alt Hacker NewsTell 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.
Comments
I 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.
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-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.
This 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.
As 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/ (beta launches next week!)
An 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
Probably 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
I 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.
This 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.
I 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.
Can 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?
Wonder how many of these people were still at the company: https://vimeo.com/173714
I just realized that video is old enough to vote.
Bending 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.
4 months:
Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
Yes 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.
Wonder 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.
I 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
What is Vimeo for as compared to YouTube or self-hosting video files?
I was surprised to see BS bought Harvest back in July. Was very low key but rumors of large price increases already surfacing
This is bad news for streaming platforms like Dropout, that use Vimeo as their backend.
Why isn't Vimeo listed on the Bending Spoons website? https://bendingspoons.com/products
New definition of "bending over" haha
Not sure I understand the point as my switching cost off Vimeo is negligible apart from finding a competitor.
Can someone give me some examples of private equity firms that aren't driven purely by avarice? I have a bet going with a colleague.
Komoot 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.
Slack next?
Anything else worth considering other than youtube (or self-hosting if scale isn't an issue)?
i have made 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.
Thank you for reminding me I had an Evernote account. I just deleted it. Its been shit since Bleeding Spork took it over.
I 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.
What 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.
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This is AGI.
The 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.
From 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.