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Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B
- FinnLobsien 1y agoBending Spoons has recently been buying aging SaaS companies that have established PMF and customers and decent brands (Evernote, Komoot, WeTransfer, Meetup). I guess it's mostly a private equity play—usually after being acquired by BS, prices go up, paywalls go everywhere, companies get "more efficient" (aka layoffs) and the product stops evolving. I wish there was a better outcome for beloved brands with good products that won't experience any more hypergrowth.
- dude250711 1y agoI will transfer my remaining domains from Gandi this month. In case anyone else needed a reminder.
- porridgeraisin 1y agoWait why. I'm out of the loop.
- dude250711 1y agoThe founders decided "it had been a wild ride but all journeys come to an end" so the prices and upselling now keep increasing so that the private equity that bought them can see fast short-term gains (the only thing they care about). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35080777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35080777 https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/montefiore-investment-acquires-gandi-net--6d5453d1 https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/montefiore-investment... https://news.gandi.net/en/2019/02/futureofgandi-the-adventure-continues/ https://news.gandi.net/en/2019/02/futureofgandi-the-adventur...
- porridgeraisin 1y agoThanks, transferring out now.
- GoToRO 1y agoFor Meetup at least the product did evolved after it got aquired.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoFrom my perspective, it "evolved" to force you to have an account, to aggressively kick off organizers who can't pay for the rising prices of posting, and the search algorithm got worse. I could barely find meetups I knew existed with a direct query.
- nhubbard 1y agoOh no, this is undoubtedly going to be terrible for the companies that built their OTT platforms on Vimeo. E.g. Dropout.tv.
- BoredPositron 1y agoThat's a way higher evaluation than I thought after their pivot. I remember in 2012 when I had hope they would succeed as a YouTube competitor. Their staff videos were insanely funny. Sad to see I end like this.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoFunny that I see this while searching for this story here: https://ymcinema.com/2022/03/17/vimeo-we-are-a-b2b-solution-not-the-indie-version-of-youtube/ https://ymcinema.com/2022/03/17/vimeo-we-are-a-b2b-solution-... It makes sense. Without ad revenue or premium subscriptions, there's no viable way to pay for creators in the say way a proper "indie youtube". In addition, many creators who post on Vimeo very much did not want their content to be publicly viewable. That was a feature.
- alwahi 1y agooh the monsters that killed evernote
- ThrowawayTestr 1y agoOh sweet, does this mean my worthless VEMO is worth something now?
- tracerbulletx 1y ago"In September 2022, Bending Spoons acquired FiLMiC[13] and converted its video-recording app FiLMiC Pro to a subscription revenue model.[14] In December 2023, the original FiLMiC team were laid off, and development of FiLMiC Pro was continued in-house by Bending Spoons.[15] In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote.[16] The acquisition was concluded in January 2023.[17] In July 2023, Evernote laid off all of its existing staff." Oh great.
- e98cuenc 1y agoEverybody loves to hate BendingSpoon, but there is a lesson here. They consistently rewrite the code of their acquisitions with a tiny team, fire everybody and are able to maintain and improve the product. They basically skip everything but engineers, and they are kept at a minimum. Feedback from users is the products they take over 1) become more expensive, 2) they ship features waaaay faster. It looks like next generation private equity, and my guess is more houses will start copying them.
- N19PEDL2 1y ago> It looks like next generation private equity, and my guess is more houses will start copying them. Isn't this the same that Broadcom does on a larger scale?
- FinnLobsien 1y agoI think that’s always the thing with any of these things. The companies private equity or Bending Spoons acquire are frequently inefficient, bloated and not the best-run businesses. But its basically an admission that the business is in its extraction phase and will no longer innovate. Relevant quote: Private Equity is engaged in buying artisanal semi-businesses, turning them into businesses, propping up the numbers while destroying them —then, hopefully, destroying itself.
- magarnicle 1y agoAs a Vimeo OTT customer, this is producing mixed emotions.
- izacus 1y agoCan you provide proof that products ship features faster after they lay off their teams?
- gbalduzzi 1y agoAlso, their core development team is in Italy and they are considered by many the best company in the IT space in Italy. What it means is that they have the top Italian talent, they pay them a very good italian salary that is still way lower than an american one. So basically they have very capable people working on their engineering, at a fraction of the cost of the original staff.
- 4ndrewl 1y agoBending Spoons also bought Evernote. They seem to have a portfolio of "used-to-be-the-thing" products. Are they buying the products or users - they laid off the entire staff of Filmic after purchasing them.
- dbbk 1y agoTheir strategy basically seems to be just to buy the brand and then rewrite the code
- 4ndrewl 1y agoDoesn't necessarily seem like the worst thing in the world - especially if you can get some vertical integrations and already have a bunch of active users.
- everfrustrated 1y agoGenerally they buy companies which have been pumped with steroids (VC money). That have a good product with active customers but have unsustainable cash flow. They cut expenses, whether thats moving labor from silicon valley to europe, cloud hosting costs out of aws, etc. Nothing new - happens in every other industry all the time. Usually companies get themselves into some sort of cult thinking so that only someone from outside can make the turnaround work. Nobody already working at a company and promoted from within is going to suggest moving the all the staff to Milan for example.
- tao_oat 1y agoThis comes after layoffs of ~10% of the company a week ago: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/phmoyer_today-we-announced-that-we-will-be-reducing-activity-7369003115422851074-qHt-/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/phmoyer_today-we-announced-th... According to layoffs.fyi there were also layoffs in 2022 and 2023.
- anon191928 1y agoVimeo worth this much is incredible.
- stevenhubertron 1y agoTheir corporate video hosting is great for platform hosting, but guess I need to find a new provider for next years renewal.
- solardev 1y agoHave you considered Cloudflare R2? It seems like that's one of the very few unmetered-bandwidth file hosting providers? It doesn't do HLS out of the box (it's just S3-compatible storage, unlike the pricier Cloudflare Stream). But you should be able to do the transcoding yourself: https://github.com/wesbos/R2-video-streaming https://github.com/wesbos/R2-video-streaming Or what are some other good options for Vimeo replacements?
- ovaistariq 1y agoOr consider Tigris object storage service.
- everfrustrated 1y agoBending Spoons usually doubles-down on the core of the product. They buy companies because the product is good not because they want to acquihire developers to put onto something else.
- jeduardo 1y agoI wonder if they're successful in converting free users to paid users after they gate all useful product features behind a paywall. I was always a light user of most products they bought and their changes just pushed me away. But as a light user, I wasn't planning to pay a subscription anyway, so going away might just release them the resources used to keep a user that generates no revenue. However, it looks to me that the communities they buy thrive on free users. If the free users go away, will the community and usage remain? For how long will they be able to make money out of those communities until there aren't any users left?
- everfrustrated 1y agoNot mentioned in the article is a year ago Bending Spoons acquired Brightcove, (a cloud platform that helps businesses manage and monetize video content), in an all-cash deal valued at $233 million. So this seems to be something of a strategy being played out. Vimeo was previously valued at $2.75B. I'd love to know where they're getting the cash from. Someone must be financing them.
- micheljansen 1y agoAh yes, Bending Spoons. The company known for: * Acquiring Evernote, laying off most of its staff and raising prices. * Acquiring WeTransfer, announcing 75% layoffs and pissing off their most loyal users by changing their T&Cs to grant themselves license to use their content for AI training purposes. * Acquiring Filmic and laying off all their staff. * Acquiring Komoot and laying off most of its staff. Now would be a good time to poach some Vimeo engineers.
- sdpy 1y agoA 2024 podcast with Bending Spoons about their acquisitions approach and company culture: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rules-of-building-software https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
- evermike 1y agoAlso in early 2024 Bending Spoons acquired the IP of Mosaic Group, which owned Apalon Apps. The buyer did not need either the Mosaic Group or the Apalon teams, both were laid off