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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-bending-spoons-in-1-38b-all-cas
by ayhanfuat 9mo 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-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.
- nness 9mo agoI 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...
- didacusc 9mo agoThey 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.
- tetris11 9mo agoIt's a vampire economy. No one has any new ideas
- danelski 9mo ago(For Komoot) Did they, though? I am aware of the layoffs, but after that they slightly redesigned the app, collected the poll for next year's requested features, the lifetime maps option is still there to buy etc. If not for HN, I wouldn't have noticed any change in the direction that it's going in.
- bombcar 9mo agoI suspect that the VAST majority of users want their saas tools to do today what they did yesterday, and so stopping active development of new features is actually a positive - no sudden Liquid Ass is going to appear in a program in maintenance mode.
- agentcoops 9mo agoIt seems to all be debt financed, i.e. just a private equity model slightly specialized for tech. The "innovation" is that Bending Spoons has an in-house engineering team it seems they try to keep constant yet scale out to all the acquisitions. I hadn't looked into them much before, but https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-manual https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma... is an interesting report -- though not focused on the finance side.
- direwolf20 9mo ago[dead]
- gtowey 9mo 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.
- thatguy0900 9mo agoI've heard vulture capitalist used to refer to that too
- t1234s 9mo ago"corporate raiders" are a definitely real thing.
- everfrustrated 9mo agoThat usually means stripping the company for parts. Bending Spoons is just trying to run the company sustainably.
- munk-a 9mo agoVimeo employed somewhere north of a thousand people a year ago with 28% being in the engineering team (according to random google results - this isn't an area I have personal knowledge of). If they dropped from around 300 people to 15 that sounds like gutting - not trimming.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- everfrustrated 9mo agoThey will be hiring up but not the same people. Bending Spoons tends to replace high silicon valley wages with high Italy wages which is a considerable saving.
- 9mo ago
- mlnj 9mo agoWhat 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 9mo agoThe 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 9mo agoLook 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 9mo agoI 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.
- lumost 9mo agoAre these hostile takeovers? buying a competitor out through a PE deal could be cheap relative to competing with them.
- WJW 9mo agoNo, they just come in and offer a lot of money to the current owners. Bending spoons are ruthless businesspeople but AFAIK they do offer a reasonable price for the businesses they acquire. (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.)
- lumost 9mo agobut where does the money come from? it seems like a good way to avoid regulatory scrutiny if your acquisition goal is to simply exit a competitor from the market.
- hedgehog 9mo agoBasically a loan.
- rcxdude 9mo agoThe money comes from investors. Private Equity basically works by taking money from investors to buy companies and turn a profit with them, paying back the investors when they do so (it's a very illiquid and risky investment, so the advertised returns tend to be higher, but it does seem like a lot of firms are struggling to actually make it work).
- lumost 9mo agoAye - it’s a simple business model, which seemed to work well in an era of low interest rates. However some of these tech buyouts seem quite myopic, making it almost appear like the goal was to shutdown the company.
- AznHisoka 9mo agoThis 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
- egypturnash 9mo agoI would still be a happy Evernote customer if they hadn't rewritten all the apps from scratch.
- stefan_ 9mo agoIts just private equity for software
- jjice 9mo agoYeah 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.
- toomuchtodo 9mo agoThis is correct. You're buying a cashflow. Bending Spoons has optimized their model for very specific types of cashflow enterprises to aggregate into their portfolio.
- rickydroll 9mo agoI use Harvest to track hours and expenses and to invoice my customers. Bending Spoons apparently bought them a while ago and just eliminated the shell company around Harvest. 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.
- toomuchtodo 9mo agoYes.
- dwedge 9mo agoI've been in the same boat as you and replaced it last year but still pay for harvest (grandfathered pricing) until I can be sure I don't need it. I'm almost up to renewal and haven't used it at all since trying app.solidtime.io 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
- burningChrome 9mo ago
- usrusr 9mo agoWhat'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 9mo agoMy 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
- Beretta_Vexee 9mo agoThey are also very good at pooling their infrastructure and software stack. This accounts for a significant portion of the costs.
- ragall 9mo agoActually they're paying very competitive salaries. For example: https://jobs.bendingspoons.com/positions/67c6dc18c70c531d6db8bc3e https://jobs.bendingspoons.com/positions/67c6dc18c70c531d6db....
- throwaway2037 9mo ago> Typically, we offer individuals at the start of their career an annual salary of £85,797 in London and €66,065 elsewhere in Europe. That would be excellent pay for a junior engineer in Italy.
- IshKebab 9mo agoI can't see any salaries there but presumably they're going to be competitive for Europe, which is roughly half the competitive salary in America. There are plenty of competent devs outside America. I can't see any reason why you'd want to pay American salaries if you're a global company.
- Fnoord 9mo agoIt is called bait and switch. And the company name referring to bending spoons (Uri Geller) gives away the way they see themselves.
- pc86 9mo agoBait and switch is something completely different. 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."
- dingnuts 9mo agoYou bought a relationship with a service company that locked you in and sold you out. That's absolutely a bait and switch, just one of service instead of goods, because it's a SaaS company. This is the real reason I'm tired of subscriptions. I don't even care about the "pay in perpetuity" problem in some cases, I just don't want the entity I chose to do business with to completely change. That's absolutely a bait and switch.
- huhtenberg 9mo agoAccording to Wikipedia, the name is a reference to that scene from The Matrix.
- nradov 9mo agoVimeo isn't really SaaS though.
- dbbk 9mo agoOf course it is?
- Beretta_Vexee 9mo agoFor 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.
- alistairSH 9mo agoIt's also complicated to switch apps because transferring routes, collections, photos, etc. to another service is difficult. 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.
- mendelmaleh 9mo agoI think by routes he means the trails database, not user activity
- Beretta_Vexee 9mo agoOh I can do it but I am not really representative of the average user. 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.
- stabbles 9mo ago> Since then, there has been no further development of the service. That's not true, the website and app both got a major redesign after acquisition.
- Beretta_Vexee 9mo agoIt is mainly cosmetic and probably due to sharing resources (web template) with their other products. There are no new features.
- bachmeier 9mo agoOne 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 9mo agoThe 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 9mo agoyou'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 9mo agoHN: 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
- cheschire 9mo agoIt’s almost as if HN were a community of voices instead of just one…
- DonHopkins 9mo agoYes, we're are all individuals! Yes, we're all different! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY (I'm not.)
- ryoshoe 9mo agoThe Goomba Fallacy strikes once again
- cheschire 9mo agoThanks for sharing the name of the phenomenon! I was not aware of it before.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo agoThis fallacy's pretty cool and first time I Heard of it! Do you know other fallacies like this which are less known but as interesting (that you or others might know of) probably?
- dotBen 9mo agoIf your comment is referring to the bending spoons business model, it's worth pointing out they are not VC, they are private equity. 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.
- Closi 9mo agoWhat 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!
- CodeWriter23 9mo 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.
- everfrustrated 9mo agoThey recently bought AOL too!
- CodeWriter23 9mo agoI was unaware, thanks for the update.
- j45 9mo agoSometimes 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 9mo agoSo 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.
- epolanski 9mo agoIt'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.
- joelthelion 9mo agoHave there been any serious legal efforts to make this less profitable? It's very clearly detrimental to society.
- ImPostingOnHN 9mo agoPrivate equity (what's being described here) has more political influence than "society" because money.
- johnnyanmac 9mo agoSociety has more money and way more votes than PE. I'm going to quote A Bugs Life (1998) of all things here: > Hopper: You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life! It's not about food, it's about keeping those ants in line. In our case, it's more like a million to one
- ImPostingOnHN 9mo agoI suspect that the free cash flow of those who seek fewer regulations of this sort on thing exceeds the free cash flow of those who seek more. People that are being squeezed by PE have less money to wield as political influence partially because they are being squeezed by PE. The ones doing the squeezing are ok with that. The people who are uninvolved, who fit into neither box, don't care enough or don't have enough money they're able & willing to part with. They also don't have fancy accountants or corporate accounts to expense it to. This is the local optimum.
- mynameisjody 9mo agoYou'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.
- huhtenberg 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo agoStartups 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 9mo agoI’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-a 9mo agoOh, 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.
- hn_acc1 9mo agoI mean, Broadcom / VmWare is basically doing the same, just more for enterprise level software. OTOH - if Vimeo has given up all hope of further new features, then giving current users the chance to keep going isn't completely evil, even if it's at a higher price. VmWare is basically doing the same, and lots of customers are leaving, and those who aren't may still eventually do so, etc. (Edit: what if the alternative was Vimeo shutting down?) Think of vintage car parts - if you absolutely want to restore that '30s Ford (keep using 20+ year old software) - someone offering an OEM-equivalent part for 3x what it cost back in the day (even adjusted for inflation) may actually still be good value - because what other alternatives are there? Now - does it suck for the employees? Sure. One thing an econ prof said back in the late 90s (who loved to guest-lecture to CS/SWEng students): your job as a software person is to put other people out of work by automating stuff they used to do manually. Are you ok with that? Because if you're not, you should go into a different industry right now. Feels much worse when it's programmers getting the axe due to finance types, but not unexpected.
- mrtksn 9mo agoElon 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 9mo agoIt's fine because revenue is not important. Elon Musk has made that clear openly and repeatedly. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-misquotes-princess-bride-tweets-conspiracy-theories-lose-money-2023-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-misquotes-princess... https://people.com/elon-musk-tells-disney-other-advertisers-go-f-yourself-8408395 https://people.com/elon-musk-tells-disney-other-advertisers-...
- tonyedgecombe 9mo agoIf it wasn’t for all the political histrionics we would all be celebrating Elon’s amazing abilities.
- Refreeze5224 9mo ago[flagged]
- evilduck 9mo agoLosing 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.
- mrtksn 9mo agoFire the engineers but don't do the nazi stuff. The software functions just fine, lack of engineers isn't the reason of the downfall of Twitter. If anything, it's better product than ever, it's just that it harbors too many deplorable people.
- chpatrick 9mo agoTo be honest, how much staff do you need to run a file transfer service.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- pnw 9mo agoThis 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 9mo agoSeems to be very common nowadays for PE
- buellerbueller 9mo agoIs this any different than the SaaS business model, except a 3rd party bought the company to strip it? Everything SaaS these days, hell every subscription these days seems to involve product enshittification + rising pricing. Is this the end game of the financialization of everything?
- walthamstow 9mo agoIt'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 9mo agoIt'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.