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. |
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. |
> 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.
I suppose this is a matter of definitions. What do you define as a "business?"
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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
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-...
And this is just modern private equity. The whole point is to avoid all those pesky regulations going public brings.
Literally the week after I launched my thing, they got bought. I have no idea what I'll do if they go to shit.
> 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...
Well, the goal of the optimizations wasn't to benefit the customer or even make the app faster. It was to make it easier for a skeleton crew to maintain. If that chopped out a few features, oh well.
Unfortunately when the software is done, the product lifetime comes to a close soon after. Everything around the product changes and the software needs to change to keep up. Smart lightbulbs need apps to keep working and you get kicked out of app stores if you don't keep up with never-ending churn Apple and Google imposes on you.
The only way to run older games is to use emulators and other 3rd party effort, that also needs to be continually updated. When you claim that any piece of software is done and completed, you've only externalized the effort required to keep it useful.
I absolutely agree with your pushback against feature creep. That is unfortunately a reflection of internal corporation value system, while the successful open source projects often know where to draw the line.
then for live games etc -- release servers maybe after 7 years so people can run their own servers for games
I think we can all agree 7 years is a good enough timeline for games to have milked all the revenue they need.
37Signals still have early versions of Basecamp running
Jetbrains does the same thing with perpetual licenses etc
SAAS does not mean software can't be finished
When you’re historical Google, building three or more competing chat platforms…? That’s pretty much bs.
Downvote away, but consider a reply explaining why.
- You need redundancy in case someone leaves, is hit by a bus, gets sick, wants to go on vacation
- The software is bespoke, so staff need to know the ins and outs of all of it
- The more software to maintain, more knowledge needed, and more maintenance tasks
- Poorly built software/systems need a lot more maintenance
- The business leaders may (erroneously) keep asking for more changes, which creates a greater engineering load
- If the business value is based on technological capability, you will eventually need radical changes to keep up with new tech
The more complex software you depend on, the more expertise you need to fix things. If your usage keeps growing, but your app wasn't designed to scale ("just use Postgres" is not a scaling solution; some things even buying more hardware won't fix), now you need someone to bust open walls and add extensions to the building. That's a lot more dangerous with software contractors than the original engineers.
If your entire stack and app is bespoke, and you run your own VMs, or god forbid, run your own metal, it's a much larger maintenance burden (to keep it running well; lots of people limp along for years on broken equipment and software, at high risk to the business)
If we actually did build software more like we build buildings, we could bring in contractors for short stints to do either maintenance or new construction. But the complexity of current software engineering trends makes that fail a lot of the time.
I would point out that there are a few alternate models:
1) You use the maintenance headcount to build, and you just build that much slower.
2) You have an org that wants to stay the same size and move from project to project. In that case, some subset of your staff, are, at any one time, revisiting old projects for updates/maintenance, and some other portion are working on building a new thing. This is probably the strongest paradigm, because you can leverage common platforms between solutions.
Unfortunately, of course, either of this is at odds with the current approach to business/capital, in which once an opportunity emerges, everything is thrown at it as quickly as possible.
Just like an old building, their business model is to sweat the asset until it's no longer viable. In the meantime, the cashflow goes directly to the bottom line.
You could make this statement about anything. "Building a new hospital wing just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time", "Adding an extra drive-thru lane just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time". The point is that it's not "just because", it's because you believe it can grow your revenue.
On the other hand, if you don't believe that, then don't invest. Nobody's saying you have to. If you think my comment is saying that, you've misread it.
You can, but do you really need the same sized team to add an extra lane to a drive-through as you needed to build the entire restaurant's building, kitchens, etc?
Do you need the same sized team to add a new wing to a building as the team that built the existing building(s)?
And the ones who helped make Vimeo what it is? left out in the cold to fend for themselves.
This is why loyalty is dead. Maybe if this billion dollar aquisition benefitted the workers there'd be less hard feelings, but that's not how capitalism works.
This is such a bizarre mentality to me. When you sell your car, do you send a cut of the money to your mechanic?
OTOH - if Vimeo has given up all hope of further new features, then giving current users the chance to keep going isn't completely evil, even if it's at a higher price. VmWare is basically doing the same, and lots of customers are leaving, and those who aren't may still eventually do so, etc. (Edit: what if the alternative was Vimeo shutting down?)
Think of vintage car parts - if you absolutely want to restore that '30s Ford (keep using 20+ year old software) - someone offering an OEM-equivalent part for 3x what it cost back in the day (even adjusted for inflation) may actually still be good value - because what other alternatives are there?
Now - does it suck for the employees? Sure. One thing an econ prof said back in the late 90s (who loved to guest-lecture to CS/SWEng students): your job as a software person is to put other people out of work by automating stuff they used to do manually. Are you ok with that? Because if you're not, you should go into a different industry right now. Feels much worse when it's programmers getting the axe due to finance types, but not unexpected.
"CEO John Doe is found Guilty of maiming Company B to the point of bleeding it dry of its funds, resulting in bankruptsy. Due to person-hood laws, we sentence you to life in prison. Thank you for your attention on this matter."
Out of curiosity, could you expand on this? Gutting engineering playgrounds and other inefficient crap to maximize ROI sounds like a fun challenge. It's essentially performance optimization but applied to a whole infrastructure as opposed to individual parts.
Applied through the proverbial front door a few months back to have a chat and unsurprisingly got a generic rejection, but wouldn't mind trying again using a better channel. Question is of course whether they'd be willing to pay enough to make it worthwhile.
Everything SaaS these days, hell every subscription these days seems to involve product enshittification + rising pricing. Is this the end game of the financialization of everything?
Whatever they're paying for it, it is too much. Video availability drops in and out. Sometimes the video works. Sometimes it doesn't work at all and gives a weird error. Sometimes it doesn't work and it claims that it "can't guarantee the security of my connection", even though other videos work fine. Sometimes videos that didn't work yesterday work today. I've been tempted to go to their app developer and try to show them how to just host it themselves in S3 or something, which would probably still be much cheaper than what Vimeo is charging. The Vimeo player embedded into the app is extremely minimalistic, for instance, it can't cast to anything, which is a pretty useful feature for something you don't want to be staring at your phone for.
I found I can Favorite a video, which then makes me log in to a Vimeo account, then it adds it as a Favorite to my Vimeo account despite being private, and then I can view it through the Vimeo app proper, although that also seems to have lost the ability to cast to anything in my house lately. Casting is a clusterfuck of its own with the mismatched capabilities matrix of what can cast to what under what circumstances anyhow, but Vimeo seems distinctly behind on that front. It's honestly significantly worse now than the default video player a browser offers at this point.
But it was probably relatively easy for them to set it up ~5 years ago, before Vimeo collapsed.
Once at Vimeo, maybe 7 or 8 years ago, I was working on putting out the fires of an extremely weird operational issue where a bug in a cloud provider's software-defined networking stack led to corrupted HTTP responses, which got stored in CDN caches, causing persistent playback issues for users (playback not starting, or locking up in the middle). The cloud provider had reported it as a "packet loss" issue, because for the most part the misdirected packets would get rejected by the receiving TCP stack for having the wrong sequence number or whatever, but one time in a billion they would get through and wreak havoc... and we were moving enough traffic that those one-in-a-billion flukes were happening constantly.
I was musing in the shared chat with one of our CDN partners that, with no real way to tell what files were affected, the only way to fix the playback issues for everyone (short of waiting a month for all the cached objects to age out) would be to simply purge the whole cache. I immediately got a bold all caps DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING THAT in response. If we flushed the whole cache, the origin traffic to refill it would have saturated some internet links to the point of DoSing other customers and probably getting on CNN that evening. And that was then. Traffic levels got significantly higher later on.
No one said it was. Where do you see that in this thread?
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.
Just listen to yourself. "Extract enough profit," "raising prices," and ending with You don't like it, too bad. You sound like the taxi industry before Uber.
This the type of thinking that gave us Windows 11, Adobe, and every other piece of technology that started good, but became crap.
It's also the reason new companies suddenly show up and eat the incumbent's lunch. Happens every day.
I'm glad I don't work for you or your company. I have pride in my work. I wouldn't want to be just another tool to "extract" things from my customers because "they don't have any better option."
Fair enough, a minority of businesses are run as public benefit corporations. But the vast majority is ran to generate profit. Bending Spoons especially.
> I wouldn't want to be just another tool to "extract" things from my customers
I assume you're independently wealthy and acquired said wealth from a generous donor who gave it to you with no expectations in return?
Because otherwise we're all "extracting" something.
I take pride in my work too and I believe the prices I charge for my services are fair - but nevertheless if I gave the choice to my clients between paying me for those services or getting them for free, they'd prefer free.
> This the type of thinking that gave us Windows 11
What's giving us enshittification and the terrible quality of software nowadays is the lack of healthy competition, because of lacking anti-trust enforcement and adversarial interoperability being effectively illegal. Companies thus take their customers hostage and raise prices/decrease quality.
Ideally we'd just make competition in tech a reality again which would put a limit on enshittification.
Once you have them on the phone, you can not only better understand their problem but also demonstrate your skill and credibility in a way no resume or branding could.
At that point it's just a sales game - generally you'd avoid hourly rates and sell them a solution (see my other comment) which will maximize your effective hourly rate while being structured in a way that's very good value for the client. Hourly should be a last resort, at which point generally you'd rather have the client bounce, so you quote a high rate.
I'll offer a specific solution that takes me a week of full time work (14 hours each day -- I'm focused) for about $10k, which is roughly $150/hour if you want to calculate it that way, or another specific solution that takes me 3 weeks of 10 hour days for $15k which amounts to $100/hour. And like any good consultant, I'll eat the cost if I'm wrong. Other times I'll charge $40k when I know it will take a few months of dedicated work and I have to really lock in.
In practice, I never actually charge hourly. So the $999/hour is really Schrodinger's rate.
I don't like the guy, so it's not like me to defend him, but perhaps because he's busy being the head of the Communications department, instead of a tech nerd?
My company produces thousands of pieces of communication each year in many different forms. Video is a small part of what his department does, so you make the false assumption that this is an "important piece" of his domain.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn he doesn't have some internal cronjob to constantly search for alternatives to every single one of the (probably hundreds) of vendors we have around the world.
It's very weird that you feel that you're in a position to second-guess a person you never met, in a job you've never done, in a company you don't know, in an industry you also don't know. That's Olympic-level hubris.
And now you're saying he might have a "cronjob" constantly searching for alternatives? Well then your original point is neutered, he's not going to "start" since he's already been looking.
And video is only a small part? Not an "important piece"? Well then why should Vimeo's owners manage their company based upon what low-level users think? Again, you've minimized the point of your original post to irrelevancy.
If you started buying Evernote 10 or 15 years ago, and use it a lot, then Evernote gets acquired and the terms change, that's shitty but is not remotely a "bait and switch."
This is the real reason I'm tired of subscriptions. I don't even care about the "pay in perpetuity" problem in some cases, I just don't want the entity I chose to do business with to completely change.
That's absolutely a bait and switch.
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!
You need a customer my friend.
Not really, sync everything through Strava, and then drop whichever service you don't want. Basically any bike ride I've done in the past decade is on 3+ services because they all sync.
Plus I have a lot of points of interest, note, picture, that I could request via gdpr but not easy to reuse and couldn't be imported into Strava.
Strava isn't better than Komoot on this regard.
That's not true, the website and app both got a major redesign after acquisition.
There are plenty of competent devs outside America. I can't see any reason why you'd want to pay American salaries if you're a global company.
> Typically, we offer individuals at the start of their career an annual salary of £85,797 in London and €66,065 elsewhere in Europe.
That's not even true with a car. I'm about to spend 3000 dollars on a big repair for a car I bought 9 years ago used @ 3500. Even if you adjust for inflation we're still talking about 70% of the car's worth just to keep it running. As for a refund, the blue book value tops at 850 dollars.
That's one way to run that ROI, sure, but is it correct?
1. The original $3.5k you spent is a sunk cost; you should ignore it, so your total cost of getting a running car is only $3k.
2. Even if you don't ignore it, your total bill to get a running car is $7.5k
In either of the above situations, you should be comparing the cost to get a running car by fixing your existing car (either $3k or $7.5k) to the cost of getting a running car by selling it as-is (so, perhaps +$500 as a parts donor -$X for a replacement running car).
Regardless of which calculus you are using, it's still going to come cheaper to fix the running car.
What the car is "worth" (however you define it) is irrelevant to the calculus.
From the sounds of it I assume you're talking about developing and maintaing a SaaS application, where there is no real maintanence of it, and instead what you end up doing is developing it further to support larger data sets and more people. That is of course assuming that the software is successful and the usage is growing.
For traditional desktop software you can declare it finished and then maintanence is minimal and limited to only critical bugs, so you'd have a team of 5 develop it and then 1 person or less maintain it.
I agree. I never claimed anyone needs to do this.
Clients don't buy hours though, they buy solutions. They have problems costing them money or preventing revenue and they'll pay a percentage of that value to solve it. When you price based on solution value rather than time, your effective hourly rate merely becomes a function of your efficiency and expertise delivering said solution.
They key to achieving such a rate comes down to your sales and business skills: understanding what to sell, how to structure it to maximize your earnings and make it palatable for the client.
For example I generally avoid hourly billing except as a filter for time-wasters. Instead, consultancy becomes a loss leader for the real business: deeply understanding client problems and delivering high-value solutions. Clients happily pay premium rates when they see the price as a fraction of the solution's worth to them.
I only resort to quoting (quite high) hourly rates where it's clear the client just wants consultancy/advice (basically a glorified IT/business support) as a way to make it worth my time and gently encouraging them to bounce (I openly suggest more cost-effective options and refer them there).
I am not sure if I fully understood what you meant exactly with your (detailed) reply.
Let's say your client has a problem that will bring them 1k/hr of revenue when fixed. You think you can fix it in an hour.
You could quote them 5k/hour, because you think you can fix it in one hour and you estimate it'll take them at least 5 hours to find and talk to someone else who could fix it. This is a big gamble for the client, what if you don't fix it or take longer? The client balks.
Now let's say you offer a "reasonable" hourly rate like 150/hr. Your client is happy to take the gamble because 150 is peanuts compared to the value they get if you do fix it. Client takes the deal, you fix the problem, but you got paid peanuts.
Now let's say you offer them a no-fix-no-fee rate of 5k. The client is happy to take it because once the problem is solved it takes them just 5 hours to go back in profit, and they risk nothing if you end up not solving the problem. They take the deal, you fix it in an hour, the client happily pays you 5k, netting an hourly rate of 5k/hour.
Same hourly rate as the first scenario, yet the first scenario will cause everyone to balk while the second one is a steal for the client (in reality, you can actually charge more than 5k, how much more depends on your reputation and sales skills).
“This is the price for me to do work I don’t want to do, but will do, if you make it impossible for me to say no.”
It’s not about justifying the rate, that’s the wrong way to think of it.
its beneficial to check it
HN is full of people who tried the free version of ChatGPT a couple of years ago, got a load of random hallucinated slop, and concluded it was all a bunch of useless hype. They enjoy parroting a lot of obsolete stuff they read once about stochastic parrots, without the slightest sense of irony.
When I was growing up, my old man recalled engineers who reacted the same way to transistors, which sucked even more than early-generation LLMs when they first came out. Most of them got over vacuum tubes eventually, though. So will most of the HN'ers, likely including you.
Every generation has at best been a 5% improvement, and nothing revolutionary compared to the last generation. Absolutely no significant improvements between me selecting say Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Claude Sonnet 4, or Claude Sonnet 4.5. Still the same somewhat useful tool for specific purposes, still not good enough to be let loose on production, still not better than what I can do myself with 10 or so years of experience.
Genuinely useful from time to time? Sure, I agree completely. Anywhere near being revolutionary enough as people here insist on gaslighting themselves to be? Absolutely not. Not even remotely.
> as long as cheap money is around you could endlessly "engineer" and pivot and bullshit around
I lived this in a particular industry firmly inside the ZIRP era. It doesn't begin to describe how things actually worked. Even if ZIRP is synonymous with endless money to you, on their end, they still had to choose how to allocate it, and it was finite. You're not going to a bank for a loan, you beg people with experience in software to believe you're trending up.
> During the ZIRP era it was all about "engagement" and DAUs/MAUs, then it was blockchain, and now it's all about AI.
Do you genuinely believe DAUs/MAUs stopped mattering once crpyto, then AI, arrived?
Your argument requires believing that engineers collectively ran a con that no investor, board member, or executive noticed for a decade, and the only people who figured it out were PE firms after 2022. That's conspiracy theory dressed in finance vocabulary.
The leveraged buyout model you're praising as "normal capitalism" is itself subsidized by cheap debt. You've correctly identified that cheap money distorts incentives. You've just misidentified which side of the transaction is the distortion.
> you beg people with experience in software to believe you're trending up
Considering how much stupid shit I've seen funded (that quietly "incredible journey'd" away or folded by now) I don't think much begging was involved. Capital was desperate to find a place, no matter how ill-advised. Everyone in the startup food chain enjoyed it.
> Do you genuinely believe DAUs/MAUs stopped mattering once crpyto, then AI, arrived?
What started mattering is a clear path to monetize said DAUs/MAUs. You can't just show up with (potentially flawed) analytics saying you have DAUs and you're gonna figure out monetization later. Now you need to actually figure it out now and show up with analytics + proof of actually monetizing those users. Well, except if you're selling AI - then it's ok to sell inference at a major loss and figure out monetization later.
> collectively ran a con that no investor, board member, or executive noticed for a decade
"Investing" in a Ponzi can still be profitable as long as you get out before it collapses. There was a lot of passing around the hot potatoes between VCs too, so a VC can rightfully determine something to be a scam, but still invest if they believe SoftBank will happily hold the bag (and those guys ended up taking a lot of bags).
So the dynamic you attributed to ZIRP is alive and well, just wearing different clothes. Your original framework was "ZIRP allowed this, now real capitalism is correcting it." Now it's "this is permanent, it just rotates themes." These are different arguments.
> "Investing in a Ponzi can still be profitable as long as you get out before it collapses... a VC can rightfully determine something to be a scam, but still invest"
You've just moved the con from engineers to VCs. If investors knowingly played hot potato, then engineers weren't running a grift, they were employees doing jobs while capital played musical chairs above their heads.
So which is it: were engineers "deadweight" padding out finished products, or were they ordinary workers caught in a game VCs were knowingly playing? Because "VCs knew it was a scam but invested anyway" is a very different story than "engineers tricked everyone into thinking the product wasn't finished."
You're retreating into "everyone knew it was fake."
(I used to work for WeTransfer and some time after I left it got acquired at about the price it was once considering IPO-ing at. This was apparently such a good offer that it took very little deliberation to agree to the deal.)
From my perspective as a one-time (but no longer) paying user of evernote - WTF am I paying for monthly if not to support a dev team?
Seriously - I get that there are infra costs for some of the services, and I wouldn't mind paying those costs plus a reasonable upcharge, but I'm sure as fuck not going to pay a company $100+ a year subscription to store under a GB of data.
So now I host bookstack and I pay backblaze ~$0.22/m to back up all my notes, which is much closer to real costs for these services if they're not under development.
Bending Spoons is what we'd call vulture capitalists which have and continue to exist. Basically they buy weakening businesses and carve them up for parts, selling anything of value and squeezing max revenue of whatever is left.
People say this like it's a bad thing, but without "vulture capitalists", struggling companies would default and banks would attempt to do the same, except they are much worse at it and even more people would lose their jobs.
I very much worry for Gen Z. Through no fault of their own.
How to get credibilty? Well, you gotta be in industry. The thing the two consultants here are besmirching. You can't win.
> There's not a lot of vectors I feel I can jump in to say "I'll do this for 1000/hr" without getting some bulging eyes.
1000/hr might be a lot for you, for many businesses it's not even a meaningful expense, the bigger hassle for them is doing the paperwork to get the money sent out.
I'm well out of tech at this point, running a small lifestyle business in a different industry. At least once a month, I get people in my new industry offering me significant amounts of money to build them software. I don't have a fancy public tech resume; really, the only thing these people know is that I'm some relatively pleasant, rich, former tech guy.
2. Make and maintain connections.
3. Be pleasant to interact with.
4. Know what value you provide.
5. Find out what value people need.
If you're someone like Steve Jobs then #3 is a bit optional because #4 is increased, both in truth and in arrogant overestimation.
The hardest part of this really is #4, because most people either get too cocky and overconfident in the value they provide in general, or they are so overcome with imposter syndrome that they believe they offer practically nothing, so they do almost entirely open source work and fail to start a consultancy.
Vimeo employees and all the people part of the recent tech bloodbath experienced that too, but without even pocketing the upside beforehand. I'd argue that for anyone currently searching for a job, they will get a better ROI engaging in sales instead.
Any monkey can (and does) sling ChatGPT'd resumes at anything that moves, hoping to get the job and pocket enough salary before people catch on. That scam doesn't work with consultancy on a "paid on delivery" model, so the market there is much less crowded. There are different scams out there but those primarily target big companies.
> There's not a lot of vectors I feel I can jump in to say "I'll do this for 1000/hr"
We as techies know how the sausage is made and estimate a "fair" price based on the effort it would take us to do it. A car mechanic would probably also consider retail oil change prices to be unfair... because he's already invested in the knowledge and tooling and with those it's indeed a 5 min job.
From a business' perspective though, our work might as well be magic - we are writing prayers in an arcane language to make silicon come to life and do things that generate money for the business. It's magic that they have repeatedly failed to replicate for themselves. The latest fad is AI/LLMs and that will fail too - LLMs only work in the hands of a skilled operator - and otherwise fail disastrously and often generate extra remediation work on short notice.
If you worked in tech there's a good chance your past contributions are netting way more than 1k/hour to someone else already - so you can generate this value. The challenge now is to capture more of said value.
Nobody in their right mind will pay 10x market rate for no guarantee of result; see my other comments in this thread. This would open them up to the same scams that happen with permanent employees and third-world countries will be all over it the next day.
But if they are guaranteed a result then the calculus changes, they are no longer thinking of hourly rates but instead of as a fraction of the revenue enabled by your solution, and their risk is lowered to only the opportunity cost. This is a much better deal for the client. Your resulting hourly rate now purely depends on the value of the solution to the client divided by how quickly you can do the task.
You only explicitly quote the 10x market rate when you want the client to bounce because the job or client sounds like a nightmare. You will get some clients who are cheap and insist on an hourly rate to explicitly prevent you from playing the above game and earning the (much bigger) cut of the solution. The "fuck you" rate is for that, it's not expected to be taken, it's there to set a baseline price for your expertise and make the deals you offer sound more attractive in comparison.
It's basically all sales and reframing your work from salaried/hourly rate to how much your work is worth for potential clients (which doesn't scale linearly with time invested nor software complexity).
As to why am I giving you advice on how to compete with me? Because you're already competing with me by willing to settle for permanent employment market rate for the services I am offering. Encouraging you to charge more helps us both.
Each individual company Bending Spoons acquires has a limited lifespan, so if you only look at a single deal it can indeed look myopic. But the whole point of their business model is that they use the cash flow thrown off by the acquired businesses (which are much more profitable for a short while due to firing 75% of personnel) to fund the next acquisitions. This can keep going on indefinitely, or at least until there are no more businesses to acquire.
Turns out that's not the case and with each bubble popping more and more people get a rude awakening. Some are able to jump on another bubble and keep the gravy train going, but might be left in the dust in the next one and so on.
If anyone was conned, it's primarily the younger engineers who started their career in those bubbles, were never exposed to the financial realities or even forced to think about it, and now get a very unpleasant wake up call.
You may disagree with my argument - but in that case I suggest taking a short position on Bending Spoons & their competitors who appear to be making the same argument and putting their money where their mouth is.
You started by calling engineers "deadweight" that Bending Spoons correctly cuts. Now they're victims who were "conned" and given "illusions" and deserve sympathy for their "unpleasant wake up call."
These are incompatible framings. Deadweight is culpable. Victims of a con aren't. Which is it?
> I suggest taking a short position on Bending Spoons
Strip-mining is often profitable. That's not the disagreement. The disagreement is whether "profitable" validates your original framing that the workers being cut are deadweight rather than, by your new admission, ordinary people who were lied to by the actual decision-makers.
Note also the lack of understanding of finance, coupled to parroting pop-finance, continues. You're trying valiantly to hammer phrases we all know, into meanings they don't have. They sound epic, and are very "law of nature" feeling. I understand the appeal. Anyways, you cannot short a company without a stock.
Which positions are culpable or victims is besides the point here (I have other comments on ZIRP related threads if you are interested, where I do make direct accusations).
> ordinary people who were lied to by the actual decision-makers
Were they truly lied to? They got paid for years of service. Now whether they got lied to by Bending Spoons denying there will be layoffs I don't know (or whether the lie matters - for all we know they got a fair severance package, at least in places where that is legally mandated?).
But for those who started their career in the "good days", I would say they got misled by an environment that rewarded raw engineering without concern for the business outcome of said engineering (and often rewarded over engineering in fundamentally unsustainable businesses). Now the business outcome is suddenly becoming the most important thing and these people are taken by surprise.
---
Now it's clear you have some kind of beef with me; I'm either talking complete shit, or I struck a nerve. Maybe a bit of both. Either way I will not pursue this conversation further - best of luck!
What's really different now is that LLMs have become useful research tools. Three or four years ago, models couldn't cite their sources at all. Two or three years ago, they started to gain the capability, but a large proportion of the citations would either be hallucinated or irrelevant. About a year ago, significant improvements started to emerge. At this point, I can give Gemini 3 Pro or GPT 5.2 Pro a multilayered research task, and end up with a report indistinguishable in accuracy and bibliographic quality from what a good human might produce in a couple of weeks.
It might take a half hour to get the answer, and I'm not sure if you could get the same result at the $20/month level, but the hype and promises we started hearing a couple of years ago are starting to bear fruit. The research models are now capable of performing at grad-student level. Not all the time, and not without making stuff up on occasion... but to argue that no progress at all has been made is nothing more or less than moon-landing denial.
Cool, how much of it can I use with a $20/month subscription? I'd reach the monthly limit within hours while gaining nothing. It's not that I never tried it, it's that I did and the difference is nowhere near worth 10x my money (nor even the wait time needed to get results).
> I'd suspect a skill issue.
There's 0 skill involved with asking a magic 8 ball to solve your problem for you. There's some skill involved with making it better for yourself consistently by cramming as much useful info as possible into the context window by writing very specific custom agents / skills / MCP servers / whatever, but I have yet to find a client that would pay me to spend an ungodly amount of time fucking around with my toolbelt instead of delivering results.
> Three or four years ago, models couldn't cite their sources at all. Two or three years ago, they started to gain the capability, but a large proportion of the citations would either be hallucinated or irrelevant. About a year ago, significant improvements started to emerge.
Let's translate that: You don't understand what they're doing under the hood when they "do that", you don't understand where that "improvement" is coming from, and I'm not interested in spending my time teaching you for free. For as little as €50/h, I'd be happy to! contact at my username.
> but the hype and promises we started hearing a couple of years ago are starting to bear fruit.
You're gaslighting yourself again in order to justify the price you're currently paying. Downgrade yourself back to $20 subscription, stick to it for one whole month, learn its limits properly, and then if you feel like you need to upgrade to a higher tier again, do so! Spoiler alert: it's gonna appear "significantly crappier" for about a week, and then after that week, you will get used to it and realise you've wasted a fuck ton of money on nothing.
> but to argue that no progress at all has been made is nothing more or less than moon-landing denial.
Where's that coming from? You're putting words into my mouth again. I specifically acknowledged small improvements, but I dismissed drastic improvements. Zero of what you said convinced me otherwise. For the love of all holy, use your own brain a little bit to actually understand the tools you're advocating for. Saying that you drank too much Kool-Aid would've been a severe understatement.
right, yeah, I got started by being able to expense the $200 plan, and now I don't expense it but there's no going back, mostly because this is extremely undervalued and its unclear how long this deal will be around
Claude's $200/mo Max x20 plan is the best deal in the game, its equivalent to about $2600 worth of API credits, and is 4x more ability than the $100 plan (Max x5)
all roads to not really... caring... about why you're resistant to this. it's going to be too late when Anthropic raises the prices, all the reasons behind your reservations grow, unless someone else undercuts them just as well.
I pay for Sourcehut now, but until recently I was using a free private GitHub account to sync my notes in Obsidian. It works fine and cost me nothing (at least nominally).
I went on a mission about 5 years ago to essentially stop paying for SaaS services if there was an opensource alternative available that I could self host.
I have old machines lying around anyways since I was upgrading about every 5 years for gaming. So I have a 5 node k8s cluster in my basement serving about 20 different services that I use, and I no longer pay for basically any subscription software.
Git is fine for text content, (hell, I have about 25 personal repos on github anyways, although speaking of... most are mirrored to a local gitea instance) but it's not a great solution for backing up DBs, binary data, media, photos, etc...
Eventually - I'll likely replace backblaze with a NAS at a family member's house, but for now - it's very cheap and the billing is fair (usage based billing, not the exorbitant monthly fees most SaaS services charge).
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Plus - I really like the flexibility of web based services. I don't have to remember to sync anything with bookstack, I just hit 'https://bookstack.[mydomain]' in a browser from any machine I want - Friends house? works. Public library? works. Wife's phone? works. Work laptop? works. etc... you get the idea.
Even after accounting for the initial outlay for a large NAS and my extra power consumption - I broke even in just under 3 years self hosting. Turns out SaaS is sorta a scam if you're technically capable.
And absolutely more power to ya for finding your own alternative solution!
I've heard that Mercurial has competent binary diffing, so I might at some point try using that to sync my Obsidian stuff.
Anyway, it's not like 22 cents a month is going to bankrupt you so I am certainly not criticizing, I was just curious.
You can imagine if your ultimate aim was to improve society, then acquiring a firm but having to sack a bunch of employees as somewhat of a failure.
if the two sides you describe agree on those definitions as mutually exclusive but in union describing the universal set of people, then they are both wrong.
as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin. you give somebody your money in exchange for something you want and would rather have: this creates happiness out of thin air.
if you think a better society is a happier society, then going into business to make money is the same as going into business to make society better.
That is a big if which is straightforwardly false. This idea of market participants' choices being entirely free rests on the efficient market fallacy [0]. Whereas the reality is that even the structure of a market itself creates friction. One of the main points of business schools is learning how to recognize and take advantage of this structural friction, which business people then conveniently forget when it's time to assuage their own egos regarding their counterparties.
[0] which is basically in the realm of asserting P == NP. The supreme irony is that if the efficient market fallacy were true, then central planning would also work as well!
Imagine if the owners of modern day factories thought a little more like this [0].
Option B: the business stays afloat, investors make money, customers keep the product, some employees get fired with a severance.
You think option A is superior?
Vimeo has not had major growth in recent years, but it was making progress, however slowly. Just nowhere near the 10x expectations out there. Nobody was going to lose anything.
What I see here is "Business stays afloat, investes make money for now, customers get a continually worse service and eventually leave, and a lot of good talent is out on the streets over corporate greed". This is only a win if you're an investor, and only in the short term. So I'm not convinced this is better than option A in the long term.
it's immoral to lie to people.
very few people can do the mental gymnastics required to equate " we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together " to "you're all getting fired."
at some point in the now far-distant past CEOs used to make heartfelt speeches and memos to a soon-to-be-downsized staff about how hard decisions had to be made and blah-blah-blah; now it's more about sequestering the decision makers away from the damaged goods while projecting daisies and sunshine for would-be investors.
The game has shifted far from the human factor into a purely financial/investor loop. Good for some people but generally worse for people .
And before I hear it : Yes it was always about money, but business wasn't always about investors . That projection of liability to a remote party is exactly the issue.
Going from "you're fine" to "you're fired", when it was always going to be "you're fired".
Nobody lied. Vimeo will continue to operate, and probably will even have targeted ongoing development.
>and probably will even have targeted ongoing development.
well, 15 of them or so.
There are proper ways to let go of people, but that's not how it's done in the US.
So if you got fired tomorrow for no reason in particular, you would not feel "harmed"? No family to support, bills to pay, or career to progress cut short? No trips nor big purchases that need to be re-planed or cancelled? No obligations you need to cancel because last week you were fine and this week it's all about scambling for a new job? This is the most asinine thing I've heard here yet.
I didn't have a choice in my society on what contract to take. And the power dynamic is unequal. I don't consider being suddenly laid off as "harmless" with that in mind.
Response from America: "well that's just business, I guess". It was never about preserving American labor.
Meanwhile, the users are the ones who lose out. Classic.
The main business was throwing off gobs of money and there were SO MANY failed projects to try and find new revenue streams. Everyone who was not being pushed by the PE owners could see that they would never account to even 1% of the revenues of the main product. It was only a matter of time before someone came in, said "the main business is fine as is" and fired the people who were involved in the moonshots then sat back and raked in the cash. Sure, it will probably not last forever. But if it brings in millions per year for 15-20 years until the company dies, then that is probably an outcome Bending Spoons is fine with.
This isn't like some B2C 5-10 dollar a month service. Video hosting is notoriously expensive and paying clients will quickly see other alternatives if they see smoke. These are already people with specialized needs that the main market leader (Youtube) cannot fulfill. They are "active", so to speak.
Isn't this just a bigger reason why these people won't leave? Assuming the acquirer isn't dumb enough to remove the core benefit that comes from their highest paying customers, they will keep providing those, and those customers won't churn. And I think this is a safe assumption, considering it's the primary goal and focus of the people at the acquirer.
But I don't really see what overall lessons there are here.
Based on my experience with Evernote, I don't trust Bending Spoons, and I'm wondering if I should look for a different time-tracking and invoicing system.
I'll be honest it's not as good as harvest. The mac app is a bit buggy, it's not as easy to add manual time, and you need to pay for pdf export. But having said that I've found the free version to cover 90% of my use of the paid version of harvest
If anybody has any good alternatives, I'm all ears.
You can of course sidestep that and use contractors for the initial build out - plenty of agencies and freelancers will give you a quote with various terms. It'll cost way more in the short term because you're essentially paying upfront the years of salary they would otherwise earn building the same thing as permanent employees, but at least it's an upfront, honest transaction with no expectation of loyalty. You can then hire a permanent skeleton crew for the continuous upkeep.
Want a turnkey Vimeo you can deploy on a cloud or truckloads of servers you can just rack up in a colo? If you have a spare 1.4B laying around, I'm sure that can be arranged.
But then the price tripled and for me, it's too much. I'll pay $2 per session, but not $5.
I remember their CEO (Phil Libin I think) on their podcast explaining how they were building a 100 year company. I really wanted to believe that.
I use Obsidian now and like it, but it feels like they are going down the same path. They keep adding features that don't really fit the original editor-for-a-folder-of-markdown-files. I wish they would stop.
It's a bummer but the feature treadmill seems inescapable. Bending Spoons will probably be able to buy Obsidian for a very nice price in a few years and the Obsidian founders will do very well.
This practice is derogatorily called "vulture capitalism" for a reason. I hope the remaining engineers are either lining up for retirement or networking around for their next gig.
Software doesn’t win by being “finished” it wins by out competing other software
And yes, I am making a good case for mature software with those lovely examples. But clearly they wanted more widgets and they kept engineers who can deliver those widgets. This wasn't some unsustainable thing for Youtube as the top comment argues. And that's how most software businesses work as of now. If you remain complacent, you're slowly dying to competition. Because the demand for more still exists.
Bending Spoons buys stalled or failed products and keeps them alive with a central engineering team in Italy which is far cheaper than anything in the US.
That's their business model. If the company you work for is acquired by them you should start looking for a new place.
I'm going on a limb here and saying that the scale that YouTube was running on back in 2010-2015 is not the same scale as now, and if they had left their whole infrastructure unchanged, a "finished product", so to speak, the site would have been feeling dated and would have eventually been killed off.
Just look at Google. They could have stopped writing new software at any point and been just fine. But in the long run they'd have missed out on trillions of dollars.
As with everything in business, it comes down to risk/reward. Not every risk pays off, but some do.
The key is knowing when to stop. Unfortunately permanent employment does not provide an incentive for anyone involved to speak up when they think it's that time.
Okay. Most businesses also fail. Is that a reason for existing ones to stop growing?
Not if you find new ways to appeal to them once you have them as users.
The search engine markets is finite, so Alphabet expanded elsewhere
Doch, even then.
Back at university, we had practice sessions about our CVs and job interviews. Mine had a cliché in it, "committed to quality"*. The businessperson who was helping us figure out how to be any good at the jobs market, picked up on it with an example:
Which is higher quality? A Porsche, or a go-kart?
Except no; you didn't consider who the customer was. If this is for a kid who just wants to have some fun, they can't afford a Porsche, they've got no insurance, they don't know how to drive. A go-kart solves their problem, they get to have fun, a Porsche doesn't.
* I was 19 or 20 when I wrote that, it was about as true as when ChatGPT writes the same: I didn't know any better.
The reason why software companies grow, is because businesses demands growth.
I suppose you could build a simple, small app and leave it on "maintenance" (even then, it's going to be difficult due to crumbling infra) but real world products don't work that way.
Companies want to scale, add features and expand to various verticals. They also have to compete with other companies , there is regulations, compliance and never ending list of incoming features from sales, marketing and customers.
Elon Musk famously attempted to run Twitter "lean", and look how that ended.
Unless you are able to curb the corporate greed, you will need to grow your engineering team.
There's only so much growth you can achieve in any vertical - the key is to realize when you've hit that limit and cut your losses. Unfortunately as a company employee you have no incentive to do that.
I doubt Vimeo would've sold if there was still lots of growth potential on the table. They've exhausted it, and for various factors were unable to cut costs internally.
Bending Spoons evaluated the situation and determined they can still extract a certain amount of profit by massively cutting costs - they gave chunk of said expected profit to the current owners, and are now implementing said strategy.
> Elon Musk famously attempted to run Twitter "lean", and look how that ended.
The decline of Twitter has all to do with Musk's politics and lack of any kind of strategy of the product (makes sense if you see it as his personal mouthpiece rather than a business). Tech-wise it seems to be working well enough. Cutting 80% of expensive engineering staff for a 1% drop in uptime of a non-critical service with no SLAs is a no-brainer.
This seemed to end pretty well. He overpaid for it, but the website kept functioning without issues.
This is crazy inefficient yet it's not captured in our economic theories, so we're essentially blind to it.
The main thing to do is make it so you can't just lay off people as easily as you can in the US for pretty much no reason. But it seems workers are still too divided to really come together and achieve such 9initiatives. Be it unions, pressuring their governments to make new laws, or simply chastising and boycotting companies who engage on such actions.
Maybe one thing we should do is to allow suing company executives for breach of fiduciary duty when they waste resources on some useless project or feature. This could make many companies more efficient.
Oh and also ban dumping. You should not be allowed to sell stuff below cost of production. Development effort with big maybe ignored.
> Hopper: You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life! It's not about food, it's about keeping those ants in line.
In our case, it's more like a million to one
Sometime in the late 00's they realized people were still happily using software from the 90's, because it worked for their needs, and well, we can't have that...
I despise their business model, but it is what it is.
If your comment is referring to the software company's exiting to provide a return to shareholders, that happens all the time whether it's venture-backed or privately owned. The owners of privately held bootstrapped companies still want an exit one day too.
As an open source software engineer who is now a venture capital investor, respectfully, I think your beef is with capitalism, not with the institutional investors.
Why not come out and say this?
Also another thing but other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699#46709164 points out how Vimeo wants to replace SV engineers with Italian engineers to save money.
They are a first and foremost private equity company, Don't forget. There's no loyalty to any group.
And yes, they in-house the engineering part, but the fact they are Italian is just because Bending Spoons is Italian and their offices are in Milan.
Bending Spoons pays its own engineers very well, an entry level junior position starts at 75k+ euros, which in Italy is a senior+ engineer salary.
This is not like making a small 20 person self funded company.
Me: can you take out the trash? My kid: dumps trash on the front lawn.
Me: people are speeding a lot, can we do something about it? Cops: shoots anyone speeding in the face.
But I guess I can't say anything about it, because they're just doing what I want!
So while individuals have different beliefs, the "average expected top comment" for communities like HN is usually pretty predictable, and hence the cognitive dissonance of the community on the whole can be called out.
Do you know other fallacies like this which are less known but as interesting (that you or others might know of) probably?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY
(I'm not.)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/05/private-equity-consolidation...
There are not more PE firms than McDonalds in the USA.
There's no hint of laying off all the staff here though. Now it sounds like they "were" excited to lay off people to maximize profits.
Maybe "unlock even greater focus for our team" means to unlock their focus to find other jobs but it's quite perverse. I agree with the OP, that "Words no longer appear to mean things"
What? Just because a statement says "we're excited to do X" doesn't mean they're not also planning to do A, B, C, Y and Z.
I'm not defending the layoff. It just seems weird to interpret the statement itself as somehow being misleading about a subject that it literally didn't mention.
We call this lawful evil logic for a reason. It's how you empower stuff like Jim Crow laws (or the current US administration in general. "Well he isn't going to actually invade a NATO ally, he's just saying he wants Greenland. I want a Ferrari!")
Those words weren't truth. Truth would have been to state the intent to fire employees in order to maximise profit. This was always going to be the outcome, and it was expected, why not just state it clearly?
Again, when truth becomes a grey area that is to be manipulated for maximising profits that benefit a minority of privileged individuals, we should be concerned and at the least, not normalise it with "its just business".
But that's not the society we live in.
Most people aren't entrepreneurs, and they may be an older folk who grew up expecting companies invested in employee retention and building careers.
Those "reasonable people" were lied to.
(To be clear, I think the latter is both descriptively true and normatively good)
Severely downsizing the company isnt a good vibe to a customer. I'd definitely be migrating off Vimeo if I did any serious business with them.
So, less than a percent of a percent of people.
I wish I was kidding. Their search result brings up
>Vimeo AI-Powered Video Platform
anyone who knew Vimeo pre-pandemic knows how eye-rolling this is.
Just saw what I thought was youth, but it was a fellow older fellow*, so chased the interlocution more than I usually would because I was curious and wanted to make sure there wasn't insight I had missed and you were speaking loosely (as is normal, we are not robots)
re: motivation, I took a lot of pride in not taking money back in prime ZIRP, early-mid 2010s and felt it was vindicated by what I saw happen to competitors.
What I saw was proto-"Bending Spoons" behavior. Frankly, Bending Spoons seems ethical and right-headed at its face. i.e. after 30 seconds with their website. but what do I know.
What I saw was private equity rollup iPad-based point of sale software who couldn't justify another round, and let the business owners using their point of sale systems flounder until they got the energy to switch. Explicitly. the rug pull wasn't just on engineering or further development of the system, it was support too. That might sound stupid (who needs support w/software?), but its necessary for point of sale due to credit card processing. Multiple companies, same playbook.
Cheers & apologies, I went too far, I left you feeling like it was a grudge.
FWIW it's also important to me because I want a fellow wide-eyed college-dropout-waiter soaking in HN from a small town to know VCs involved in these messes will continue acting as they have post ZIRP, as you've established.
* via your HN profile, not stalking off site or based on username
> it was a fellow older fellow
~11 years professional experience only - still got plenty to learn, but unfortunately seen enough shit to be cynical. Started out starry-eyed in the middle of the ZIRP era ~2015 and made some salary off it but no exit money, though something felt off and I never understood the over-engineering at the time.
Then as I gained experience, switched to consulting to boost my earnings and looking back at it my (admittedly very jaded) opinion is that a lot of that "engineering" was performative bullshit enabled by cheap money, which continues to be the case in some verticals (blockchain; now AI).
Senior engineers of the time would've likely known it was bullshit and were just happy to play with new tech while subsidized by VCs, but unfortunately this "quiet part" was never said out loud to those who started their careers during this period and for whom their only experience of technology was through this distorted lens of cheap money and no financial/business pressures.
The result is a lot of very senior people tech-wise but with little exposure to the business side of their craft, who the readjustment hit like a brick wall. The fact my statement about maintaining a (well-built) product requiring much less manpower than building it is apparently controversial suggests many people have yet to experience this brick wall.
But for those who looked into the financials, the selling out and subsequent layoffs should've come at no surprise - it was never sustainable to keep paying those tech salaries perpetually. The same thing happened to blockchain/web3/crypto, and the same will eventually happen to AI.
There is still and will always be money to be made in technology, but it will be made by applying technology to business problems and approaching every problem as "how much money does this make/save and how big of a cut I can negotiate". Permanent employment is just letting someone else do said negotiation on your behalf in exchange for a promise of stability - well, turns out when the times are tough they don't have to keep that promise: plan accordingly.
(btw, this ZIRP-era distortion was not limited to technical roles - there were plenty of "startup founders" and executive roles too who got there because of the cheap money rather than earning said position through demonstrated skill - unsurprisingly, a lot of those people have since quietly transitioned back to the rank & file once the money fueling their little startup escapade ran out)
If you look at financial markets and finance theory, there is no validity to the idea that people are long term blind and short term mistaken. markets discount the future, they are the best estimates of the future rather than somebody with no skin in the game magically "knowing better"
its plausible for companies to be worth less than their assets. While it might be the best estimate its still not necessarily the best one. aka the market can stay crazy longer than you can stay solvent. Markets measure confidence as much as they measure value.
Budgeting is trivial thing. Spend less than you earn. And it is not like these were minimum wage workers. They should have known to have plenty of buffers at this point. It is entirely their own fault of not reach that point.
And it's always the workers who pays the price, not the businessman. Does that see fair?
>If a US owner bought it they'd have done exactly the same thing (layoffs) albeit possibly with new jobs in a different state than country.
That'd be unfortunate, but it still means jobs are created in the US. It also gives he opportunity (slim) to have people move in the country. Moving the jobs overseas, not quite as mobile.
But yes, the big issue here is the lack of decorum in how we recklessly cut jobs here. This isn't how most 1st world coutnries work.
This sounds more like a reverse mortgage line of business, to me. Bending Spoons is betting they can eek enough revenue out of Vimeo to pay the interest on the $1.4B loan by cutting the $400M expense run rate.
The actual loan principal will be paid out (if it ever does) of the money they expect to bring in when they inevitably go to an IPO.
And at that point you have speculators carrying risk, bankers getting rich off interest, leadership raking in millions, and a once reasonably healthy business is jeopardized (subject to the performance of other Bending Spoons properties, risky management, etc). All in the name of growth that may or may not be achievable.
The company failed. In 4 years, they managed to turn the valuation from $8.5B to $1.4B. No employee should be in any way surprised by what happens when you watch your company's valuation fall that much. Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying any attention to the company's operating metrics (they only made $27m last year!) to a negligent extent.
It sucks for the people let go, but they can't be surprised.
>Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying any attention to the company's operating metrics
Dude, I just want layoffs to be signaled ahead of time. You can defend billionaires all you want and gaslight engineers for not being marketing majors. My demands are very simple.
That's not marketing or gaslighting, that's expecting people to pay minimal attention to their employer's financial performance. Minimal here being on the level of possessing object permanence.
in an inefficient market, you can still choose to transact or not, and you will only do so if you feel you will benefit.
in an efficient market, the net benefit across society will be higher, but nothing in what I said requires an efficient market.
so you are simply wrong.
But even in the general case your argument still does not make sense. When we talk of a business providing societal utility, we don't include the business owner themselves in the integral. For example your assertion lets you conclude things like a casino owner who has made a pile of money but impoverished the community has made society better.
I didn't say you could, pay closer attention or you will not be able to understand arguments or learn anything.
What I said was, "as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin."
however, your mistake does contain a germ of reinforcement to what I said: if you cannot choose to participate in a transaction, you will be less happy, i.e. allowing sellers to offer choices and buyers to make choices will increase happiness in every type of market.
before you make another mistake and go shooting off, I didnt say people will be happy, I said they will be happier, but happier is an unmitigated good.
And if everybody chooses to not transact, you have a market crash. So... waves at 2026/2027
There's also a lot more competition with Vimeo than there is with YouTube. So options exist to find.
----
But I'll break down my thoughts further. I'm familiar with the scene (a lot of artists use Vimeo for their portfolios, as well as working with clients on NDA content), but not intimate. So I'd love someone for me to call me out here. But:
There's 2 lenses here. Your lens implies Vimeo is the best service in this niche space, that reducing down the staff count to a skeleton crew will keep it as the most competitive option, and that as long as this isn't disrupted that it'll be business as usual. And we'll be charitable and assume this doesn't enshittify. Those are all valid points. I'm much less charitable, but I can still work in this lens for the sake of argument.
The lens I'm looking in is more at the type of person using Vimeo, not the type of business Vimeo runs. Compare this to Evernote. It's a lot closer to Twitter or Facebook, where remaining users will use it simply because "it's familiar" more than for any competitive edge. It has everything you need, and even if costs rise, we're still talking about one lunch outing per month. It's a "sticky" product benefiting from previous goodwill and marketing.
The people on Vimeo aren't "sticky". They are closer to the type of person who leaves Windows for Linux because Microsoft keeps pissing then off. In fact it's more like they are Linux users who jump around from distro to distro because they already forsook the market leader. They are "actively" on the move and aware of the tools they use. Given that Vimeo is a highly premium service when you use Enterprise, you need to be active. You don't want to be on a sinking ship and have your work crash with it.
So I see two roads here. Some users will stay "stuck" because maybe nothing else does compared to Vimeo. Or because some larger pipeline relies on Vimeo and it's beyond their control. Then some users will be either leaving to another service, or actively keeping an eye out for competitors in the near future. That's what I see as "different" here.
Now, taking my charitable lens off: I do think there will be a lot of small issues pushing people off, and then a few huge ones. Small things like site performance degrading as they scale back server, and worse support as they slash labor. Then the larger things will truly push people, like a price hike, change in monetization models, or failing to honor any deals made pre-bending spoons. Or even a huge data leak. Those things, big and little, break the foundation of a trusted business.
So many chains to keep up with. There wasn't really a lesson here. Just "Vimeo is not Evernote"?
My wider lesson unrelated to this chain is that US at will employnent sucks and we need to overhaul it. You don't create a trusting career by treating employees like toys to discard.
2. This is like saying "Asia has better rice because it employs more rice makers than the US". Besides being dubious in truth, that also isn't a good measurement for "enrichment" nor "quality". It's just saying that there's more money being put into the industry in this country than another counry's industry.
3. Even if I took this as truth, this didnt happen overnight. I worry about how Gen Z will be "enriched" in this model, and saying "but millenials/Gen X had great careers" is condescending to Gen Z at best. The rules changed over their careers, and we're still using the old rules to talk about how good we have it. Or had it. Gen Z doesn't know what those rules are anymore, so there's nothing to fall in love with.
No one wonders why loyalty is dead.
>No one wonders why loyalty is dead.
I see you missed the recent narrative of "Gen Z is lazy" and "most managers avoid hiring Gen Z" out there. I assure you many managers are baffled, bit blame the (relative) children instead of seeing how work culture has shifted since they were that age
Guys, I totally get it. Nobody likes to be laid off. I was laid off a month ago. But the money that is being soaked up by employee who are, again, stipulated to be not doing anything productive goes somewhere else. This may be a tragedy for an individual person, but it's good for society overall.
I did not "reinforce" the exception of what you said, I pointed out an error in your framing that necessitates coming at the analysis a different way. The context of what you're responding to is a company laying people off - reducing the number of choices in the employment market. We're not talking about the dynamic of someone creating a new business and having to emphasize one or the other, but rather an existing business where the owners are choosing to change things to be closer to one end of the spectrum between the two.
Adding extra nodes to an existing horizontally-scalable system (that has already been operating and has its bugs ironed out) is much easier.
People that are being squeezed by PE have less money to wield as political influence partially because they are being squeezed by PE.
The ones doing the squeezing are ok with that.
The people who are uninvolved, who fit into neither box, don't care enough or don't have enough money they're able & willing to part with. They also don't have fancy accountants or corporate accounts to expense it to.
This is the local optimum.
That lack of care is going to cost us all in ways we'll be forced to care about one day. Not necessarily for Vimeo, but definitely much more important things that people are ignorant or actively turning their heads against.
> They also don't have fancy accountants or corporate accounts to expense it to.
We call them our represenatives. We expense it to them with our votes (and literal expenses with tax dollars we are forced to part with). But votes require care and we're back in the loop.
By then, it'll be too late. The ruling party has a monopoly on violence, perpetrated by sycophants and enabled by wide-area surveillance analyzed by AI. We're a matter of months (maybe years) away from kill-drones being used with impunity against the populace.
> We expense it to them with our votes
Gerrymandering by the ruling party has ensured that your vote won't make a difference. Even if it did, election interference by the ruling party has ensured that it won't be counted. Even if it is, the ruling party has expressed its wishes to cancel elections, and who's gonna stop them when they have all the kill-drones and thugs, paid out of a bottomless bank account?
I won't repeat the same usual solutions again, but I'll mention one thing that already exists: the WARN act. The spirit of this is good, to give employees a 3 month buffer of when their job is ending. But it's clearly abused at worst, and not enforced at best. It's not as good as other countries' worker rights, but ot exists today to be looked at. In addition, severance can help to. This is standard, but even the "generous packages" in the US tend to be on the lower end of what other countries need to do.
Basically, it shouldn't be a drop dead easy decision for a company to mass layoff and have the workers surprised at the facs. It needs to both be slowed down and give immediate short term costs. That's a start of "kinda actual change" to strive for.
1. Bending Spoons model is known, everybody knows as soon it's announced
2. The company belongs to the shareholders and founders. It's them making the decision.
the owners didn't have shares in their company? they weren't paid for their labor? They only get money when they sell off and are working for free out of a labor of love until then?
>The argument by other people was that the sale shouldn't happen...
I guess it wasn't in this chain, but my argument was focused on the human element. I don't care if the owners got a trillion dollars and never shared. I don't think it's right to be able to lie to your employees only to let them go with no notice a few months later.
You're never going to convince me that "it's good for society" to prop up livliehoods on convinient lies and instability. That's how suddenly everyone starts talking less about Star Trek and more about Luigi.
The shares in the company convert to money when they sell the company. They're not intrinsically valuable.
Look, lying is bad sure. It would be better if they had been honest in November. But nobody here is actually arguing that the layoffs are fine, they're only mad about the comms.
If they are founders and they chose to leave, that's their freedom to do so. Just like any employee you don't get a salary for leaving just because you used to work there.
if you're an owner who bought in, you already got your money. You got a steady profit from sitting there and operating a business at best. At worst you made a bad business decision. You're not owed profit.
So yes, they are both paid, or gambled and had a bad opportunity cost. That's life. I don't see it as justification for them to "deserve" their sale, even if it's legally their call.
>But nobody here is actually arguing that the layoffs are fine, they're only mad about the comms.
Many people in this discussion are in fact arguing that the layoffs are fine. to paraphrase a few
> "It's obvious if you know who Bending Spoons is"
> "That's at-will employment, it's fair"
> "they have to run a business"
> "most of the owners are not drawing any salary"
So yes, even if it's against their best interests there are still so many beholden to defend billionaires. And that is why I asset seemingly obvious points. What's your argument here again?
Those rights need to show up in company balance sheets as a contingent liability.
That applies when the company is acquired as well.
The employment of a company need to be either paid out to employees at net present value, or need to be transferred to the new owners as part of the sale.
In the US, with employment sponsored health insurance, it's even more important.
2. And I'm saying a cooperation shouldn't be able to make reckless decisions like "lets lay off most of our workforce" withotu reprecussions. Like most civilized societies outside the US do. Thats's what the bulk of my previous response is about.
What are you arguing? That you can do anything you want to something you own? That's not true for nearly anything in modern society.
Yeah, and also just like any employee, you don't get the benefits of ownership just because you were paid to work on something.