15 ms·
Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
As expected. Almost the whole company is gone, less than 15 people left in engineering.
- ChrisArchitect 8mo ago4 months: Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
- bilekas 8mo agoThis comment from e98cuenc seems extremely prescient. > Everybody 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
- altairprime 8mo agoHonestly, I wish more businesses would do this. It turns out that grandiose dreams make grandiose staffing, but a lot of great business ideas would thrive and bloom if the gardeners would just prune them back more often.
- johnnyanmac 8mo agoThe part about "they get more expensive" makes me actively not want this, despite otherwise being someone obsessed with optimization. I'm not here to optimize billionaires' pockets at the expense of the people I actually make the product for.
- altairprime 8mo agoI don’t understand the basis for your hostility here to charging more money and making a profit, especially given that Hacker News is founded and run by a venture capital firm whose goal is repeatedly that in hundreds of attempts at once. At minimum, Vimeo should have been raising prices by inflation% per year, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t doing that. Better the platform continue and thrive doing what works than founder uselessly on the zero-price pivot shoals like most startups these days. And there’s a sense of cosmic irony that both Vimeo and Dropout are now run by a very small team rather than a large one. Perhaps Vimeo will learn the lesson of Dropout and switch to the boring but effective 100% paying-customers-only model that other successful businesses use. I’m rooting for them.
- Glawen 8mo agoI'm discovering Bending Sppon withn this thread, and I think they really got their business right. I hope they IPO soon
- johnnyanmac 8mo agoI'm not privy to support, as another reply put it, "Enshittification as a Servce". And this is just modern private equity. The whole point is to avoid all those pesky regulations going public brings.
- gulugawa 8mo agoConsidering what Bending Spoons did to Meetup.com after buying the site, I wouldn't trust them to improve a product. Here are some of the issues I noticed. - Group searches consistently return irrelevant results across multiple cities. As a test, I tried searching for soccer groups in Dallas, Texas, and one of the results was for a backgammon group. Users will also often have a hard time finding events I host on Meetup. - An organizer being charged $357.98 per year to host a group on Meetup.com. - The pages for my Meetup events are full of clutter and duplicate data, while relevant information such as RSVPs is hidden. - My Meetup.com home page is full of pointless distractions, including a banner asking me to become an organizer when I already organize events. - When editing an event, Meetup shows an option to generate a description by using generative AI. Generative AI is a scam and I try to avoid it. That being said, you are right that they are becoming more expensive and ship features faster. I describe Bending Spoons as Italian private equity.
- dangoor 8mo agoAs a heavy Meetup user, I can say that Bending Spoons absolutely fixed some glaring, long-standing bugs. But their massive price increases have really driven people away, and some of their attempts to grab more money (Meetup+) really rankled a lot of people. Also, search still sucks.
- johnnyanmac 8mo agoThis is why "running lean" for a B2C business is never something to take as a good sign from the consumer standpoint. Let alone the client. Those savings are not being passed to you, quite the contrary. they will in fact have their care and eat it by trying to throw more costs at you despite the supposed lower overhead.
- red-iron-pine 8mo agoEnshitification As A Service (EaaS)
- corderop 8mo agoActually the acquisition was closed on November 24th, so it was just in 2 months
- ayhanfuat 8mo agoFrom "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 8mo 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...
- mlnj 8mo 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.
- didacusc 8mo 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.
- 8mo ago
- CoastalCoder 8mo agoI just recently found that Vimeo is hosting MST3K, with free playback of the original episodes (Joel and Mike). So for selfish reasons this makes me sad. I'm guessing MST3K will need to find another host, perhaps with less generous terms. Edit: I really hope that doesn't mean RiffTrax will also have problems.
- ortusdux 8mo agoThey are also the backend for Dropout, which has just shy of 1m paid subscribers. So I understand your selfish sadness feelings. https://vimeo.com/customers/dropout https://vimeo.com/customers/dropout
- didacusc 8mo agoAnd Criterion :(
- munk-a 8mo agoWell, some good news is that if you've ever wanted to build a new video streaming platform there are a bunch of companies that'd love to sign up. I'm sure dropout et all will be able to continue with their same level of functionality in the short term but I can imagine the bills they'll be receiving will be escalating quickly.
- ortusdux 8mo agoDropout's CEO has been pretty open about the company, and he described their early efforts as 'Brutal' > No! We tried, but people don’t realize this. The first rendition of Dropout was built on Vimeo OTT’s API, but it was our own product. We employed something like eight sophisticated engineers at IAC to build our own product around it, and it was brutal. Which is to say, it’s just very hard to do very well. And these were great engineers. https://www.theverge.com/podcast/781331/hank-green-sam-reich-dropout-collegehumor-game-changer https://www.theverge.com/podcast/781331/hank-green-sam-reich...
- rmccue 8mo ago
- johng 8mo agoI just cancelled my account that I've had for about 10 years... maybe longer. I barely used it, but it's now >$100/year for my plan. I had maybe 15 videos uploaded that I would share occasionally.
- coffeefirst 8mo agoI used to be an indie filmmaker and used it to host features when nothing else could. I’ve been paying since 2008. The price would go up but they were great so I let it be. I guess I’ll be exporting everything today.
- dylan604 8mo agoThe client review capabilities was pretty nice when I used it once. It's not that the feature stopped working, but after COVID I had to pivot career.
- johng 8mo agoThis is actually my favorite Vimeo video of all time. I wish they would have made a TV show. This was just the pilot, but it's hilarious. https://vimeo.com/86146321?share=copy&fl=cl&fe=ci https://vimeo.com/86146321?share=copy&fl=cl&fe=ci
- TheChaplain 8mo agoI have no hope for Vimeo. BS took over Evernote and I cancelled the subscription after a year. Their idea of value for the customer vs the price is not realistic.
- apparent 8mo agoJust realized the acronym for Bending Spoons is BS. Seemingly appropriate.
- jen729w 8mo agoIn my youth -- the mid-90s -- one of the most scathing slurs our circle of friends could bestow on a person was that they were 'a spoon-bender'. Uri Geller being a … well, this is a family site. Finish that yourself.
- reddalo 8mo agoI'm still mad at Uri Geller for suing Nintendo and preventing Kadabra from appearing in games.
- solarkraft 8mo agoBending Spoons: Wow, they gave us money for a year!
- johnnyanmac 8mo agospending X00 million dollars to get maybe $200 out of a user is certainly a flex.
- solarkraft 8mo agoThat’s exactly how their economics work. I do wonder exactly what numbers they are working with.
- chuckadams 8mo agoWonder what this means for vimeo/psalm, the static analyzer for PHP, which has recently seen some new life breathed into it after long neglect. Psalm has credible alternatives in PHPStan and now Mago, but it would still be a loss to see it go unmaintained again.
- muglug 8mo agoPsalm creator here! Vimeo has not contributed any code to Psalm since I left in 2021. Psalm is still in good hands!
- amelius 8mo agoWas this name inspired by Uri Geller?
- chuckadams 8mo agoMore likely The Matrix, but the whole "psychic spoon bending" thing was of course made popular by Geller.
- jp1016 8mo agoi have made https://codekeep.io https://codekeep.io for storing snippets, have similar features to evernote. all users will get free pro membership now. if you are thinking about moving , please consider codekeep too.
- xnx 8mo agoWhat is Vimeo for as compared to YouTube or self-hosting video files?
- RyanShook 8mo agoVimeo you manage your brand and presentation. YouTube you have little control over where or how your video is presented. Vimeo also provides VOD for some large brands and media companies.
- fckgw 8mo agoYeah, it's this. It's a hosting platform, not a social media platform. You see a ton of people who have short films, art projects, commercial portfolios and stuff like that hosted at Vimeo. They don't need/want comments, discoverability, or to deal with things like automated DRM takedowns. Clean, simple, video hosting.
- jen729w 8mo agoI built my own course presentation platform (for my own courses, not as a thing I resell), but I wasn't going to host my own videos. I use Vimeo. It's great: I upload to them, embed an iframe, job done. I don't care about maintaining a video player or bandwidth or subtitles or… Literally the week after I launched my thing, they got bought. I have no idea what I'll do if they go to shit.
- VladVladikoff 8mo agoOur business uses Vimeo because we get a discounted rate on acami CDN via their bulk purchasing power. YouTube is free but that comes with a lot of headaches. For example not being able to hide the recommended videos at the end of a video, which annoyed our clients in the past when we did use YouTube. YouTube also needs to be public to be embeddable, which also created issues for us. However this announcement has me terrified and literally scrambling for a backup plan.
- BizarroLand 8mo ago
- rvz 8mo agoThis is AGI.
- randomsc 8mo agoProbably they will also fire remaining 15 people and move everything to Italy. Their strategy is to - fire everyone, - give product to very small but ambitious team of people - cut free version of the product to minimum even if does not make a sense to have a free version such as 5 video upload per month etc (they are doing this just to avoid backlash from users and community) - use every possible dark pattern exist to get every penny from the users
- worldsavior 8mo agoI'll be surprised if those engineers don't want to leave the company themselves after these layoffs.
- moralestapia 8mo agoWhat I've always found unusual (but not necessarily bad) about BS is ... how come a company that came out of nowhere starts buying tech companies here and there? Billion dollar deals? In cash? It can't be just a few "enthusiastic" random guys (as they portray), you need a lot of capital to pull that off. IMO they're someone's family office with an obfuscated name. Edit: and my comment suddenly goes to the bottom despite having several upvotes ... definitely not sus.
- prmoustache 8mo agoMoney laundering?
- everfrustrated 8mo agoThey're a Milan, Italy company so don't get a lot of visibility in the US.
- jcynix 8mo agoHundreds of millions in revenue and three acquisitions in 2024 — what’s behind Bending Spoons’ success? | Sifted https://sifted.eu/articles/bending-spoons-italy-startup-ipo https://sifted.eu/articles/bending-spoons-italy-startup-ipo
- Ekaros 8mo agoSomeone has actual financial plan. I know a unknown thing for VC and startups. If they do and can calculate reasonable rat of return on acquisition it makes sense for lot of investors. Especially when they start to have proven record. Having paying customers, stopping giving things away for free and then cutting costs like wages and moon shots projects. A software starts to be tech again. That is marginal unit costs really do work.
- JayStavis 8mo agoThe founder recently went on invest like the best and explained it top to bottom, they started as a broke agency and grew from there quite fast. I forget the details but I would imagine they are financed quite heavily by LP's https://colossus.com/episode/luca-ferrari-building-bending-spoons/ https://colossus.com/episode/luca-ferrari-building-bending-s...
- torben-friis 8mo agoCan someone in the know explain Bending Spoons? I routinely see job postings by them in my local dev circles, significantly above market rate, and the offers seem to keep reappearing forever. Their site namedrops known apps and services like wetransfer but otherwise seems to be just buzzwords. Are they VC buying existing IPs? What is exactly going on?
- jcynix 8mo agoHundreds of millions in revenue and three acquisitions in 2024 — what’s behind Bending Spoons’ success? | Sifted https://sifted.eu/articles/bending-spoons-italy-startup-ipo https://sifted.eu/articles/bending-spoons-italy-startup-ipo So private equity is behind it.
- torben-friis 8mo agoYeah, but AFAIK that means people buying companies, leaving them with a skeleton crew and milking the remaining users as long as possible. How does that fit with expensive hiring sprees? If anything I’d expect them to be continuously shedding absorbed employees.
- jcynix 8mo agoI guess that companies which get bought might be a bit "overstaffed" from the startup phase or because planned further development. If one removes this staff, you need less people to minimally maintain a running app. But itcs just a guess, you'll loose knowhow too, when drastically reducing your staff.
- a_victorp 8mo agoThey hire at higher pay because they want people that can/are willing to do the job of multiple people
- johnnyanmac 8mo agoAnd often at places cheaper than US talent, so that above average pay in the EU comes out to below average pay overall.
- WA 8mo agoKomoot gets shittier every week too. Takes way too many taps to plan a route, search still sucks, "go premium" in your face all the time.
- 0xbadcafebee 8mo agoThis is potentially disastrous to content on the web. Vimeo provides a platform-as-a-service known as OTT, that powers well known branded streaming services, like Criterion Channel, HistoryHit, Dropout, DIRTVision, Speed 51, URLTV, Armflix, MHz Choice, Trinity Broadcasting Network, SommTV, IndieFlix, BroadwayHD, Full Moon Features, etc.
- kotaKat 8mo agoI assume they’re pulling a Broadcom here - the big OTT customers will not be able to easily escape, if at all, without major effort. Little folks can run, but Bending Spoons won’t care here. They want to milk the enterprise video agreements.
- PyWoody 8mo agoNo, not the Criterion Channel, too! Hopefully they can migrate to a different service without too much fuss.
- george_perez 8mo agoWatermelon+, too!
- theturtle 8mo ago[dead]
- pestkranker 8mo agoWhy isn't Vimeo listed on the Bending Spoons website? https://bendingspoons.com/products https://bendingspoons.com/products
- jorams 8mo agoThat lists 6 products, Wikipedia lists 13. I can only guess at the reason for deciding what to put there, but it does say > Some of our most popular products
- bovermyer 8mo agoCan someone give me some examples of private equity firms that aren't driven purely by avarice? I have a bet going with a colleague.
- jdmoreira 8mo agoIf you are an LP a their fund this is what you would expect. Hate the player not the game.
- ecshafer 8mo agoYour question doesn't really make sense. What business isn't driven by the goal of making money ultimately?
- hamdingers 8mo agoEvery nonprofit.
- hackable_sand 8mo agoWhat businesses are profit-driven? I would love to know so I can avoid them.
- ecshafer 8mo agoEvery gas station, grocery store, convenience store, pharmacy, urgent care, every bank, every tech company, every computer manufacturer, most food production companies, most farms, every resource extraction company, every manufacturing company.
- bovermyer 8mo agoAny health care organization - from your list, pharmacies and urgent care - that is profit-driven is not holding health as top priority. If an organization that should be focused on making people healthy is instead focused on how many currency units it can extract from other entities, there is (as they say) a misalignment of priorities.
- Joeboy 8mo agoAnything else worth considering other than youtube (or self-hosting if scale isn't an issue)?
- psteinweber 8mo agoWe are quite happy with bunny(.net) stream. Very affordable and easy to use
- stenuto 8mo agoAs a longtime user of Vimeo (since 2009), I was afraid this was going to happen. I built our own HLS video streaming in-house a couple of years ago and never looked back. Way faster, lightweight player, uses modern apis and codecs. Now I'm working on productizing that at https://framerate.com/ https://framerate.com/ (beta launches next week!)
- aarondf 8mo agodamn framerate looks good
- mannyv 8mo agoBuilding video streaming is easy. Selling video streaming is difficult.
- cadamsdotcom 8mo agoNice work. Aren’t there decent open source alternatives though? What do you think your differentiation will be vs. a customer using an open source solution and hosting the video chunks on a CDN - or even S3?
- stenuto 8mo agoThank you! There aren't any end-to-end open source video host solutions out there from what I can tell. DIY ffmpeg + a CDN is a great way to go. But quickly erodes when you want all the other niceties that are table-stakes today (like storyboards, subtitles, chapters, etc.). I'll have all the niceties, but I plan to differentiate mainly on performance and quality. - Higher quality compression (via AV1 encoding) - Fast load times worldwide (Framerate's custom player is 18kb gzipped versus 200kb+ for vidstack/mux) - Better publishing experience (bulk editing options, team collaboration, etc.)
- cadamsdotcom 8mo agoSounds good. I’d suggest niching down and talking to some customers to see who genuinely cares about those things - as they might turn out (tragically I know) to be things only techies care about. Fair warning.. when we hear talk to customers we are tempted to reply “I talked to customer in my mind and they love my thing!” But unfortunately customers in our minds don’t have money :) There’re either customers out there, or if not there's learning about why youtube has almost 100% market share.. Wishing you genuine luck and success!
- Nextgrid 8mo agoI am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it. In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it - if you need to keep the full team of builders around then something is wrong and you may want to seek a refund for the original builders' fees since they did not actually finish building it. Builders and electricians and tradesmen either work as contractors and take that into account (charging higher rates to compensate for the sporadic nature of the work) or work full-time for companies who then resell their services on building projects (charging accordingly to ensure there is enough revenue to pay a full-time payroll of said tradesmen). Tech was an outlier in this case because ZIRP allowed companies to retain full engineering teams to keep "engineering" the product even once product-market-fit has been achieved and the product has been stabilized and finished. This gave a lot of engineers the illusion that perpetual "engineering" of a single product/service is a sustainable model and career. Bending Spoons' business model is to buy finished products, cut off the deadweight and keep operating the product and actually making profit off the finished product, which was always a normal thing in every other industry. For tech people that see themselves as builders, this should be normal and expected - they should charge competitive rates for their services taking into account the expectation that they're building something for someone else to make money off once it's built and that they won't be part of it once that's done (unless they want to negotiate an actual stake in the company). For tech people that don't, this is a difficult wake up call, but the earlier the better - the old situation was never sustainable to begin with.
- publicdebates 8mo agoExactly why I charge $999/hour for my software consulting. To the doubters, laugh all you want, but I've been doing this for literal decades, and will absolutely slaughter LLM generated code in terms of code reliability and maintainability amortized over 5 years.
- Nextgrid 8mo ago
- badc0ffee 8mo agoWonder how many of these people were still at the company: https://vimeo.com/173714 https://vimeo.com/173714 I just realized that video is old enough to vote.
- bdougherty 8mo agoThe people in this video were mostly CollegeHumor people (I think there are 4 Vimeans in there), but the last one left about 10 years ago now.
- poulsbohemian 8mo agoNot sure I understand the point as my switching cost off Vimeo is negligible apart from finding a competitor.
- dwedge 8mo agoI was wondering what I used by this company because I saw the name yesterday. It's Harvest, and I was thinking yesterday how the sign up and pricing page seems more or less abandoned. Guess it's time to roll my own version
- xlaacid 8mo agoThank you for reminding me I had an Evernote account. I just deleted it. Its been shit since Bleeding Spork took it over.
- madjo80 8mo agoThis is bad news for streaming platforms like Dropout, that use Vimeo as their backend.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- k1rd 8mo agoYes bending spoon will stop growing these companies and stop add features. These role will be just replaced by engineers and employee in Italy, where bending spoon is form, and where people cost many times less than in the US. Italy is like a higher quality India in a sense.
- epolanski 8mo agoBending Spoons pays very high rates for their own engineers. Of course if your comparison is Bay Area or Zurich, there's no match, but if you exclude such outliers (where the compensation is what it is due to the insane costs of living and competition for talent) they are paying rates higher than pretty much any other part of the world. They pay rates that are closer if not higher than London or Munich averages (which are very high).
- alephnerd 8mo ago> Italy is like a higher quality India in a sense. It's attitudes like this that rub decisionmakers who aren't of European heritage the wrong way. Italian tech salaries [0] aren't significantly different from Indian tech salaries [1], especially in major hubs like Bangalore [2]. If companies like Google [5], Broadcom [6], and Nvidia [7] can afford to pay EU level salaries in India and decided to heavily invest in hiring in India, it shows that Indian talent can't be underestimated. Also, a European dismissing Indian engineering quality doesn't bode well as your governments that are signing an FTA [3] and a security and defense partnership [4] with India in a couple days, and with the Italian government soliciting Indian capital for infrastructure investment [8] and the French government soliciting Indian capital for defense [9] and infrastructure [10] investment. [0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy [1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/india https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/india [2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater-bengaluru https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater... [3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/eu-nears-historic-trade-deal-with-india-von-der-leyen-says-2026-01-20/ https://www.reuters.com/world/india/eu-nears-historic-trade-... [4] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/eu-proceed-security-defence-partnership-with-india-kallas-says-2026-01-21/ https://www.reuters.com/world/india/eu-proceed-security-defe... [5] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-engineer/levels/l4/locations/india https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en... [6] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/broadcom/salaries/software-engineer/levels/icb-4/locations/india https://www.levels.fyi/companies/broadcom/salaries/software-... [7] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/nvidia/salaries/software-engineer/levels/ic4/locations/india https://www.levels.fyi/companies/nvidia/salaries/software-en... [8] - https://www.lagazzettamarittima.it/2025/10/30/rixi-in-india-ecco-il-piano-italia-2032-da-200-miliardi-di-investimenti/ https://www.lagazzettamarittima.it/2025/10/30/rixi-in-india-... [9] - https://www.frstrategie.org/publications/defense-et-industries/marche-indienne-vers-indigenisation-2023 https://www.frstrategie.org/publications/defense-et-industri... [10] - https://fr.euronews.com/business/2025/07/03/limec-deviendra-t-il-un-jour-le-corridor-economique-reliant-linde-a-leurope https://fr.euronews.com/business/2025/07/03/limec-deviendra-...
- hi_hi 8mo agoFrom the previous press about the aquisition: BendingSpoon CEO: "At Bending Spoons, we acquire companies with the expectation of owning and operating them indefinitely, and we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together" Vimeo CEO: "We are excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses" Words no longer appear to mean things. While this isn't a surprise, it provides another data point that there can be no trust given to leaders words. I find it sad as it simply re-inforces this behaviour and normalises it.
- whalesalad 8mo agoThings happen. Times change. It's just as important to know when to throw in the towel as it is to know when to persevere.
- killingtime74 8mo agoThe acquisition concluded in November 2025, only 2 months ago.
- wanderer2323 8mo ago[flagged]
- dangus 8mo agoIt sucks that people get laid off, but there are a whole lot of finished low growth products like this that have bloated teams. I don’t really see any lying going on. Which statement was a lie?
- taurath 8mo agoThese are the things that happen - taking a company and strangling it to make a 10% short term return. It’s like of funny, we give corporations personhood, but the type of person that can be owned by another person, or murdered for profit
- KarenDaBass 8mo agoNew definition of "bending over" haha
- epolanski 8mo agoThis is the Bending Spoons model: acquire companies that have some core user base and traction with VC money. Lay off the entirety of the staff. Focus on price modeling. Depending on the particular software they may or may not invest some internal engineering in keeping the money flowing. Rinse and repeat. Italian LinkedIn hails them as one of the most innovative companies, whereas to me they seem to fall in the butt cigar business.
- sinoue 8mo agoBending Spoons did the same thing with Evernote. Laid off US staff. Closed their Redwood City offices and hired a dev team in Italy to take over.
- epolanski 8mo agoSmall correction, they didn't hire a dev team in Italy to take over. They are an Italian company with their own engineering.
- wqtz 8mo agoThe strategy is simple. - Buy a product that has name recognition overshadowed by a monopolistic company and the leadership is trying to make a pivot and failing terribly. - Leadership is aggressively rebranding to appease a takeover. They keep doing the most basic forbes council op-ed title moves to make the product appealing. - It is not a parts-shop, the team is used to sense of "eh what you are going to do about it". It is a signboard and patents that you can use to hostage bigger companies. - The takeover company has figured out maintenance engineering. You buy the product, you cull the team because they are not a growth engine. You focus on maintenance, and you milk the brand. Any eastern European or LATAM team can approve an automated version bump PR and send out "let's jump on a call" email. Heck, even Tai fricking Lopez bought Radio Shack under similar pretense.
- nurettin 8mo agoSlack next?
- TWDan 8mo agoI was surprised to see BS bought Harvest back in July. Was very low key but rumors of large price increases already surfacing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454175
- TheGreatWave 8mo agoAn interesting aspect is that they acquire US companies, where it is legally possible to lay off employees. In Italy, where BS is based, firing employees is much more difficult
- corderop 8mo agoThey acquired European companies in the past and did similar things (e.g. Komoot). They are in the process of acquiring Eventbrite, where a big part of the workforce is located in Spain, and the feeling is that they are going to do the same there. It will probably take more time due to legal processes and severance packages may be better, but I don't think this is going to stop them, let's see.
- Animats 8mo agoIs there a solid source for this? Vimeo laid off most of their operation in Israel recently.[1] At least according to "www.calcalistech.com", which seems to be some minor news source in Israel. Their comment was that the office was damaged in a recent war. Rebuilding may not have been worth it. Their headquarters is in New York. [1] https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjtjgbabzx https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjtjgbabzx
- cik 8mo agoCalcalist is the news source for the tech community here in Israel. Admittedly the English site is complete rubbish compared to the Hebrew site - but it's still THE local source.
- muglug 8mo agoBending Spoons understandably don’t want a final percentage out there, because the more people know about this, the less likely they are to use Vimeo. Most everyone I knew there was just laid off, with a skeleton crew that’s been asked to stay on until April.
- tom_m 8mo agoPeople use Vimeo?
- Animats 8mo agoThey used to have a free tier with no ads, and I still have some videos on there. All new stuff goes on Peertube.
- MattRix 8mo agoThey have a product where you can make your own whitelabeled video site, which is used by some popular services, ex. Dropout.
- breakingcups 8mo ago
- dsign 8mo agoI was planning to use Vimeo for some video hosting... I guess I'll have to self-host now. Oh well. At least this happened before I actually committed to buying a plan or even creating an account. With private equity poisoning the well like this I'll probably be better off hosting my videos in AWS; doubt anybody will be buying them anytime soon.
- psteinweber 8mo agoTry Bunny Stream, really super simple and affordable
- joeyguerra 8mo agoThey expect to use AI.
- epolanski 8mo agoFor all the valid criticism of Bending Spoon's business model, I'd like to raise another point. They haven't extorted these companies from the previous shareholders and founders. They paid for those. We talking about multi millionaires deciding to throw away their life's work, their customers, their teams to become even wealthier very well knowing what the fate was going to be. But that crowd isn't even mentioned.
- valevk 8mo agoIf anyone is looking for an alternative made in Germany: https://ignite.video/en https://ignite.video/en
- jen729w 8mo agoLiterally 10x the price of Vimeo, unfortunately. Otherwise I might have given this a go. Source: my Vimeo annual plan renewal currently shows US$144. We host about 100 videos and get in the dozens of views a day. Pretty small. Your 'Grow' plan is €155/month × 12 = €1,860 = $2,218! That's … a lot.
- dabinat 8mo agoVimeo’s prices are insanely low for what they’re offering. You could not host on AWS and match them on price, nor probably even Hetzner. I never knew if they built out custom infrastructure or if they’ve just been losing money this whole time.
- hobbified 8mo agoLots of custom infrastructure. A bit of losing money as well, but moderately profitable on the whole. They were a publicly traded company in their own right from 2021 to 2025, so you can look at the 10-Ks. There was a massive boost in business from COVID in 2020 and early 2021... which meant that the spinoff in May 2021 left investors in a position to be perpetually disappointed, sort of like Peloton.
- bdougherty 8mo agoThe spinoff definitely came at a particularly bad time, but that was always how it was going to end up because that is how IAC operates. Vimeo was probably doomed from the moment IAC acquired Connected Ventures. It was never going to be the kind of business that could really operate as a public company, but totally could have been a profitable private company.
- bdougherty 8mo agoThe custom stuff was all on the transcoding and player sides. Actual video file storage and delivery was using a variety of well-known CDNs depending on when and where, but primarily Akamai.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- varshith17 8mo agoBending Spoons' playbook: acquire established product, gut the team, run it on fumes with skeleton crew + AI tooling. They did this with Evernote, Meetup, now Vimeo. Classic private equity move dressed up as a tech company. Extract value, minimize costs, ride the brand until it dies.
- fnands 8mo ago> Classic private equity move dressed up as a tech company. Kinda, more like a tech company using private equity tactics. Say what you want about them, but they do actually employ decent engineers, and the founders are all engineers. They seem to fundamentally understand the companies they are buying (not always the feeling I get with PE). Their business model is a bit cynical, but I would still consider them a tech company.
- Ekaros 8mo agoI think it is good to understand tech company and then startup or VC company. Tech company is company with marginal unit costs. Bending Spoons aims these and then optimize them further. Startup or VC, search "growth" and user acquisition. Usually in something with marginal unit costs. Just because someone stops spending money on chasing growth does not mean they still don't have unit economics of tech companies.
- lylo 8mo agoI see these acquisitions as a reset. They spend a huge sum to acquire established, but struggling, products and strip the size of the company to the minimum required to keep it operating. This is very much the Musk model. At this point they have stopped the cash bleeding and made profit margins healthy again. From there they can more easily rationalise how to take it forward over the next 5-10 years. That might mean stripping unpopular product features, rebranding, going upmarket, whatever. It’s a real shame for all the staff, of course, but from a business point of view it’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out.
- gadgetboy 8mo agoThis is typical of Bending Spoons. They make an acquisition, lay off as many people as possible, then start jacking up prices and putting features behind ever larger paywalls. They've got to start feeling the pain of user churn and attrition at some point, but not yet, I guess.
- HardwareLust 8mo agoI once hoped Vimeo would grow to compete with YT, but that dream died long ago.
- webworker 8mo agoSomeone just posted an inside story of what went on inside of Vimeo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757868
- askldfhalkdfh 8mo agoAre they planning to merge Vimeo’s and Brightcove’s underlying technology, even if the brands and product lines remain distinct? In theory, that could deliver a true best-of-both-worlds outcome. Each platform has strengths that could fill the other’s gaps. In practice, though, it would almost certainly be messy, with non-trivial integrations and some painful migrations and breaking changes for at least some of the customers.