alt Hacker NewsFrom "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.
Replies
This is the same model Computer Associates used to run back in the day. Find product with marginal profit but dedicated user base, cut costs, increase pricing and milk it until the next product comes along.
To be honest, how much staff do you need to run a file transfer service.
I’d love to see how this impacts their bottom line
Sure short term it’s more “focused” and “greedy”
But the damage to the community and acquisition through a free tier must drop those numbers in an impactful way
It's interesting to think about which current companies will be acquired by BS in the future. Evernote and WeTransfer were huge ten years ago.
Elon Musk acquired Twitter and fired %80 of the employees and it was just fine.
I bet there's so many more people that can be let go from all tech industry. It's mature and product discovery is mostly locked behind advertisement so what's left is exploitation.
If you think about it, as long as you don't mingle much with the product that works it keeps working indefinitely. It's no different than running Excel or WhatsApp, especially when the servers are managed by 3rd party providers these days.
I 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...