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

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.

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?

Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302

I just realized that video is old enough to vote.

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.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454175

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.

- 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.