> 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.
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...
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.
The main business was throwing off gobs of money and there were SO MANY failed projects to try and find new revenue streams. Everyone who was not being pushed by the PE owners could see that they would never account to even 1% of the revenues of the main product. It was only a matter of time before someone came in, said "the main business is fine as is" and fired the people who were involved in the moonshots then sat back and raked in the cash. Sure, it will probably not last forever. But if it brings in millions per year for 15-20 years until the company dies, then that is probably an outcome Bending Spoons is fine with.
Based on my experience with Evernote, I don't trust Bending Spoons, and I'm wondering if I should look for a different time-tracking and invoicing system.
If anybody has any good alternatives, I'm all ears.
I'll be honest it's not as good as harvest. The mac app is a bit buggy, it's not as easy to add manual time, and you need to pay for pdf export. But having said that I've found the free version to cover 90% of my use of the paid version of harvest
In the 80's people who did this were known as "corperate raiders". Nowadays it's just called business.
From my perspective as a one-time (but no longer) paying user of evernote - WTF am I paying for monthly if not to support a dev team?
Seriously - I get that there are infra costs for some of the services, and I wouldn't mind paying those costs plus a reasonable upcharge, but I'm sure as fuck not going to pay a company $100+ a year subscription to store under a GB of data.
So now I host bookstack and I pay backblaze ~$0.22/m to back up all my notes, which is much closer to real costs for these services if they're not under development.
Bending Spoons is what we'd call vulture capitalists which have and continue to exist. Basically they buy weakening businesses and carve them up for parts, selling anything of value and squeezing max revenue of whatever is left.
You might think that. Then there's Earthlink and AOL still collecting $5 or $6/mo per mailbox as their cash cow.
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"
Also HN: No, not like that
Why not come out and say this?
Also another thing but other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699#46709164 points out how Vimeo wants to replace SV engineers with Italian engineers to save money.
They are a first and foremost private equity company, Don't forget. There's no loyalty to any group.
Me: can you take out the trash? My kid: dumps trash on the front lawn.
Me: people are speeding a lot, can we do something about it? Cops: shoots anyone speeding in the face.
But I guess I can't say anything about it, because they're just doing what I want!
If your comment is referring to the software company's exiting to provide a return to shareholders, that happens all the time whether it's venture-backed or privately owned. The owners of privately held bootstrapped companies still want an exit one day too.
As an open source software engineer who is now a venture capital investor, respectfully, I think your beef is with capitalism, not with the institutional investors.
This is not like making a small 20 person self funded company.
Do you know other fallacies like this which are less known but as interesting (that you or others might know of) probably?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY
(I'm not.)
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.
That's not true, the website and app both got a major redesign after acquisition.
Not really, sync everything through Strava, and then drop whichever service you don't want. Basically any bike ride I've done in the past decade is on 3+ services because they all sync.
Plus I have a lot of points of interest, note, picture, that I could request via gdpr but not easy to reuse and couldn't be imported into Strava.
Strava isn't better than Komoot on this regard.
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!
I dont know if the same can be said for Vimeo, though
And the company name referring to bending spoons (Uri Geller) gives away the way they see themselves.
If you started buying Evernote 10 or 15 years ago, and use it a lot, then Evernote gets acquired and the terms change, that's shitty but is not remotely a "bait and switch."
(I used to work for WeTransfer and some time after I left it got acquired at about the price it was once considering IPO-ing at. This was apparently such a good offer that it took very little deliberation to agree to the deal.)
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.
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
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
It certainly is depressing to look at what was built and what could be made of it but most of the folks with money lack the creativity or skill to actually build a lasting business. Just burn it down and rob it on the way out - such is the modern economy.
I 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.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-misquotes-princess...
https://people.com/elon-musk-tells-disney-other-advertisers-...
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.
But, this obviously carries risk, that the new thing you develop won't be worth as much as you spent. Bending Spoons doesn't want risk, hence their decision.
Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. If you keep reinvesting your revenue forever into "engineering" the product there's going to be a time where a competitor comes in with a finished product matching your customers' requirements and snatches him from you by both charging less and making a profit.
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.
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.
When you’re historical Google, building three or more competing chat platforms…? That’s pretty much bs.
Downvote away, but consider a reply explaining why.
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.
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."
And accidentally turned it into a shitty product in the process :-)
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).
Clients don't buy hours though, they buy solutions. They have problems costing them money or preventing revenue and they'll pay a percentage of that value to solve it. When you price based on solution value rather than time, your effective hourly rate merely becomes a function of your efficiency and expertise delivering said solution.
They key to achieving such a rate comes down to your sales and business skills: understanding what to sell, how to structure it to maximize your earnings and make it palatable for the client.
For example I generally avoid hourly billing except as a filter for time-wasters. Instead, consultancy becomes a loss leader for the real business: deeply understanding client problems and delivering high-value solutions. Clients happily pay premium rates when they see the price as a fraction of the solution's worth to them.
I only resort to quoting (quite high) hourly rates where it's clear the client just wants consultancy/advice (basically a glorified IT/business support) as a way to make it worth my time and gently encouraging them to bounce (I openly suggest more cost-effective options and refer them there).
Only road I can imagine is highly specialized industry, with money, that often has time-sensitive needs, and smart management that knows how to recognize value or trusts their tech management. And even then I think you'd have to start in the coal-mines version of it, $50K/year flat salary, and building a reputation without management taking credit for your successes, somehow.
Once you have them on the phone, you can not only better understand their problem but also demonstrate your skill and credibility in a way no resume or branding could.
At that point it's just a sales game - generally you'd avoid hourly rates and sell them a solution (see my other comment) which will maximize your effective hourly rate while being structured in a way that's very good value for the client. Hourly should be a last resort, at which point generally you'd rather have the client bounce, so you quote a high rate.
A very analytical, technological, short-sighted view of things. But not necessarily how the customers think.
For many customers, a company that isn't growing is shrinking. If a company isn't willing to invest in growth, that's a red flag.
I mentioned the Vimeo thing in a meeting this morning, and the head of Communications immediately said he's going to start looking for alternatives.
You can make all the analogies and excuses you like, but look at Vimeo's sister properties (Evernote, etc.) Are they better off since they were gutted? Are they delivering more value to the customers, or just funneling money to the parent company and its investors?
I think a better analogy is some big Wall Street investment company buying up nursing homes, and making lots of noises about "efficiency." That never works out well for the patients/customers. Only for the company.
I 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)
Now I'm working on productizing that at https://framerate.com/ (beta launches next week!)
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
Little folks can run, but Bending Spoons won’t care here. They want to milk the enterprise video agreements.
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.
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.
So I understand your selfish sadness feelings.
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.
> No! We tried, but people don’t realize this. The first rendition of Dropout was built on Vimeo OTT’s API, but it was our own product. We employed something like eight sophisticated engineers at IAC to build our own product around it, and it was brutal. Which is to say, it’s just very hard to do very well. And these were great engineers.
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/781331/hank-green-sam-reich...
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?
So private equity is behind it.
How does that fit with expensive hiring sprees? If anything I’d expect them to be continuously shedding absorbed employees.
Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
> 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
Vimeo has not contributed any code to Psalm since I left in 2021.
Psalm is still in good hands!
I just realized that video is old enough to vote.
I guess I’ll be exporting everything today.
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.
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.