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
> Reviving this account to say: Almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off yesterday, including the entire video team. If you're looking for talented engineers, there are a few on the market.
Most everyone I knew there was just laid off, with a skeleton crew that’s been asked to stay on until April.
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.
But, this obviously carries risk, that the new thing you develop won't be worth as much as you spent. Bending Spoons doesn't want risk, hence their decision.
Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. If you keep reinvesting your revenue forever into "engineering" the product there's going to be a time where a competitor comes in with a finished product matching your customers' requirements and snatches him from you by both charging less and making a profit.
Any profit bending spoons earns they can run off and invest in another business if they like. They don't bother investing in the businesses they purchase because they believe, like the previous owner believed, that there is no more juice to squeeze from that particular lemon.
Just like with your building analogy and with other car analogies presented here, software does need some maintanence every now and again to keep it up to date - with security fixes, compiling to a newer platform, integrating fixes from dependencies, etc. And yes while buildings may be finished they stil require regular maintance if they are used.
On the contrary, it absolutely can be, in both directions.
Software can absolutely be "feature complete", and in the case of many products it would have been an improvement to say "we're done now" and switch from developing new features to maintenance-only mode, dealing only with API changes and new laws.
Some examples of where it should be "done" by some point include smart TVs and smart lightbulbs. I'm also old enough to remember the era of games where patches were rare and small, unlike the current experience of having to wait for Steam to install updates almost every day, and only then will allow me to see if the game I want to play and which worked yesterday now has a mandatory update that I also have to wait for (which is less often but still often enough to be annoying).
Even with MacOS, while I absolutely do appreciate all the behind the scenes stuff regarding security and so on, the last time I appreciated what they did with the UI in an update, the version branding scheme was still to name releases after cats.
Even as an iOS developer, although I can see what they're trying to do with SwiftUI, I find it worse than UIKit in basically every regard because the "magic" keeps not working and the "problem" it tried to solve was never (for me) a problem; with concurrency, they went from GCD to Combine which IMO was a step back, before going to async/await.
"Too many features" is also a problem for the developers, as it leads to them duplicating work. For example, the background sounds feature on my phone and the one on my HomePod each has its own list of sounds, they're not just two interfaces to the same underlying app even though the HomePod's OS is a fork of tvOS which is a fork of iOS.
(The other way around, the home I grew up in is now about twice the size it was when my parents bought it around 1970, judging from the Google areal view).
How does that make it different? More features could always be added to most buildings. You could keep adding rooms onto the side, update the floors/ceilings/walls every year to stay trendy, add a water feature, expand the basement with a tunnel network, etc.
At some point a tech product is "finished" as in a mature, stable product and adding new things to it isn't going to do 10x in revenue. Its probably really hard for the product and tech teams involved to admit though.
Most of the ongoing costs you mention for cars still apply--but there are also the occasional (possibly dramatic) changes to the interior 'cabin product' like new seats and entertainment systems, new fabrics/branding, new business class seats/pods, changes in seat layouts, etc in order to remain competitive in their market segment. Cars rarely have such significant refreshes, but software products often have analogous design and UX overhauls that are also intended to try to keep the software competitive in its market segment. And again airlines don't need to engage the specific airframe manufacturer like Boeing or Airbus for these, but they do need some semblance of a tech team that have certain domain expertise in aircraft engineering constraints.
Airframes also have major overhauls called MROs (Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul) about every 6-10 years, which again does not require the original manufacturer but does require significant engineering expertise. To me this is akin to certain ongoing software maintenance activities like updating a codebase to use newer library versions, major database version updates, API or SDK version compatibility, etc.
okay. Salaries office workers don't work on contracts. If they do, they know an end is in sight and renewal is not guaranteed. If companies want contractors, they should just do that.
Meanwhie, I'm sure your parents' generation for many industries expected to find one job and make a career around that company, maybe doing 1 or 2 hops based on circumstances. It was highly unusual to lay off everyone at the drop of a hat. This is not normal, and I don't think we should normalize it.
To use your metaphor, this is more like you are working on the 3rd room of some house and suddenly you are kicked out. Contractors take this into account, but you as a salaried worker just need to bite the bullet. This is companies having their cake and eating it to.
>the old situation was never sustainable to begin with.
Tell that to the trillion dollar tech companies.
the idea that software is never done is a double edge sword: yes, its great to have a long term vision that keeps evolving and motivating people to continue to push boundaries. but it also creates this idea that "done" state is not possible or even desirable.
plenty of human (economic) activity is just operating, or maintaining. maybe some people who built products are happy to continue operating and operating it. not everyone, and certainly it would be hard to expecy society to guarantee employment under any circunstances.
i have never seen labor laws that prohibits lay off under any circunstances. some make it more onerous and/or more beneficial conditiona to employees than others. but certainly is it possible (and likely) that vimeo lay offs have been lawfull and even beneficial for many employees. i certainly know plenty of people who explicitly stick around "mature" organizations waiting for the fat check of layoff
* Fix things
* Build new things
Add to this that things naturally break. Try a git reset to 1 year ago and deploy that to prod, for example.
Add to that new features tend to add new bugs.
the backlog keeps being increased (by you and your manager at times),
so it never gets finished.
Seems easy enough to explain.
There has to be a dragon being fought to account for all this money. Even if the dragon is bs.
cut wasteful spending, find a way to increase revenue - milk the SAAS for a few years - then either sell it off or shut it down - or it can keep running as a lean cash generating machine
Vista Equity rotates operators within its holding companies
(like ya said, operators is the right word. it felt icky)
At least for the first year, the acquired teams were able to run more or less the same but with new hyped-up-overly-aggressive Vista hotshot managers and then the sh*t-from-above just started raining down.
Also, they hired the worst sw architect / person I've ever had to work with. He wasted so much time and money.
Some clients are ok with it, some don't; this is normal and what a competitive market should look like. I tell clients openly when my premium service is not the right fit for their current requirements or budget, and there are cases where cheaper labor or LLMs are absolutely a better fit (and they should come back once when/if they outgrow the cheaper, lower-quality product).
Only road I can imagine is highly specialized industry, with money, that often has time-sensitive needs, and smart management that knows how to recognize value or trusts their tech management. And even then I think you'd have to start in the coal-mines version of it, $50K/year flat salary, and building a reputation without management taking credit for your successes, somehow.
it's only been released for two months but its changed the calculus entirely
if its been over two months since you've tried any LLM generated code solution, or are still occasionally copy pasting code requirements into a browser chat session as if its still 2023, then I can't put any weight into the opinion
The primary difference now is that the transition from bespoke IT on premises environments has been subsumed by the cloud hyperscalars and an entire hierarchy of products that use that infrastructure in a higher level of composability than in the past.
Products like SAP will continue to require engineering to maintain compatibility with the changes in its customers' requirements.
Products like MS-Word don't need that same level of feature work.
If a product is essentially feature complete then making the engineering a "maintenance only" support is about minimizing those support costs.
Bending Spoons doesn’t care (yet), but they’re not at the point where stuff has proven unsustainable
With Evernote, Bending Spoons identified that the backend needed a complete rewrite. They moved from a monolithic architecture running on manually provisioned virtual machines to a microservices architecture with managed databases, significantly improving performance and scalability.
I wonder if the same is true at Vimeo, which employed ~250 engineers [1], which seems high for a mature product that's deliberately conservative (most of Vimeo's customers are B2B whitelabelers, for whom a constantly changing product is a massive downside.) It's not like video codecs or storage systems or web standards are changing daily. I would imagine a well-engineered codebase from 10 years ago would work well today with only minimal changes, mostly centered around updating libraries for security patches. The fact that they had 250 engineers on staff who presumably did more than play ping-pong all day makes me wonder if the codebase was not, in fact, well-engineered.
[0] https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma...
[1] https://www.unifygtm.com/insights-headcount/vimeo
[*] Imagine the equivalent for a building: "we don't have automatic circuit breakers in this building; instead, we have a 24 hour staff of electricians who measure current with an ammeter and manually cut the power if it gets too high."
And accidentally turned it into a shitty product in the process :-)
It's also simply because no one will give you clearance to get out of those pitfalls. When you grow, you're focused on features, not optimization.
Bending spoons' approach isn't to grow, so you finally get to optimize what you couldn't... assuming you weren't already laid off by then.
>Imagine the equivalent for a building
buildings have regulations. And that word is still a boogeyman to many in the field of software.
That model works fine for a few years. Then you need a bigger change. Often, the system is built on top of some enterprise project, heavily customized, and you stay at your outdated version until it becomes unsupported. The maintainers don't care, and often don't have the capability to upgrade, so they just leave it as long as it keeps working. Or maybe some law has been introduced and requires a bigger change. Or the market just changes, and you need to support new APIs, new payment methods, new integrations...
The maintainers tend to quit every 1-2 years and are replaced with someone only trained by the previous generation. With every generation, the maintainers get worse. After 3 generations, all product knowledge is gone. To make things worse, the maintainers do stupid things in the code because they don't fully understand it, and it begins to rot. In the worst case I know, no one even knew what branch was deployed on production and what the last changes were.
Then, after 5-10 years of decay, some requirement comes along that would require a major refactoring. Everybody is overwhelmed, no one understands the internals, and eventually they decide that it the project is now so outdated that the only solution is to replace it. Management doesn't care because they can blame their predecessors.
In my experience, that's how it always works. I know at least 5 major projects that took over a year to develop, and costing millions, in at least one case tens of millions, that died like that.
I put it to not-tech people as: "[insert_ridiculous_valuation] is because you can fire everyone tomorrow and keep operating"
> "Tech was an outlier in this case because ZIRP allowed companies to retain full engineering teams to keep "engineering" the product despite it being essentially finished."
This is wrong, though, it's unnecessarily tying in a pop-finance obsession with ZIRP.
Unnecessary is the right word because it's not necessary for the rest of your post, you could cut it out and it wouldn't affect your argument or anyone's understanding.
Wrong is the right word because the dynamics it assumes are fantastical - companies took on debt to fund bloated engineering teams because no one noticed the engineering was done?
Additionally, ZIRP didn't induce this, this stuff happened, exactly the same, during ZIRP as well. Saw it in the iPad point of sale industry in early to mid 2010s.
A real finance nerd would point out ZIRP would in fact induce more of this behavior. It makes it cheaper for private equity/entities like Bending Spoons to take on debt to buy out companies and strip mine them. (strip mine being my word for this behavior)
ZIRP allowed a lot of "businesses" to exist that wouldn't in a conventional, competitive capitalistic environment. Businesses in quotes because there was never any reasonable potential for profitability, but it didn't matter because VC money was cheap. Building a sustainable business is hard, playing "startup founder" and having that lifestyle subsidized by VCs is easier.
In that case, (over)engineering was part of the performance art that was required to keep your only revenue source: the next funding round. There was never any incentive to "finish" the product because doing that would put your business model (or lack thereof) to the test and stop the music. On the other hand, as long as cheap money is around you could endlessly "engineer" and pivot and bullshit around, chasing the next funding round and using that to pay yourself/your friends decent salaries.
During the ZIRP era it was all about "engagement" and DAUs/MAUs, then it was blockchain, and now it's all about AI. For those that have run out of grifts, they fold or "incredible journey" and get sold for pennies on the dollar to entities like Bending Spoons that do notice there are bloated engineering teams that can be cut.
Car makers don't make a car and dismiss the entire engineering team.
Sure, you could do that, but eventually people are going to move on from your only car that's old and clunky.
That's exactly Bending Spoons model. Cut all the expenses, let the product die slowly. In the meantime you might have made more money than you put in to buy the product and the team.
It's basically bankrupcy management.
A very analytical, technological, short-sighted view of things. But not necessarily how the customers think.
For many customers, a company that isn't growing is shrinking. If a company isn't willing to invest in growth, that's a red flag.
I mentioned the Vimeo thing in a meeting this morning, and the head of Communications immediately said he's going to start looking for alternatives.
You can make all the analogies and excuses you like, but look at Vimeo's sister properties (Evernote, etc.) Are they better off since they were gutted? Are they delivering more value to the customers, or just funneling money to the parent company and its investors?
I think a better analogy is some big Wall Street investment company buying up nursing homes, and making lots of noises about "efficiency." That never works out well for the patients/customers. Only for the company.
He's gonna start looking for alternatives and then most likely find nothing that matches the featureset vs price of the current solution + the cost of switching, and the matter will quickly disappear.
Last time AWS or Cloudflare was down a lot of noise was made and a lot of people started looking for alternatives too - and everyone forgot about it a week later.
> Only for the company.
Yes, the point of business is to make profit, not to be a charity. Bending Spoons believes they can extract enough profit off Vimeo to justify the purchase price, either by reducing expenses, raising prices or both. This may still be palatable to the customers if they don't have any better option.
Software is more like industrial manufacturing. Besides the high cost of the machinery, if the machines stop working (which they do occasionally) you stop producing product, so you need someone on staff who is familiar with them to fix them. A friend of mine is one of several "night staff" at Hershey's that just sit there twiddling their thumbs until a candy machine stops working at 4am.
But that maintenance headcount is much lower than the headcount necessary to build that machine. The same should be the case in tech - once the product is built and the groundwork laid, ongoing maintenance and minor alterations should not require anywhere near the headcount it took to build.
They've not really been able to add new features to the backend, but on the other hand: old @Jack Dorsey Twitter was so bad about this that there were memes ("likes are now florps"). And the features they have added (indecent image autogeneration) have caused as much brand damage in Europe as the Nazi salute. Yet the site continues to stay up almost all the time.
(I don't think ZIRP is where the blame should lie, though. It's SaaS, which turns software into rentierism rather than purchase)
Do you include visual design/UI design in the engineering category? In the situation you describe does a completed product continue evolving visually, or does the design stay fixed, and gets bug fixes and such?
Part that i can't wrap my head around was at least in case of twitter, it was a hostile take over. In case of Vimeo, it didn't look hostile at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
> Twitter's board publicly and unanimously accepted the buyout offer for $44 billion
Letting someone else do the dirty work allows them to disassociate themselves from the (predictable) outcome and frame it as just business.
Pop music CD's had been popular for years before data CDROMs became available and more common.
Stars like Michael Jackson were raking in the bucks and their record companies even more.
Then by the mid '90's Windows was too sizable and unwieldy for most people to install from floppy any more, and consumer PCs started having CD reader/players standard.
Microsoft CDs started flying off the shelf at 10x the retail price the record companies were charging for music CD's.
I see a lot of negative comments here on HN, and I partly agree, but no one is recognizing here their try to optimize.
the more appropriate analogy is a car company. They still need engineers because they need to keep coming out with new model and technology in order to remain competitive. Ford didn't fire its engineering team once it had built a car.
> 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.
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...
Product has paying users and it's in a "complete" state. Cut costs to optimize profit for a bit and hope not everyone leaves.
In the case of Evernote, it's probably really hard to get 10 year users off of it at this point, so they can double subscriptions and they're locked in. My assumption is that there's a serious amount of people that go "eh" and just deal with the cost increase and stagnated features.
In the 80's people who did this were known as "corperate raiders". Nowadays it's just called business.
Minimum viable cost of keeping the lights on. And sometimes they even compromise a little, "let's spend a tiny bit more and see how much growth we can get from that"
Also HN: No, not like that
Some customers will churn, some will stay, Bending Spoons are the masters of this model so will have made an assumption on how revenue will change across the next 5-10 years+, but I would assume that they aren't forecasting extreme growth, and instead are calculating that net profit can be changed from c$30m to c$139m within existing revenue, so if they can keep revenue at/near current levels without growth, they can end up with a much more profitable business.
Bear in mind that same revenue doesn't necessarily mean the same number of customers - it can also mean raising prices and having less customers. Bending Spoons might estimate that if they double prices, half their customers might leave - this would still be BRILLIANT for profit, as while revenue would stay the same, some costs would half, and thus profit might jump from c$140m to c$250m based on some napkin math!
They laid off 90% of the teams. They migrated the app to their infrastructure to pool costs. Since then, there has been no further development of the service.
They are cost killers of the internet.
They acquire startups and companies without a huge growth potential but modest cash flow and little profits.
They cut the operating expenses to the minimum and jack up the prices to sky rocket profits till their mathematical models will tell them they will profit on the investment.
Rinse and repeat.
To play devil's advocate, maybe there's a point where a product or service needs to stop evolving and just be.
I have a Vimeo account that's been on auto-resubscribe for years. I couldn't tell you a single feature they've added in the last 5 years, but they host my videos, collect stats, and let me send links to my friends, and that's really all I want.
You might think that. Then there's Earthlink and AOL still collecting $5 or $6/mo per mailbox as their cash cow.
It's also not their only investment or even necessarily their own money. Individual holding companies don't tell you much about the larger pool of money they come from.
1) borrow a bunch of money to buy the company - this is called a leveraged buyout
2) once you're in control, have the company assume the debt you took on in order to buy it. you as the buyer are now free and clear, and the company is now responsible for paying back the money you borrowed to buy it. the end result of this transaction is that the company now owns stock that is less desirable because the company is more leveraged
3) make huge cuts everywhere and use the money "saved" by divesting from your own future to pay yourself as a consultant
The company is now in the extremely fragile position of not being able to spend to respond to the market because all of their income is going to servicing debt and paying the members of the private capital group. the "investors" aren't actually invested at all because even if the stock they hold becomes worthless they didn't pay anything for it in the first place, the company did. the thing limps along for as long as it can keep bringing in some small amount of income for the "investors" to skim off the top of, then it inevitably dies like anything riddled with parasites will, the company declares bankruptcy and they sell the copper out of the walls in order to pay back the loan used to take the company private in the first place
Maybe they're deciding to maximize locked in revenue and margin.
Laying off so many people doesn't seem signal the greatest confidence to the market, maybe they'll explain it as some kind of efficiency alignment.
After all, Twitter is still operating on some level after 75% layoffs?
I dont know if the same can be said for Vimeo, though
Companies like Bending Spoons focus on buying these assets and turn them into $$$$$$$$, not sustainability or growth.
And the company name referring to bending spoons (Uri Geller) gives away the way they see themselves.
This requires reinvesting profits into the company. It sounds like they choose not to do that, but instead switched to cashing in.
If the profits are stable and supported by a fraction of the workforce, then why keep the rest around? Clearly a shitty thing to do, but business-wise it makes sense.
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 certainly is depressing to look at what was built and what could be made of it but most of the folks with money lack the creativity or skill to actually build a lasting business. Just burn it down and rob it on the way out - such is the modern economy.
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.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-misquotes-princess...
https://people.com/elon-musk-tells-disney-other-advertisers-...
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.
It's a shitty business model, run by people who do not, in any way shape or form, care about people at all. But they are honest.
So if you work at a company and BS comes knocking: relax, accept the severance money and start looking for something new. It will be over soon. And you also don't want to stay even if offered because it will be an entirely alien environment where only people of a certain character can work.
I guess that's the new buzzword for "by removing most of the team from the equation and focusing the rest on everything". Noted.
>our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses
2 issues here
1. why would I trust a company who will flip around and remove nearly all its labor overnight?
2. I don't know how this move makes them more "innovative". You're just going to be burning out the very few people left to support the product.
I'm bold enough to call this a blatant lie.
But even more, it seems like the statement implies layoffs if they are acquiring a startup or growth-orient company. Bending Spoon is saying they intend to run the web site/web app as-is and make money. That means they will discard employees who have been employed with hope of growing/pivoting/etc the company. In start-ups, that can be a lot of the employees.
I've been through this myself once upon a time I was at a company and the way they described it is they just changed owners habitually.
Within about 4 months of this ownership change they fired my entire office. Luckily I was already some place new.
It's like; the thing we trust the most cannot be trusted but so long as we keep using money in its current form, this implicit form of trust is devaluing the trust of everything else that's not money.
Our relationship with money sets the bar for all other relationships. If it's a deceptive relationship and we tolerate it, we will tolerate every other relationship which is equally deceptive. We become accustomed and tolerant to a certain level of deception. We are also emboldened to deceive others.
Our relationship with money is highly deceptive and getting worse over time. We can expect to see the same trend in our relationships.
I think money CAN buy trust; it works by devaluing the entire concept of trust to the level that it can afford to buy it outright. It maintains a monopoly on trust.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
Reading the comments there, I shouldn't be surprised at this maneuver.
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
Little folks can run, but Bending Spoons won’t care here. They want to milk the enterprise video agreements.
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
Now I'm working on productizing that at https://framerate.com/ (beta launches next week!)
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.)
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.
Uri Geller being a … well, this is a family site. Finish that yourself.
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.
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.
So I understand your selfish sadness feelings.
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.
Vimeo has not contributed any code to Psalm since I left in 2021.
Psalm is still in good hands!
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?
So private equity is behind it.
How does that fit with expensive hiring sprees? If anything I’d expect them to be continuously shedding absorbed employees.
Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
> 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
- 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.
I just realized that video is old enough to vote.
I guess I’ll be exporting everything today.
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.
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.
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).
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
[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/india
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/eu-nears-historic-trade-...
[4] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/eu-proceed-security-defe...
[5] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
[6] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/broadcom/salaries/software-...
[7] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/nvidia/salaries/software-en...
[8] - https://www.lagazzettamarittima.it/2025/10/30/rixi-in-india-...
[9] - https://www.frstrategie.org/publications/defense-et-industri...
[10] - https://fr.euronews.com/business/2025/07/03/limec-deviendra-...
> Some of our most popular products
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.
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.
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.
https://colossus.com/episode/luca-ferrari-building-bending-s...
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.
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.
- 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.