Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B
investors.vimeo.comBending Spoons also bought Evernote. They seem to have a portfolio of "used-to-be-the-thing" products.
Are they buying the products or users - they laid off the entire staff of Filmic after purchasing them.
Generally they buy companies which have been pumped with steroids (VC money). That have a good product with active customers but have unsustainable cash flow. They cut expenses, whether thats moving labor from silicon valley to europe, cloud hosting costs out of aws, etc.
Nothing new - happens in every other industry all the time. Usually companies get themselves into some sort of cult thinking so that only someone from outside can make the turnaround work. Nobody already working at a company and promoted from within is going to suggest moving the all the staff to Milan for example.
Their strategy basically seems to be just to buy the brand and then rewrite the code
Doesn't necessarily seem like the worst thing in the world - especially if you can get some vertical integrations and already have a bunch of active users.
Not mentioned in the article is a year ago Bending Spoons acquired Brightcove, (a cloud platform that helps businesses manage and monetize video content), in an all-cash deal valued at $233 million.
So this seems to be something of a strategy being played out.
Vimeo was previously valued at $2.75B.
I'd love to know where they're getting the cash from. Someone must be financing them.
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.
Also, their core development team is in Italy and they are considered by many the best company in the IT space in Italy.
What it means is that they have the top Italian talent, they pay them a very good italian salary that is still way lower than an american one.
So basically they have very capable people working on their engineering, at a fraction of the cost of the original staff.
> Also, their core development team is in Italy and they are considered by many the best company in the IT space in Italy.
That’s just PR to get students to apply and pay them peanuts. History shows that they acquire businesses, make them worst and destroy them.
I think that’s always the thing with any of these things. The companies private equity or Bending Spoons acquire are frequently inefficient, bloated and not the best-run businesses.
But its basically an admission that the business is in its extraction phase and will no longer innovate.
Relevant quote:
Private Equity is engaged in buying artisanal semi-businesses, turning them into businesses, propping up the numbers while destroying them —then, hopefully, destroying itself.
Can you provide proof that products ship features faster after they lay off their teams?
> It looks like next generation private equity, and my guess is more houses will start copying them.
Isn't this the same that Broadcom does on a larger scale?
As a Vimeo OTT customer, this is producing mixed emotions.
>They consistently rewrite the code of their acquisitions with a tiny team, fire everybody and are able to maintain and improve the product.
"improve" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Evernote and meetup are in worse states post BS. Shipping features and shipping value is very different in this landscape.
>It looks like next generation private equity, and my guess is more houses will start copying them.
Yes, that's why I hate it.
Citation needed for “improve the product”
Oh no, this is undoubtedly going to be terrible for the companies that built their OTT platforms on Vimeo. E.g. Dropout.tv.
Could you help me understand what Vimeo helps with that's specifically helpful with OTT?
They do whitelabel OTT. https://vimeo.com/ott
Neat, thanks. Didn't come across that link in their menu.
Bending Spoons has recently been buying aging SaaS companies that have established PMF and customers and decent brands (Evernote, Komoot, WeTransfer, Meetup).
I guess it's mostly a private equity play—usually after being acquired by BS, prices go up, paywalls go everywhere, companies get "more efficient" (aka layoffs) and the product stops evolving.
I wish there was a better outcome for beloved brands with good products that won't experience any more hypergrowth.
I will transfer my remaining domains from Gandi this month.
In case anyone else needed a reminder.
Wait why. I'm out of the loop.
The founders decided "it had been a wild ride but all journeys come to an end" so the prices and upselling now keep increasing so that the private equity that bought them can see fast short-term gains (the only thing they care about).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35080777
https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/montefiore-investment...
https://news.gandi.net/en/2019/02/futureofgandi-the-adventur...
Thanks, transferring out now.
For Meetup at least the product did evolved after it got aquired.
From my perspective, it "evolved" to force you to have an account, to aggressively kick off organizers who can't pay for the rising prices of posting, and the search algorithm got worse. I could barely find meetups I knew existed with a direct query.
"In September 2022, Bending Spoons acquired FiLMiC[13] and converted its video-recording app FiLMiC Pro to a subscription revenue model.[14] In December 2023, the original FiLMiC team were laid off, and development of FiLMiC Pro was continued in-house by Bending Spoons.[15]
In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote.[16] The acquisition was concluded in January 2023.[17] In July 2023, Evernote laid off all of its existing staff."
Oh great.
Vimeo worth this much is incredible.
Their corporate video hosting is great for platform hosting, but guess I need to find a new provider for next years renewal.
Bending Spoons usually doubles-down on the core of the product. They buy companies because the product is good not because they want to acquihire developers to put onto something else.
> [...] They buy companies because the product is good [...]
It was already mentioned above: Bending Spoons bought Evernote. That is a product that has become entirely stale and barely usable, unable to compete with something like Obsidian, a tool made by a company with fewer than 50 employees.
Perhaps it's not just about good products alone. I imagine that Evernote had a pretty stubborn subscriber base at that point. ...and they had no more socks to sell.
I wonder if they're successful in converting free users to paid users after they gate all useful product features behind a paywall.
I was always a light user of most products they bought and their changes just pushed me away. But as a light user, I wasn't planning to pay a subscription anyway, so going away might just release them the resources used to keep a user that generates no revenue.
However, it looks to me that the communities they buy thrive on free users. If the free users go away, will the community and usage remain? For how long will they be able to make money out of those communities until there aren't any users left?
Good question. My gut is people over value the importance of free users. Especially so if there's good business or corporate sales for the product. Free users are not zero cost on either infra or product/dev/support time.
Perhaps this is Bending Spoons real business model - understand which customers bring you revenue and pivot to product development for them not the free loaders. Sounds obvious but there aren't too many software product companies actually do it. Takes a lot of discipline as an org - generally orgs listen to the loudest voices which are most likely the ones not bringing any revenue.
Companies like Microsoft show that you can coast on a successful product for many decades and still be incredibly financially successful. And the world is a lot bigger place than selling MS Word & Excel in the 2000s.
Have you considered Cloudflare R2? It seems like that's one of the very few unmetered-bandwidth file hosting providers?
It doesn't do HLS out of the box (it's just S3-compatible storage, unlike the pricier Cloudflare Stream). But you should be able to do the transcoding yourself: https://github.com/wesbos/R2-video-streaming
Or what are some other good options for Vimeo replacements?
Or consider Tigris object storage service.
This comes after layoffs of ~10% of the company a week ago: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/phmoyer_today-we-announced-th...
According to layoffs.fyi there were also layoffs in 2022 and 2023.
A 2024 podcast with Bending Spoons about their acquisitions approach and company culture: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
That's a way higher evaluation than I thought after their pivot. I remember in 2012 when I had hope they would succeed as a YouTube competitor. Their staff videos were insanely funny. Sad to see I end like this.
Funny that I see this while searching for this story here: https://ymcinema.com/2022/03/17/vimeo-we-are-a-b2b-solution-...
It makes sense. Without ad revenue or premium subscriptions, there's no viable way to pay for creators in the say way a proper "indie youtube". In addition, many creators who post on Vimeo very much did not want their content to be publicly viewable. That was a feature.
Also in early 2024 Bending Spoons acquired the IP of Mosaic Group, which owned Apalon Apps. The buyer did not need either the Mosaic Group or the Apalon teams, both were laid off
oh the monsters that killed evernote
Ah yes, Bending Spoons. The company known for:
* Acquiring Evernote, laying off most of its staff and raising prices.
* Acquiring WeTransfer, announcing 75% layoffs and pissing off their most loyal users by changing their T&Cs to grant themselves license to use their content for AI training purposes.
* Acquiring Filmic and laying off all their staff.
* Acquiring Komoot and laying off most of its staff.
Now would be a good time to poach some Vimeo engineers.
Oh sweet, does this mean my worthless VEMO is worth something now?