Bending 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.
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
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.
A 2024 podcast with Bending Spoons about their acquisitions approach and company culture: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
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.
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.
> [...] 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.
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.
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.