

As others mentioned, the statement seems true.

But even more, it seems like the statement implies layoffs if they are acquiring a startup or growth-orient company. Bending Spoon is saying they intend to run the web site/web app as-is and make money. That means they will discard employees who have been employed with hope of growing/pivoting/etc the company. In start-ups, that can be a lot of the employees.

KarenDaBass• 6 months ago

New definition of "bending over" haha

epolanski9• 6 months ago

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.

sinoue• 6 months ago

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.

epolanski9• 6 months ago

Small correction, they didn't hire a dev team in Italy to take over. They are an Italian company with their own engineering.

wqtz• 6 months ago

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.

nurettin• 6 months ago

Slack next?

TWDan• 6 months ago

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

TheGreatWave• 6 months ago

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

corderop2• 6 months ago

They acquired European companies in the past and did similar things (e.g. Komoot). They are in the process of acquiring Eventbrite, where a big part of the workforce is located in Spain, and the feeling is that they are going to do the same there.

It will probably take more time due to legal processes and severance packages may be better, but I don't think this is going to stop them, let's see.

Animats2• 6 months ago

Is there a solid source for this?

Vimeo laid off most of their operation in Israel recently.[1] At least according to "www.calcalistech.com", which seems to be some minor news source in Israel. Their comment was that the office was damaged in a recent war. Rebuilding may not have been worth it.

Their headquarters is in New York.

[1] https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjtjgbabzx

muglug2• 6 months ago

Bending Spoons understandably don’t want a final percentage out there, because the more people know about this, the less likely they are to use Vimeo.

Most everyone I knew there was just laid off, with a skeleton crew that’s been asked to stay on until April.

tom_m• 6 months ago

People use Vimeo?

pjc502• 6 months ago

They're not publicly traded (they appear to be pre-IPO "startup", made out of acquisitions), but it seems weird to me that there can be such a thing as secret layoffs.

keane• 6 months ago

https://businessinsider.com/vimeo-laying-off-staff-after-bil...

hobbified4• 6 months ago

The BusinessInsider story is as much as you're going to get right now, because Bending Spoons is declining to provide specifics, and those just let go aren't free to tell all. But yes, "globally" means significant cuts in New York and the US in general.

matteocontrini• 6 months ago

Someone that worked at Vimeo until last month tweeted:

Reviving this account to say: Almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off yesterday, including the entire video team. If you're looking for talented engineers, there are a few on the market.

https://x.com/daemon404/status/2013988239829303624

cik• 6 months ago

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

BryantD• 6 months ago

As always, claims like this should come with the WARN Act notice record. There's only been one notice in NYC in 2026 (visible at https://dol.ny.gov/warn-dashboard) and it's not Vimeo or Bending Spoons. I don't see one in Q4 2025, either.

hobbified4• 6 months ago

Most of the ones with a "date posted" in Jan 2026 have a "date of notice" two to five months ago.

dsign• 6 months ago

I was planning to use Vimeo for some video hosting... I guess I'll have to self-host now. Oh well. At least this happened before I actually committed to buying a plan or even creating an account. With private equity poisoning the well like this I'll probably be better off hosting my videos in AWS; doubt anybody will be buying them anytime soon.

psteinweber2• 6 months ago

Try Bunny Stream, really super simple and affordable

joeyguerra• 6 months ago

They expect to use AI.

epolanski9• 6 months ago

For all the valid criticism of Bending Spoon's business model, I'd like to raise another point.

They haven't extorted these companies from the previous shareholders and founders. They paid for those.

We talking about multi millionaires deciding to throw away their life's work, their customers, their teams to become even wealthier very well knowing what the fate was going to be.

But that crowd isn't even mentioned.

valevk• 6 months ago

If anyone is looking for an alternative made in Germany: https://ignite.video/en

jen729w3• 6 months ago

Literally 10x the price of Vimeo, unfortunately. Otherwise I might have given this a go.

Source: my Vimeo annual plan renewal currently shows US$144. We host about 100 videos and get in the dozens of views a day. Pretty small.

Your 'Grow' plan is €155/month × 12 = €1,860 = $2,218! That's … a lot.

dabinat• 6 months ago

Vimeo’s prices are insanely low for what they’re offering. You could not host on AWS and match them on price, nor probably even Hetzner. I never knew if they built out custom infrastructure or if they’ve just been losing money this whole time.

hobbified4• 6 months ago

Lots of custom infrastructure. A bit of losing money as well, but moderately profitable on the whole. They were a publicly traded company in their own right from 2021 to 2025, so you can look at the 10-Ks. There was a massive boost in business from COVID in 2020 and early 2021... which meant that the spinoff in May 2021 left investors in a position to be perpetually disappointed, sort of like Peloton.

bdougherty3• 6 months ago

The spinoff definitely came at a particularly bad time, but that was always how it was going to end up because that is how IAC operates. Vimeo was probably doomed from the moment IAC acquired Connected Ventures. It was never going to be the kind of business that could really operate as a public company, but totally could have been a profitable private company.

bdougherty3• 6 months ago

The custom stuff was all on the transcoding and player sides. Actual video file storage and delivery was using a variety of well-known CDNs depending on when and where, but primarily Akamai.

varshith17• 6 months ago

Bending Spoons' playbook: acquire established product, gut the team, run it on fumes with skeleton crew + AI tooling. They did this with Evernote, Meetup, now Vimeo. Classic private equity move dressed up as a tech company. Extract value, minimize costs, ride the brand until it dies.

fnands• 6 months ago

Classic private equity move dressed up as a tech company.

Kinda, more like a tech company using private equity tactics. Say what you want about them, but they do actually employ decent engineers, and the founders are all engineers.

They seem to fundamentally understand the companies they are buying (not always the feeling I get with PE).

Their business model is a bit cynical, but I would still consider them a tech company.

Ekaros4• 6 months ago

I think it is good to understand tech company and then startup or VC company.

Tech company is company with marginal unit costs. Bending Spoons aims these and then optimize them further.

Startup or VC, search "growth" and user acquisition. Usually in something with marginal unit costs.

Just because someone stops spending money on chasing growth does not mean they still don't have unit economics of tech companies.

lylo• 6 months ago

I see these acquisitions as a reset. They spend a huge sum to acquire established, but struggling, products and strip the size of the company to the minimum required to keep it operating. This is very much the Musk model.

At this point they have stopped the cash bleeding and made profit margins healthy again. From there they can more easily rationalise how to take it forward over the next 5-10 years.

That might mean stripping unpopular product features, rebranding, going upmarket, whatever.

It’s a real shame for all the staff, of course, but from a business point of view it’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out.

gadgetboy• 6 months ago

This is typical of Bending Spoons. They make an acquisition, lay off as many people as possible, then start jacking up prices and putting features behind ever larger paywalls. They've got to start feeling the pain of user churn and attrition at some point, but not yet, I guess.

HardwareLust• 6 months ago

I once hoped Vimeo would grow to compete with YT, but that dream died long ago.

webworker• 6 months ago

Someone just posted an inside story of what went on inside of Vimeo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757868

askldfhalkdfh• 6 months ago

Are they planning to merge Vimeo’s and Brightcove’s underlying technology, even if the brands and product lines remain distinct? In theory, that could deliver a true best-of-both-worlds outcome. Each platform has strengths that could fill the other’s gaps. In practice, though, it would almost certainly be messy, with non-trivial integrations and some painful migrations and breaking changes for at least some of the customers.

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

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