10 ms·
AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
- neom 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons Interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476
- JohnClark1337 1y agoSo companies go there to die
- jimnotgym 1y agoAnother way to look at it: When a companies bubble bursts, when people realise that it is just a note taking app (or whatever), and that its never going to grow 10x again, VC investors want shot of it. Without a constant stream of new investment, the company simply can't afford to be loaded up with SV staff producing features that nobody will pay for. Bending Spoons change the business model to 'normal business'. They move to much cheaper European staff, stop work on nonsense 'features', concentrate instead on servicing their existing customers with a stable platform and well thought out incremental advances. So they take businesses that are dying because nobody will give them free money any more, and make them into real sustainable businesses that can stand on their own two feet?
- xandrius 11mo agoNono, this is a pro-scammer point of view. They absolutely go for a minimal upkeep, maximum dark patterns strategy. It's not about sustainable business, they are literally enshittifiers. I know quite a few employees, they literally debate whether a UX change to make a X to close a payment modal almost invisible is "too evil or not" and they go with it anyway. So, we're not kind to companies who ruin their product for a short-term revenue increase then why all this positive spin for a company whose business model is to do exactly and only that?
- kbar13 1y agoholy smokes this is worse for consumers and employees than being bought by PE
- pavel_lishin 1y ago> In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote.[19] The acquisition was concluded in January 2023.[20] In July 2023, Evernote laid off all of its existing staff and announced it would relocate to Europe to be closer to Bending Spoons' headquarters.[21] Damn.
- marstall 1y agoHow does that possibly work? How do they continue with zero of the staff?
- everfrustrated 1y agoThey replaced them with staff in Italy. Bending Spoons is an Italian (Milan) company. They wanted the product not the developers.
- amiga386 1y agoSimple. They get new staff whose job is to shove intrusive surveillance and advertising into the product and push out an update, they don't have to support or develop the product. The company bought the product to bilk money out of its existing users. They throw the product in the bin once all the users have gone. Sadly, some ants get infected with corydceps. Tragic for the ant, but the other ants get it the fuck away from their colony, because they don't want to be next.
- mtgentry 1y agoAs an Evernote user, Bending Spoons has been iterating fast over the past couple years to improve the product. It’s much better than it used to be.
- sentientslug 1y agoWhat the value prop of continuing to use Evernote versus other newer solutions like Notion? Interested to hear from someone still using the product
- qingcharles 1y agoI'm still waiting to see how they complete destroy Vimeo they just bought.
- dancc 1y agoSomeone wrote about Bending Spoons' history and playbook: https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-manual https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma... I enjoyed this part: No On-Call Rotations: Bending Spoons aims to build systems so reliable that they eliminate the need for on-call rotations. This is unusual in the tech industry, where on-call duties are standard to promptly address system issues. For most of their products, they have no on-call schemes at all. Engineers are encouraged to think through all corner cases to ensure robustness, knowing there is no fallback like an on-call team.
- everfrustrated 1y agoI wonder if that's got lost in translation somewhere. I can understand not having on-call operations teams (an anti-pattern) but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Unless they mean to say its part of all devs job expectations and not a paid extra.
- veidr 1y agoI don't want to imply Bending Spoons is this awesome, as I know nothing much about them (except that they named their company after a weird scam, lol), but there's a pretty reasonable principle that might apply here: If our service goes down for any reason, uh... wait until Monday afternoon, then try again. (Sorry!) Like, who would die if AOL was down for 36 hours?
- croisillon 1y agooh wow and they got Vimeo and WeTransfer too!?
- dotcoma 1y agoAnd Komoot and Meetup, and of course Evernote.
- kryptoncalm 1y agoRelevant coverage of some acquisitions doesn’t bode well for AOL staff: 1. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-lay-off-75-185112831.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-lay-off-75-185... 2. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/route-planning-app-komoot-sold-after-it-expands-paywall-job-losses-could-follow/ar-AA1BojLK https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/route-planning-app-kom...
- A_Duck 1y agoAnd clearly they're hard at work whitewashing that page... check the Talk Page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bending_Spoons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bending_Spoons
- internetter 1y agoBending Spoons is correctly following the [[Wikipedia:Conflict of interest]] process. They are pointing out information which could be improved and are requesting an independent party confirm they are correct. They disclosed their conflict. All companies are allowed and encouraged to do this. Not many do. Source: I'm a wikipedia editor unaffiliated with bending spoons. Edit: I see another complaint about IP editing. I am looking into this.
- mooreds 1y agohttps://archive.is/Ouc0B https://archive.is/Ouc0B
- alberth 1y agoAt one time, AOL had a market cap of $200B https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-internet-of-the-90s-and-let-it-slip-away.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-intern...
- bdcravens 1y agoWhen Verizon sold it and Yahoo, they were sold for less than 2% of their peak market cap https://www.axios.com/2021/05/04/verizon-aol-yahoo-valuations https://www.axios.com/2021/05/04/verizon-aol-yahoo-valuation...
- ec109685 1y agoThat is a silly comparison. The alibaba assets of Yahoo were carved out before it was sold to Verizon was worth $58.62B.
- ascagnel_ 1y agoI always look at the AOLTimeWarner merger as the thing that broke them, distracting them at the moment they should've been prepping to roll out broadband. I also look at that merger through the lens of "don't fight a land war in Asia" in terms of breaking empires -- "don't let your company acquire Warner Bros.".
- JustExAWS 1y agoAOL did exactly the right thing. They knew their stock was overvalued and did some shady accounting to prop their stock up until the acquisition and it immediately crashed. How could they “get into broadband”? They weren’t going to be able to create the last mile infrastructure. We see how that worked out for Google. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/google-fiber-exits-louisville-after-shoddy-installs-left-exposed-wires-in-roads/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
- sgerenser 1y ago
- NickC25 1y agowhat does AOL even do these days? genuinely curious.
- tartoran 1y agoI wasn't even aware they were still around until a couple of days ago I received an email from an aol.com domain. Best bet is they're just a dead mall.
- mikestew 1y agoIt wasn't until the end of last month that they finally turned off dialup: https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discontinued https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discont... And I have people in my contacts whose active email ends in "@aol.com".
- ascagnel_ 1y agoAt least for my parents, there was a real fear of losing access to their 20+ year old email address if they stopped paying. I don't know if it was founded on anything, but it got them to keep paying through a decade-plus of non-AOL broadband.
- Jordan-117 1y agoIn addition to ads on their web properties, they still have a sizeable (though aging) userbase that they milk for unnecessary services. I cancelled my mom's AOL subscription years ago and they were charging something like $25/mo when the only thing she used was their (free) email service -- though of course during the cancellation they touted things like antivirus and ID theft protection that she apparently had access to. It's a legacy of when people paid them for their internet access -- no telling how many retirees (or estates) continue paying each month.
- underlipton 1y ago"Unexamined legacy subscriptions paid without a thought," is another way of saying, "Has too much money." If this is a widespread Boomer phenomenon, it explains a lot. I still kick myself for spending 6x MVNO pricing on my cell phone plan with a legacy carrier whose features I didn't need.
- flakiness 1y agoThis podcast episode has a couple of guests from that company. Recommend to whoever interested in this company: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rules-of-building-software https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
- dep_b 1y agoIf I would work at AOL I would start polishing up my resumé. They usually fire 80% after acquisition.
- everfrustrated 1y agoAOL was already owned by private equity so I'd imagine not much left to cut.
- jjice 1y agoI don't know much about Bending Spoons, but I associate them with Evernote now. Not sure if Evernote's downfall is associated with them or predates them. I never used Evernote, that's just what I hear. From what I've seen over the years, people don't like the way the product has moved and they really don't like the frequent price increases for not product change.
- avrionov 1y agoEvernote was in decline in more than 5 years before their sale to Bending Spoons. The sale didn't improve anything, because Bending Spoons act as private equity. They layoffs, moving the job to cheaper locations and increasing the prices.
- 4ndrewl 1y agoSomeone's got to cover the costs of all those non-paying users. 20 years from Bending Spoons will be the final resting place of Anthropic.
- ekjhgkejhgk 1y agoFor all the shit that PE gets, what you described is probably the best outcome possible from the POV of shareholders. If done well it should increase earnings per share. It's perhaps the best you can hope for in a situation where the company has been in decline for 5 years and you have no levers to effect change as a small shareholder. This only works profitably because the users let themselves be stepped on, of course. But then again users who put their notes into a remote company's computer are those kind of people.
- DHPersonal 1y agoBending Spoons has taken at least one of the apps I’ve used and stuffed them full of subscription models in a pretty blatant attempt to wring as much money out of the existing user base before the app becomes obsolete.
- bonzini 1y ago
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoEverytime I hear Bending Spoons it's just ugggh. Too much money. It feels so predatory. And for what? Absorb and abuse the userlist or whatever they're actually trying to get ahold of.
- rhetocj23 1y agoBending Spoons is a joke company that buys company with hopes to restructure them to meet some nonsensical financial numbers made up in an excel spreadsheet.
- ramon156 1y agoStill have no idea why they have so many job applications, they don't actually hire.
- lormayna 1y agoAFAIK (I am Italian) they have a very long and difficult hiring process, comparable to a FAANG.
- alirezaxdehghan 1y agoNo one gets in I guess. The coding challenges never end.
- nticompass 1y agoRIP AOL: 1983 - 2025
- rootbear 1y agoVerizon handed their email service over to AOL some years ago. I wonder if this will be the end for my unused @verizon.com account.
- mattmaroon 1y agoSomehow, my very first email, Hotmail (which was the only option when I got it really) is the only one from the 90s that is still kicking.
- dotcoma 1y agoYahoo! Mail is still working
- mattmaroon 1y agoThat’s true. I mean it does get hacked every week, but it does still function.
- doodlebugging 1y agoEarthlink remains great.
- Macha 1y agoAOL mail and Verizon mail had both been migrated to the yahoo mail backend when I left the company. This one kind of feels like a weird acquisition to me as that’s the story for a lot of AOL properties these days - a differently branded front end to the same services as their Yahoo counterpart. It would surely be much more costly to run AOL outside Yahoo as now you need to spread the costs of maintaining all that across fewer users
- rootbear 11mo agoAh, yes, you are correct, I had forgotten it was Yahoo that took over Verizon mail.
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoPress release: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251029086811/en/Bending-Spoons-to-acquire-AOL-following-$2.8B-debt-financing https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251029086811/en/Ben...
- jacobgkau 1y agoPeople usually mention Evernote when Bending Spoons is brought up, but I also know them as purchasing Meetup (after it was already sort of struggling) and, more recently, entering an agreement to purchase Vimeo (of which I'm a paid user). AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Yahoo!. Some of the still-relevant tech news sites like TechCrunch and Engadget were apparently moved from AOL to being directly under Yahoo! a few years ago. So I'm not too worried about AOL, but it's interesting how often I've heard about Bending Spoons in relation to brands I know over the past few years. (Edit: AOL deleted all of my childhood emails back in the 2010s-- on an account that had previously been part of a paid AOL family subscription for years-- after I failed to sign into my account for more than 6 months, which also contributes to my current feeling that it's dead to me.)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jrochkind1 1y agoIt sounds like Bending Spoons is where old tech products go to die? I guess that's private equity for you.
- dangus 1y agoThat seems to be the opposite of what the article suggests, they seem to hold on long-term and invest in technology improvements.
- everfrustrated 1y agoActual press release https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251029086811/en/Bending-Spoons-to-acquire-AOL-following-$2.8B-debt-financing https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251029086811/en/Ben...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- stabbles 1y agoThey bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still did a major redesign of the app and website afterwards. I expected outages, but so far it works like before.
- BozeWolf 1y agoExcept that it now has ten times the number of reminders popping up to please subscribe for premium, even though I already have the world maps package, so they got some of my money already.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoThis might just be an accounting trick. A lot of mature products act as a lottery ticket printing machine for the rest of the company - spend the cash on some other concept and hope that new thing becomes a stand alone product on its own. Now that komoot is owned by a parent company, instead of printing lottery tickets that other employees are scratching off, the cash is being sent up to the parent company, who may just have employees in another entity being funded by the money from komoot.
- elAhmo 1y agoIt was mostly a cosmetic redesign, no functionality has been significantly changed. Websites don't just stop working after people are fired immediately, but they slowly die or become home for parasites. Twitter is a great example of this.
- NumberCruncher 1y ago> They bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still did a major redesign This sounds like "doing a major redesign" would be something positive. I'm a paying customer since ages and use the app on daily basis. The new design adds nothing except confusion, at the same time they broke the app on my smartwatch. I'm pretty much thinking about switching apps because I don't see myself buying a new watch just because of this. Some companies would be better off with less bored designers. This is exactly the same situation like a couple of years ago, when Spotify every week rearranged the GUI and every week I had to relearn how I can reach the same functionality. Back then I had to use the App Store to give feedback, but I see now I can do the same directly in the Komoot app. They're gonna have something to laugh about...
- bluedino 1y agoI'm still using an email that is one of the AOL domains, mostly for accessing legacy sites that were around at that time. I lost access to it during an iPhone upgrade, I paid $12.95 or something for a 'premium' membership that allowed me to have the password reset by a REAL LIVE PERSON.
- logifail 1y ago> I'm still using an email that is one of the AOL domains ProTip: Honestly, just buy your own domain, control your own email address(es)...
- mlyle 1y ago> > mostly for accessing legacy sites that were around at that time.
- einsteinx2 1y agoSo change the email address on those accounts?
- xp84 1y agoThat's not always possible.
- carlosjobim 1y agoIt is almost always possible.
- strombofulous 1y agoEmail was often used as a primary key on older websites
- zarzavat 1y ago
- sdairs 1y agoLeast offensive Bending Spoons acquisition to date. I don't really mind if they kill this one?
- nostrademons 1y agoFar cry from the AOL - Time Warner merger, where AOL purchased Time Warner for $183B, creating a company with a combined $350B market cap.
- ottah 1y agoWhy would it even be worth that? Patents? Copyrights? Certainly not the trademark.
- mattmaroon 1y agoRevenue. They’ve still got millions of email/portal users and they own LifeLock, Lastpass, and a bunch of other crap. They are still rumored to do nearly a half billion a year in revenue and the margins are good.
- dotcoma 1y agoThen 1.5 B is a steal!
- jrflowers 1y ago> they own LifeLock, Lastpass AOL owns neither of these
- mattmaroon 1y agoYou’re right, I guess they sell plans to seniors that include those bundled in but don’t own them.
- ano-ther 1y agoCan someone enlighten me on the economics of such a deal? From what I know about acquisitions, valuations are in the range of 10-12 times annual EBITDA (or perhaps even profits). This would mean that AOL is making 150 million a year. Is that correct?
- Invictus0 1y agoFrom the first sentence of the half-page article: "AOL still drives hundreds of millions of dollars of free cash flow"
- wat10000 1y agoInteresting choice to give your company the name of a notorious fraud.
- exasperaited 1y agoThe name comes from the Matrix, supposedly. But yeah, they seem more Uri Geller than anything else.
- sharkjacobs 1y ago> That "incredibly loyal user base," as he called it, could be better served with greater investments in AOL's product and user experience, he noted. I think there's something kind of astute here, which is that anyone who is still using AOL products at this point is someone who is very resistant to changing "email and web content properties" providers, and is likely willing to passively tolerate additional enshittification and monetization
- silisili 1y agoYeah, for another 10 years or so tops. On the other hand, they are the easiest demographic to scam out of money, which seems fitting for a company like AOL.
- tanepiper 1y agoProof we are in the weirdest timeline
- elAhmo 1y agoNot sure how actively AOL is used, probably not really, but anything Bending Spoon touches is entshitified soon after. They most recently bought Komoot, and have already made questionable choices with a lot of firings and promoting paid plans. Same has happened to Meetup. It is a sad reality that this company keeps buying good products and making it hostile for users who made it good, such as in the Komoot's or Meetup's case.
- reaperducer 1y agoNot sure how actively AOL is used Perhaps more than you think. I was recently looking through an e-mail distribution list that my company uses and was surprised how many @aol.coms were on there. Easily hundreds. People in the tech bubble vastly underestimate the number of @aol.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, @earthlink.net and other legacy e-mail addresses regular people still use. After all, it's their e-mail address. Why would they ever change it?
- jimnotgym 1y ago>promoting paid plans You might say, however, that a business that wants you to actually for a product is a real sustainable business.
- apparent 1y ago> That "incredibly loyal user base," as he called it, could be better served with greater investments in AOL's product and user experience, he noted. Sure, but isn't the user base also incredibly aged, and literally dying off? They're also not very tech-savvy or likely to embrace new offerings. If anything, it seems like the opportunity is to reclaim the old brand and try to make it a thing with Gen Alpha kids or something, via kitsch and some genuinely useful offerings (like more email storage than gmail, or something).
- WillAdams 1y agoSome of us would have been willing to pay --- still annoyed all my members.aol.com pages were first defaced by ads (I would've paid extra to not have such) and then went away (I'd've been willing to pay a reasonable fee to keep them online). This does however explain why a bunch of accounts I forgot to log into for a couple of years are gone.
- gregjw 1y agoBending Spoons hoovering up old notable names
- arresin 1y agoIs boomer goodwill that valuable?
- olalonde 1y agoIt comes down to 50$ per monthly active user. I wonder how they plan to recoup that.
- exasperaited 1y agoI didn't know AOL was still alive. Dead now though. Bending Spoons is the kiss of death.
- keyliejener 1y ago[flagged]
- jlarocco 1y agoI had never heard of Bending Spoons before. Their Wikipedia article makes them sound like kind of a failure, but the entire second half of the page is talking about all of their acquisitions, more than one of which cost over $1 billion. So what am I missing? How did this company get so much money?
- jimnotgym 1y agoI guess by offering consistent long term cashflows you can attract classic institutional investors, and banks. Europe is much better at that than it is at finding VC cash for a moonshot
- xandrius 1y agoDark-patterns all the way. They have tiny internal teams split per product with the sole purpose of hiding the "not now" button as much as possible to increase trials and purchases. Absolutely cancer of a company, run away if you see their name on anything.
- Ekaros 1y agoMaybe they just run companies like they should be run when VC money runs out. Which is somewhat hard for consumers that have gotten used to getting everything for free. ZIRP era with free flowing money, probably did lot of bad in this respect. Running products cost actual money. And those surviving on advertising is more limited group.
- Tarsul 1y agoI noticed that, too. If one only had the wikipedia article to go on, it would appear that they made way too much money with the covid app for Italy. Which is probably true, but probably not billions?! So, after reading another article[1] (which does not really give strong pointers but leads to) my conclusion would be that they simply somehow became a darling for investors and could finance all these big acquisitions. [1]https://weeklysiliconvalley.com/bending-spoons-from-humble-beginnings-to-a-global-tech-unicorn/ https://weeklysiliconvalley.com/bending-spoons-from-humble-b...
- poemxo 1y agoPart of me wonders how much of that 1.5B is the value of all those chat logs.
- leoc 1y agoA good effort, but not at the level of “Twitter Acquires Magic Pony” or the unmatchable “Salesforce Acquires Slack”.
- jmspring 1y agoIn all honesty, Bending Spoons acquiring AOL will probably have better synergy across their portfolio than Salesforce buying Slack. Having worked at SF, even working in dev rel/infra ops, it was mostly "slack who?". That acquisition was more like the Skype/Lync - aka, not really integrated, but tried - as opposed to MS buying GitHub and mostly keeping it independent.
- mkhalil 1y ago1.5 billion used to be an absolute ridiculous number to pay for a company not long ago. AOL? 1990s AOL? But with 5 trillion dollar companies these days that are "worth" more than the entire GDP of Germany, why not. It's not real. It's just a number on a computer at this point.
- holden_nelson 1y agoHighly recommended the Bending Spoons episode of The Pragmatic Engineer podcast. They address the layoffs head-on and talk about some of their other unconventional stuff like no on-call. https://pca.st/episode/11464df6-e1cc-4b8f-a64d-a4de9a9ec170 https://pca.st/episode/11464df6-e1cc-4b8f-a64d-a4de9a9ec170
- card_zero 1y agoFootnote: Netscape.
- xandrius 1y agoAlright, if anyone is still using AOL: get the hell out of it. Bending Spoons is probably one of the companies I loathe the most from what I know from outside and even more from insider's knowledge. Anything they touch turns into dark pattern ridden turds. I honestly wish there was a page with all the products they purchased, so that I can avoid them forever.
- e40 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45749641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45749641
- cyrialize 1y agoMy wife's grandparents use and pay for AOL. I think they pay for a premium package? All I know is that it handles their internet, web browsing, and email. One day they had issues setting it up, so they call a help line. They ended up being scammed, and paid this person ~$200 to fix their issue. After it happened, they immediately called me up and asked if they were scammed. I told them that unfortunately, they were. Surprisingly though, the scammer did actually fix their issue.
- Thorrez 1y agoWas it really a scam then? Or just extremely overpriced?
- cyrialize 1y agoMy apologies, I should've been more clear! The scam was that this service is actually free provided by AOL. The grandparents shouldn't have ever been charged, they just ended up finding scammers that actually knew how to fix the issue.
- jimmydddd 11mo agoI think what folks are getting at is that it might not have been an outright scam. Just a third-party company that charged for its help desk. Many folks are willing pay for services like email that they could have otherwise gotten for free. The "scam" may have been more on the part of Google which elevates paid links to the top of the search results.
- x187463 1y agoAre you using the word scam to describe AOL overcharging for helpdesk service or was the helpdesk not affiliated with AOL and they just happened to know how to fix the problem (or maybe they caused it?)?
- cyrialize 1y agoMy apologies, I should've been clear! AOL doesn't charge for any helpdesk service at all. It explicitly says on their website that all helpdesk services are free and they'll never charge you. The scam was that the scammers had a fake helpdesk service that showed up that my wife's grandparents ended up paying for. The scammers did actually fix the issue, but the scam was that the grandparents should have never been charged!
- paulbjensen 1y agoLooking at the portfolio of businesses that Bending Spoons has, it's like a who's-who of 2010s startups. It'll be interesting to see what they do with AOL. That business itself was an amalgamation of other businesses over time, so they may find a mirror image of themselves once they start to dig into the weeds.
- ajross 1y agoEnd of an era. (Well, OK, the era ended long ago, this is just the long-delayed tombstone I guess). Those of us coming out of the pre-boom internet always sneered, but those floppies they'd pack into every magazine were the gateway for the rest of the world.
- justin66 1y agoEven though we all complained (perhaps not in so many words) about the eternal September and the damage done by opening things up to a larger number of people, the early AOLers were paradigms of intellectual curiosity and urbanity compared to what came later.
- estimator7292 1y agoHonestly I'm shocked that AOL is still worth that much.
- firefax 11mo agoI hope they bring back AIM