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Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO
- lhoff 5mo agoThey also own Komoot and I am anxiously awaiting the enshittification. As of now my use cases still work and it certainly helped that I bought the lifetime all-world map package.
- w4der 5mo agoIt has already started, many features which you could previously access without an account are now locked behind a login screen.
- sarnu 5mo agoFrom my view, komoot got a lot better since it was bought by BS. I don't know how they did this while laying off a lot of devs, but compared to the years before, a ton of useful things got shipped. Disclaimer: I have the yearly subscription. Maybe the new features are only available for customers who are subscribing, not the one-time purchases.
- elffjs 5mo agoPer Wikipedia, Bending Spoons owns: AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite, Evernote, Harvest, Issuu, Komoot, Meetup, MileIQ, Remini, StreamYard, Tractive, Vimeo, and WeTransfer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons
- postalcoder 5mo agoYou missed filmic. Wow. So these people are the reason why Filmic went overnight from one of my favorite iOS apps to something for the trash heap. 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.
- fckgw 5mo agoThey're basically the retirement home for once-good apps and services who still serve a dwindling core audience but are not longer growing or even a real contender in their field.
- BonoboIO 5mo agoAt least Evernote was saved by Bending Spoons. At one point, even Evernote was getting roughly a third of its monthly revenue from merchandise, which is pretty wild for a paperless note-taking app and a decent sign that the core business was already in bad shape. For the rest, though, they seem very good at squeezing hard whatever is left.
- drob518 5mo agoYep, but now they’re jacking the pricing to the moon and everyone is starting to leave for other apps. I almost did it this year and probably will do it next year.
- jonfromsf 5mo agoI left last month. $250 a year or something crazy like that. Obsidian has a free web clipper, I'm planning on using that since I was just bookmarking stuff.
- drob518 5mo agoExactly. I’m trying out Obsidian this year. In Bending Spoon’s defense, they have been improving the app, particularly the sync, but I don’t care about many of the new features (e.g., AI stuff).
- righthand 5mo agoInteresting, Vimeo sat under IAC for almost 20 years claiming it would go public, when it finally did it was eventually sold off to Bending Spoons not even 5 years in.
- michelb 5mo agoWhile I'm not a huge fan of the Bending Spoons model, Vimeo sure got improved quickly.
- muglug 5mo agoWhat exactly? From what I’ve heard, most of what was released in the months after the acquisition were features that were already in development/behind feature flags.
- michelb 5mo agoSpeed, UI improvements, esp in the backend. Vimeo has been languishing for years. If this was all done by the original team, I wonder why they didn't roll it out years earlier. I've switched several clients away because of it.
- xnx 5mo agoBut how will they make it about AI...?
- raphman 5mo ago> "Founded in 2013, Bending Spoons reported a net income of $27.5 million on revenue of $601 million for the three months ended March 31, compared to a net loss of $112.2 million on revenue of $259 million a year earlier. A large chunk of its revenue comes from recurring subscriptions, providing a more predictable stream of income." Gergely Orosz did an interview with them in 2024: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rules-of-building-software https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
- stefan_ 5mo agoClever, shitty numbers and they decide to IPO at the peak of the "actually SaaS is worthless" hype. I wish them the worst, considering their business model.
- gekoxyz 5mo agoIn Italy they are really frowned upon by developers. They add 0 value. And it's not like "Oh, VC firms add 0 value to companies they acquire", this is really messed up.
- csomar 5mo agoSo roughly $100m/year profit(edit). They are looking for a 20Bn valuation but interest rates are at 5%? How does any of this make any sense? That or we are in a real bubble.
- postalcoder 5mo agoYou're mixing up the numbers. Their annual run rate is $2.4 billion. Revenue grew 140% YoY. That's an 8x sales multiple on good growth. The valuation is not egregious.
- csomar 5mo agoSorry I meant profit. On a 5% interest, you get 1bn (pure profit with no risks) per year for a 20bn of capital. Their revenue grew 140% YoY but does that account for new acquisitions? Also, their profit needs to grow x10 in order to match bonds. It may have made sense in a 0% interest rate world but not at 5.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- moralestapia 5mo agoIt's still a big mystery to me how they were able to pull billion-dollar acquisitions while being one or two orders of magnitude lower in revenue. >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.
- foresterre 5mo agoTheir strategy always was "buy company" and "instantly lay off about everyone" to save costs and rapidly increase subscription pricing (1). 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-says-this-wont-end-well.html https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/03/komoot-acquired-history-... (2) https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/ https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/
- threetonesun 5mo agoYou can imagine all of these moderately successful SAAS companies that see peak subscribers starting to fall off on top of legacy tech stacks and no will to make drastic steps to get back to growth and understand why they sell. I've never seen BS as specifically ruining companies (although they've certainly been known to jack up prices for the remaining subscribers) but it's not a good sign when they do buy something you use.
- Zigurd 5mo agoWhat would you rather have? A five-year struggle to turn around a stagnant SaaS, or a big fat check? It's a simple and effective model. First one out gets the biggest check.
- k310 5mo agoIMO, they buy companies, lay off en masse and sell the now sunsetted products. 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.
- alephnerd 5mo agoIt's the circle of life - all businesses reach a point where they don't have significant growth potential or became a "keep the lights on" operation, and at that point their investors and founders wish to exit and cash out in order to invest in greener pastures. That's where businesses like Bending Spoons, Red Ventures, and IAC come in for digital media.
- w4der 5mo agoThey also have a very intense workplace culture, I had a manager who was part of Evernote while their site was being laid off by Bending Spoons, and he heard some wild stories, they pay above average for a European tech company (but with geo-fenced brackets), crunch a ton and then crash out at a big new year's party were they fly all their teams to some resort, among other things.
- orsorna 5mo agoWow sounds very family friendly!
- cucumber3732842 5mo agoSo? Doesn't sound any worse than the average restaurant.
- marcosdumay 5mo agoHow many people work in your family? How many different events in random parts of the world can your family attend together at mid-night December 31st?
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- martin_drapeau 5mo ago20VC had an interview with them: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/luca-ferrari https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/luca-ferrari 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.
- baobabKoodaa 5mo agoSo first they fire all the staff and then they "care and improve the products"? Who? Who does that? They fired the staff, so who improves the product?
- mmarian 5mo agoI'm often thinking about building a better Meetup, it's so expensive for organizers these days. But then I acknowledge the network effects and I give up. And they own Eventbrite too! Savvy people.
- baron816 5mo agoIsn’t this just Luma?
- mmarian 5mo agoSee reply I just made in other thread.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- burkaman 5mo agoI see a lot of people using https://luma.com/ https://luma.com/. I'm sure it's not as big as Meetup but it does have a decent community of users, and you can set up pretty much anything with their free plan.
- alephnerd 5mo agoAt least in the Bay, Luma and Partiful are much bigger than Meetup now.
- mmarian 5mo agoInteresting. Luma is getting traction in London. Not so much outside.
- alephnerd 5mo agoIt's about the user bases - Luma and Partiful are almost entirely professionals in careers like Tech, Finance, or Entertainment (especially LA), and the events almost always vet before accepting people. This helps ensure a better noise to signal ratio that Meetup simply couldn't provide.
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoSome history from only the past year in discussions: Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302 AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45749161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45749161 Bending Spoons Acquires Eventbrite https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124673 Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699
- kome 5mo agoIPOing just before an evident .com tech bubble is about to explode is courageous. Good luck to everyone. 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.
- greggoB 5mo ago> despite the naysayers, they improve things a bit on most of their acquisitions There seem to be quite a few commenters stating the exact opposite, with concrete examples in hand (especially for Komoot). Do you have experience with any of the services they've bought, and can say how they've been improved?
- fhdkweig 5mo agoNot the OP, but from a stock market perspective, improvement can mean "lay off workers, and raise subscription prices". Not good for the users, but good for the kinds of people who like reading news about IPOs.
- greggoB 5mo agoFair enough, though I do bristle at the use of the term "real value", like somehow it's a general net positive. They should at least qualify with "for shareholders" so we can know that their interests are specifically directed at financial enrichment
- riffraff 5mo agowhy is it courageous? It seems the perfect time to do it while the market is still bubbly.
- Zigurd 5mo agoI'm old enough to have been acquired by Computer Associates at a company that acquired my company. CA's business model was to buy companies and then fold their products into an omnibus license, all of their customers, including the ones they just acquired, becoming involuntary licensees whatever the cat dragged in this quarter. It turns out a lot of corporate IT has no idea how to switch vendors in case a product they use gets acquired by a company with this business model.
- Maxious 5mo agoThe number of corporate IT departments got caught when VMWare licencing shifted from Dell EMC to Broadcom https://www.techradar.com/pro/broadcom-has-allegedly-hiked-vmware-costs-between-800-and-1-500-percent https://www.techradar.com/pro/broadcom-has-allegedly-hiked-v...
- Zigurd 5mo agoFor context, Broadcom bought CA.
- kryogen1c 5mo agoThis still confuses me. It's clear they wanted to 10x licensing costs and /10 customers which assumably raises margins, but i still dont see it working out. My international enterprise and all our business partners moved every broadcom product we have to a competitor. On top of that, they were very aggressive and combative with their sales+cease and desist threats. They earned enemies for life. Some of us care about business relationships. Broadcom is dead to me and anyone that will listen to me.
- nikanj 5mo agoThat's what people have been saying about Oracle for decades, and they're still going strong
- justsomehnguy 5mo ago> They earned enemies for life. Some of us care about business relationships. Broadcom is dead to me and anyone that will listen to me. That's the thing: Broadcom don't. Care, bother, whatever. You are not even a blip.
- defmetrix 5mo agoAnother IPO that I will be avoiding.
- easyThrowaway 5mo agoMark my words: they will keep growing until they collapse, and once that happens, they will use their reach and contacts with the Italian government to ask to be bailed out out of debt. It’s not a matter of “if”, but “when”. It’s a well known strategy that has been applied by several Italian companies, FIAT (now Stellantis) first and foremost.
- gulugawa 5mo agoI looked at the Bending Spoons employee handbook, and they openly admit that employee performance is evaluated on "making an impact". To me, this means adding pointless features for the sake of getting better ratings. Since Bending Spoons purchased Meetup, I have noticed the UI becoming more cluttered and hard to use. Also, I consistently get ads asking me to buy an organizer subscription to host events, even when on the page for a group I'm an organizer for. After seeing this emphasis on "impact" cause Meetup's UI to degrade, I'm skeptical about the company's long term future.
- toast0 5mo ago> I looked at the Bending Spoons employee handbook, and they openly admit that employee performance is evaluated on "making an impact". To me, this means adding pointless features for the sake of getting better ratings. I worked at a company that was all about impact. Take the site down, that's a lot of impact ... If they wanted something else, they should have been more specific.