Reminiscent of "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, but he gutted and then flipped whole companies.
I think of them as the bakery outlet store that sells only stale goods.
That's where businesses like Bending Spoons, Red Ventures, and IAC come in for digital media.
This helps ensure a better noise to signal ratio that Meetup simply couldn't provide.
my knee jerk reaction is to throw shade at the ppl operating the company but, upon second thought, there's an obvious pattern of them relieving the company from people who knew less how to run (and sustain) it. I haven't used evernote in almost a decade but it actually seems.. fine? I stopped using it when the company started selling merch as a latch ditch effort to make money.
Gergely Orosz did an interview with them in 2024:
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
So far they've been relatively soft (for their doing) on Komoot, which I too am most anxious off.
Bikepacking.com has a good read about Komoot; it was probably unsustainable in the long run before bending spoons took over anyways (2), yet I much rather had they stayed a sort of indie company driven by their passion. I will cancel my long standing Komoot subscription the day enshittification news breaks.
(1) https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/03/komoot-acquired-history-... (2) https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/
Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45749161
Bending Spoons Acquires Eventbrite
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124673
Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
>inb4 leverage
Yeah, I know leverage exists but still, you cannot go to a bank and ask them to help you acquire something 100x worth your cap.
That said, their business model seems fairly solid, and despite the naysayers, they improve things a bit on most of their acquisitions. So there might be some real value in what they do. Yet, the expected market valuation is way off. But worry not: market will fix that.
As of now my use cases still work and it certainly helped that I bought the lifetime all-world map package.
I came in thinking they would be like PE and just put products on life support sucking all the recurring they can. But it seems they care and improve the products. I think that has merrit.