6 ms·

What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

86 points by jack1689 3mo ago

mghackerlady 3mo ago
I wonder how different AOL is since last time I checked. A few years ago at least, it was basically just Yahoo with different branding
jack1689 3mo ago
I was reading a bit about their story, it feels like they managed to succeed by turning overly funded (and by then devalued) software products and restructuring them for long term profitability as they are not bounded to the classic 10 year time horizon of private funds. Wondering if we will see more plays like this as alternatives to traditional private equity and as fallback option for VC backed companies that bursted.
- tecleandor 3mo ago
  From the acquisitions I've followed, what they do is firing 80% of the staff the next week after the acquisition, raise prices, and put the app in maintenance mode. I don't know if they've done something more sensible elsewhere, but they mostly do wealth extraction.
  - sbarre 3mo ago
    While I agree that their specific approach sucks, I do wish more companies would declare products as "done" and stop messing with the UI and changing features every quarter, and just go into a long-term stability mode.
    - alanwreath 3mo ago
      That’s Valve (somewhat) and Blizzard (but to the nth degree) in a nutshell. That said, tangentially, I do wish game companies would let games live on.
      - bionade24 3mo ago
        Valve recently changed the Steam workshop UI/website meanwhile Steam still runs on X11 and depends on 32bit libs on Linux.
  - mike_hearn 3mo ago
    They do claim to be shipping new features to their acquired apps. Look at their website. It's got lists of such things. The steelman case for this is something like, mature apps that found product market fit are often over-staffed and doing a lot of duplicated work. You could get five of them together and consolidate their infrastructure/code to reduce costs, and have generalist devs who can work on any of those codebases. Then you need fewer people. So this isn't an irrational thing to do. It's commonly done by firms like Google or Meta where they buy a small company and then rewrite it onto their own infrastructure to reduce costs. Sometimes the engineers are reallocated to other projects, or things drift and there are eventually layoffs. Google bought DoubleClick and then laid off 50% of the staff! Twitter didn't consolidate products but was clearly overstaffed, nobody imagines that Twitter was unique. So the bull case for this is that it's finding efficiencies. The apps may not be the shiniest hottest things anymore, but they can still live on and be maintained if they're run more efficiently as a business. And yes this may involve layoffs or price rises, as often software startups hopelessly misprice their product and prefer to burn VC money than lose users or colleagues. Managers who aren't emotionally attached to the product or company can correct this, putting it on a long term stable path. That may suck for the user but probably sucks less than the company being under, or being acquihired and the product totally shut down.
ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
Related: Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446310 Weird Italian loveletter about the IPO: Bending Spoons just went public: Italy won the World Cup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48773549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48773549 Some 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
achandra03 3mo ago
Is it not just a private equity fund masquerading as a tech firm?
- PatronBernard 3mo ago
  It is. They are also enshittifying Komoot and EventBrite. Also by default they acquire a company and fire all staff within the week. Fuck Bending Spoons.
  - jlarocco 3mo ago
    I wish they'd buy Spotify... Keep one SRE to keep the servers running, one guy to do security updates to the app, and the team that acquires rights to music.
    - bdamm 3mo ago
      Why do you think that a platform with so many customers as to be industry defining, with dozens of interface options, with a massive feature set, with a global footprint and basically flawless uptime requirements, could be kept running by two guys?
      - jlarocco 3mo ago
        It was a tongue in cheek complaint about their terrible apps and the user hostile way they force unwanted "features" on people. I'd pay 2x my subscription price to be able to use a third party client again.
    - warkdarrior 3mo ago
      You need at least 3 devs to keep adding popups to the app with offers, upgrades, and other "related content".
    - Grombobulous 3mo ago
      This will never happen. Labels literally negotiated their own royalty rates down in exchange for shares in Spotify. It’s the perfect way to push artists out of receiving earnings. I think record labels would be first in line to buy Spotify if it was ever for sale.
ethagnawl 3mo ago
Whatever they are, they let Evernote devolve into a buggy pile of crap -- especially on Android. I migrated to Joplin, stopped paying for my obscenely expensive plan ($$$ per year) and haven't looked back.
- GGO 3mo ago
  That's exactly their business plan. So seems like they are executing on it very well.
- Quiza12 3mo ago
  Same - what's funny is that if they'd lifted prices 20-30% I might have stayed, but they went with the big bang of 85%.
cs702 3mo ago
Bending Spoons is a company that acquires SaaS companies/products that are not growing or losing users but have a well-known brand and customers who stick around. The execs at Bending Spoon buy these SaaS services on the cheap, cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible. Rinse and repeat. The goal is to generate the highest possible rate of return on invested capital in a law-abiding manner.
- Scoundreller 3mo ago
  I had a vendor acquired by one of these types of outfits. I looked through their assets and it clicked: “this is where software goes to die”
  - mavelikara 3mo ago
    > this is where software goes to die The ones that IBM passed up on, yes.
    - pigeons 3mo ago
      That avoided the Apache Foundation.
- ulfw 3mo ago
  That's a short term business model if I have ever seen one. "customers who stick around." is anthesis to mid- to long-term customer loyalty when you do "jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible"
  - cs702 3mo ago
    Think of it as a perpetual bond with declining coupon payments. Customer "inertia" or "lock-in" might be better terms to describe what the company is looking for in an acquisition. Their ideal customer may well be someone who's forgotten they have a subscription on credit card auto-pay.
stenodeevee 3mo ago
[dead]
AdmiralAsshat 3mo ago
Remarkably on-brand, named after the signature trick of a well-known charlatan.
jabiko 3mo ago
I'm a bit salty due to what they've done to the Komoot team. Komoot was (and still is) a great app for planing your outdoor activities. After acquiring Komoot, they fired everybody. Watching their goodbye video is a bit heartbreaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLJkK4Wn1HI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLJkK4Wn1HI
xacky 3mo ago
AOL Time Warner was the peak of the original dot com bubble.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
block_dagger 3mo ago
Whenever I see Vimeo in a headline, it reminds me of my lack of foresight. In college, the creator of Vimeo was in my friend group. I went to his on-campus apartment to pick him up for a party once. He showed me this "video sharing website" that he was working on. Its title was an anagram of "movie." This was in 1999. Digitized video was barely a thing. I looked at it, didn't understand how it would be useful, and assumed it was another one of his eccentric creative outlets that would go nowhere. A few years later, he was a multimillionaire and I was not.
- ValentineC 3mo ago
  > Its title was an anagram of "movie." TIL! I always thought it was some creative play on "video".
  - block_dagger 3mo ago
    It's both!
com2kid 3mo ago
Very off topic - Just 2 days of for fun I tried to login to AOL.com with my username and PW from 1995. (Same username as on HN in fact) It worked! That is one hell of a series of good DB migrations. Sadly I was immediately forced to change my password. Still, 31 years is a good run for a password.
lain98 3mo ago
Down 13% in the last 5 days.
khurs 3mo ago
This is the Prospectus they used for the IPO which goes into all the details about them https://bendingspoons.com/documents/financials/2026/Bending%20Spoons%20Final%20Prospectus%20As%20Filed.pdf https://bendingspoons.com/documents/financials/2026/Bending%...
apparent 3mo ago
Are there any companies/products that got better after acquisition by these guys? I feel like the only times I've heard about them is when people are griping about how they're making stuff worse.
bix6 3mo ago
I don’t really get this model. Seems like a waste of money / time / energy.
- Bratmon 3mo ago
  They keep popular but unprofitable products that would otherwise be turned down alive. There are Victorian-horror-esque costs to that, but it's still better that those projects be alive but enshittified than completely dead (If you disagree, you can just cancel your subscription, after all)
cryo32 3mo ago
Bending Spoons are the miserable tossers who bought Meetup and somehow made it worse by monetising every move you make. And it was pretty bad to start with.
luisgvv 3mo ago
> What is Bending Sppons? The company that made me unsubscribe from Evernote after 8 years because it got slow, buggy and skyrocketed their prices. Good riddance, now I am using Obsidian + an LLM and works way better.
forsatellite 3mo ago
Contrary opinion I guess but they've modernized the two services I use that they've acquired: Evernote and Harvest. I was already a paying multi-seat customer of both so maybe the worst price increases didn't happen to me (yet); I suspect Bending Spoons has a real animosity to free/near-free tiers. But I certainly might get bitten soon. I use Evernote for paperless household management (shared travel itineraries, scans of paperwork, saved recipes, etc.) as well as my personal notes. It was under Bending Spoons that they finally landed multi-player realtime collaboration, which ended a decade of annoying sync conflicts and bugs, at least for me. Every month there are new little features like @mention to include a linked note, that bring more parity with platforms like Notion – the kind of core improvements the original owners had completely lost focus on. And they record a monthly video evangelizing the new features. Would something newer be better? Who knows but I'm happy not to switch, I have thousands of notes in there which I access from laptop, desktop, phone, and web. Bouncing from one platform to another is not my favorite way to spend time. I'm quite happy with how they've managed a mature platform. Harvest also started adding new features for the first time in many years. Their customer support did turn into a baffling AI bot for a while but eventually a human replied and apologized. Harvest is also a mature platform that just needs to not self-destruct in order to serve my needs; but small new features have been welcome. Both these platforms have something in common too: Good old fashioned REST API's. I like to scan directly to Evernote from my Brother MFC printer/scanner, no computer or phone needed. We log time into Harvest from a variety of other platforms and apps. I'm happy to have these workflows maintained. I might submit that this kind of specialized, deep-pocketed owner is the best-case scenario for long-term preservation of mature REST-based SaaS small businesses. Otherwise they get bought by Google, or dwindle when the founders move on?
crumpled 3mo ago
I wonder if "loyal user base" just means people who feel locked in, or somehow don't know any better. I can't imagine another reason for the "loyalty". Feels pretty exploitive.
dmacedo 3mo ago
Well I want to launch Straightening Forks: the B-Corp that hires experienced developers, designers, and other digital folks and instead of buying dying digital estate to extract the remaining bone hurting juice from its user-base, it would instead: re-implement (fork, LOL) open alternatives seeking viable business models or just FOSS a working path, with minimal product features serving those core users and their needs, centralising the core cross-product services and cost optimising the backend plus realising what's the actual features users "need" vs. "want", and try to create sustainable products which instead of just extracting value try to provide value in this world. Surely this isn't difficult???...
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
chewz 3mo ago
There is a market niche for projects cementary. Many companies or funds tend to buy projects at peak valuations (or artificial valuations based on blown up projections). Re-valuating these projects on the books would be an embarrassing to the board. Losing face, shareholders questions. Selling these assets (possibly via asset swap) to specialized cementary fund where they can be disolved and disappear in the haze is a different, more honorable matter.

86 points by jack1689 3mo ago

I wonder how different AOL is since last time I checked. A few years ago at least, it was basically just Yahoo with different branding

jack1689 3mo ago

I was reading a bit about their story, it feels like they managed to succeed by turning overly funded (and by then devalued) software products and restructuring them for long term profitability as they are not bounded to the classic 10 year time horizon of private funds. Wondering if we will see more plays like this as alternatives to traditional private equity and as fallback option for VC backed companies that bursted.

tecleandor 3mo ago
From the acquisitions I've followed, what they do is firing 80% of the staff the next week after the acquisition, raise prices, and put the app in maintenance mode. I don't know if they've done something more sensible elsewhere, but they mostly do wealth extraction.
- sbarre 3mo ago
  While I agree that their specific approach sucks, I do wish more companies would declare products as "done" and stop messing with the UI and changing features every quarter, and just go into a long-term stability mode.
  - alanwreath 3mo ago
    That’s Valve (somewhat) and Blizzard (but to the nth degree) in a nutshell. That said, tangentially, I do wish game companies would let games live on.
    - bionade24 3mo ago
      Valve recently changed the Steam workshop UI/website meanwhile Steam still runs on X11 and depends on 32bit libs on Linux.
- mike_hearn 3mo ago
  They do claim to be shipping new features to their acquired apps. Look at their website. It's got lists of such things. The steelman case for this is something like, mature apps that found product market fit are often over-staffed and doing a lot of duplicated work. You could get five of them together and consolidate their infrastructure/code to reduce costs, and have generalist devs who can work on any of those codebases. Then you need fewer people. So this isn't an irrational thing to do. It's commonly done by firms like Google or Meta where they buy a small company and then rewrite it onto their own infrastructure to reduce costs. Sometimes the engineers are reallocated to other projects, or things drift and there are eventually layoffs. Google bought DoubleClick and then laid off 50% of the staff! Twitter didn't consolidate products but was clearly overstaffed, nobody imagines that Twitter was unique. So the bull case for this is that it's finding efficiencies. The apps may not be the shiniest hottest things anymore, but they can still live on and be maintained if they're run more efficiently as a business. And yes this may involve layoffs or price rises, as often software startups hopelessly misprice their product and prefer to burn VC money than lose users or colleagues. Managers who aren't emotionally attached to the product or company can correct this, putting it on a long term stable path. That may suck for the user but probably sucks less than the company being under, or being acquihired and the product totally shut down.

ChrisArchitect 3mo ago

Related: Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446310 Weird Italian loveletter about the IPO: Bending Spoons just went public: Italy won the World Cup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48773549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48773549 Some 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

achandra03 3mo ago

Is it not just a private equity fund masquerading as a tech firm?

PatronBernard 3mo ago
It is. They are also enshittifying Komoot and EventBrite. Also by default they acquire a company and fire all staff within the week. Fuck Bending Spoons.
- jlarocco 3mo ago
  I wish they'd buy Spotify... Keep one SRE to keep the servers running, one guy to do security updates to the app, and the team that acquires rights to music.
  - bdamm 3mo ago
    Why do you think that a platform with so many customers as to be industry defining, with dozens of interface options, with a massive feature set, with a global footprint and basically flawless uptime requirements, could be kept running by two guys?
    - jlarocco 3mo ago
      It was a tongue in cheek complaint about their terrible apps and the user hostile way they force unwanted "features" on people. I'd pay 2x my subscription price to be able to use a third party client again.
  - warkdarrior 3mo ago
    You need at least 3 devs to keep adding popups to the app with offers, upgrades, and other "related content".
  - Grombobulous 3mo ago
    This will never happen. Labels literally negotiated their own royalty rates down in exchange for shares in Spotify. It’s the perfect way to push artists out of receiving earnings. I think record labels would be first in line to buy Spotify if it was ever for sale.

ethagnawl 3mo ago

Whatever they are, they let Evernote devolve into a buggy pile of crap -- especially on Android. I migrated to Joplin, stopped paying for my obscenely expensive plan ($$$ per year) and haven't looked back.

GGO 3mo ago
That's exactly their business plan. So seems like they are executing on it very well.
Quiza12 3mo ago
Same - what's funny is that if they'd lifted prices 20-30% I might have stayed, but they went with the big bang of 85%.

cs702 3mo ago

Bending Spoons is a company that acquires SaaS companies/products that are not growing or losing users but have a well-known brand and customers who stick around. The execs at Bending Spoon buy these SaaS services on the cheap, cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible. Rinse and repeat. The goal is to generate the highest possible rate of return on invested capital in a law-abiding manner.

Scoundreller 3mo ago
I had a vendor acquired by one of these types of outfits. I looked through their assets and it clicked: “this is where software goes to die”
- mavelikara 3mo ago
  > this is where software goes to die The ones that IBM passed up on, yes.
  - pigeons 3mo ago
    That avoided the Apache Foundation.
ulfw 3mo ago
That's a short term business model if I have ever seen one. "customers who stick around." is anthesis to mid- to long-term customer loyalty when you do "jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible"
- cs702 3mo ago
  Think of it as a perpetual bond with declining coupon payments. Customer "inertia" or "lock-in" might be better terms to describe what the company is looking for in an acquisition. Their ideal customer may well be someone who's forgotten they have a subscription on credit card auto-pay.

stenodeevee 3mo ago

[dead]

AdmiralAsshat 3mo ago

Remarkably on-brand, named after the signature trick of a well-known charlatan.

jabiko 3mo ago

I'm a bit salty due to what they've done to the Komoot team. Komoot was (and still is) a great app for planing your outdoor activities. After acquiring Komoot, they fired everybody. Watching their goodbye video is a bit heartbreaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLJkK4Wn1HI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLJkK4Wn1HI

xacky 3mo ago

AOL Time Warner was the peak of the original dot com bubble.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

block_dagger 3mo ago

Whenever I see Vimeo in a headline, it reminds me of my lack of foresight. In college, the creator of Vimeo was in my friend group. I went to his on-campus apartment to pick him up for a party once. He showed me this "video sharing website" that he was working on. Its title was an anagram of "movie." This was in 1999. Digitized video was barely a thing. I looked at it, didn't understand how it would be useful, and assumed it was another one of his eccentric creative outlets that would go nowhere. A few years later, he was a multimillionaire and I was not.

ValentineC 3mo ago
> Its title was an anagram of "movie." TIL! I always thought it was some creative play on "video".
- block_dagger 3mo ago
  It's both!

com2kid 3mo ago

Very off topic - Just 2 days of for fun I tried to login to AOL.com with my username and PW from 1995. (Same username as on HN in fact) It worked! That is one hell of a series of good DB migrations. Sadly I was immediately forced to change my password. Still, 31 years is a good run for a password.

lain98 3mo ago

Down 13% in the last 5 days.

khurs 3mo ago

This is the Prospectus they used for the IPO which goes into all the details about them https://bendingspoons.com/documents/financials/2026/Bending%20Spoons%20Final%20Prospectus%20As%20Filed.pdf https://bendingspoons.com/documents/financials/2026/Bending%...

apparent 3mo ago

Are there any companies/products that got better after acquisition by these guys? I feel like the only times I've heard about them is when people are griping about how they're making stuff worse.

bix6 3mo ago

I don’t really get this model. Seems like a waste of money / time / energy.

Bratmon 3mo ago
They keep popular but unprofitable products that would otherwise be turned down alive. There are Victorian-horror-esque costs to that, but it's still better that those projects be alive but enshittified than completely dead (If you disagree, you can just cancel your subscription, after all)

cryo32 3mo ago

Bending Spoons are the miserable tossers who bought Meetup and somehow made it worse by monetising every move you make. And it was pretty bad to start with.

luisgvv 3mo ago

> What is Bending Sppons? The company that made me unsubscribe from Evernote after 8 years because it got slow, buggy and skyrocketed their prices. Good riddance, now I am using Obsidian + an LLM and works way better.

forsatellite 3mo ago

Contrary opinion I guess but they've modernized the two services I use that they've acquired: Evernote and Harvest. I was already a paying multi-seat customer of both so maybe the worst price increases didn't happen to me (yet); I suspect Bending Spoons has a real animosity to free/near-free tiers. But I certainly might get bitten soon. I use Evernote for paperless household management (shared travel itineraries, scans of paperwork, saved recipes, etc.) as well as my personal notes. It was under Bending Spoons that they finally landed multi-player realtime collaboration, which ended a decade of annoying sync conflicts and bugs, at least for me. Every month there are new little features like @mention to include a linked note, that bring more parity with platforms like Notion – the kind of core improvements the original owners had completely lost focus on. And they record a monthly video evangelizing the new features. Would something newer be better? Who knows but I'm happy not to switch, I have thousands of notes in there which I access from laptop, desktop, phone, and web. Bouncing from one platform to another is not my favorite way to spend time. I'm quite happy with how they've managed a mature platform. Harvest also started adding new features for the first time in many years. Their customer support did turn into a baffling AI bot for a while but eventually a human replied and apologized. Harvest is also a mature platform that just needs to not self-destruct in order to serve my needs; but small new features have been welcome. Both these platforms have something in common too: Good old fashioned REST API's. I like to scan directly to Evernote from my Brother MFC printer/scanner, no computer or phone needed. We log time into Harvest from a variety of other platforms and apps. I'm happy to have these workflows maintained. I might submit that this kind of specialized, deep-pocketed owner is the best-case scenario for long-term preservation of mature REST-based SaaS small businesses. Otherwise they get bought by Google, or dwindle when the founders move on?

crumpled 3mo ago

I wonder if "loyal user base" just means people who feel locked in, or somehow don't know any better. I can't imagine another reason for the "loyalty". Feels pretty exploitive.

dmacedo 3mo ago

Well I want to launch Straightening Forks: the B-Corp that hires experienced developers, designers, and other digital folks and instead of buying dying digital estate to extract the remaining bone hurting juice from its user-base, it would instead: re-implement (fork, LOL) open alternatives seeking viable business models or just FOSS a working path, with minimal product features serving those core users and their needs, centralising the core cross-product services and cost optimising the backend plus realising what's the actual features users "need" vs. "want", and try to create sustainable products which instead of just extracting value try to provide value in this world. Surely this isn't difficult???...

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

chewz 3mo ago

There is a market niche for projects cementary. Many companies or funds tend to buy projects at peak valuations (or artificial valuations based on blown up projections). Re-valuating these projects on the books would be an embarrassing to the board. Losing face, shareholders questions. Selling these assets (possibly via asset swap) to specialized cementary fund where they can be disolved and disappear in the haze is a different, more honorable matter.