Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

Bending Spoons’ Acquisition Playbook

• Pattern described across Evernote, WeTransfer, Meetup, Komoot, Harvest, AOL, and now Vimeo:
  • Buy mature, branded products with sticky user bases and modest but reliable revenue.
  • Lay off most existing staff, especially higher-paid US teams; centralize engineering on a small, well-paid European (often Italian) core.
  • Migrate infrastructure to their shared stack, minimize new feature development, focus on maintenance.
  • Raise prices and tighten free tiers to maximize cashflow over remaining product lifetime.

Is This Efficient or Predatory?

• Supporters frame it as:
  • Classic private equity for software: stop loss-making “growth” experiments, cut bloat, run a feature-complete product profitably.
  • Analogous to construction: you don’t keep the full building crew once the house is built; you just need a maintenance team.
  • Sometimes better than bankruptcy: product continues to exist, customers retain service, investors get returns.
• Critics call it:
  • “Vulture capitalism” / “butt cigar investing”: strip-mine companies, enshittify products, and leave users and workers worse off.
  • A debt-fueled leveraged-buyout pattern that loads the company with debt, funnels cash to owners/consultants, and lets it die slowly.
  • Socially harmful, yet hard to regulate and politically well-protected.

Impact on Products and Users

• Reported effects on prior acquisitions:
  • Evernote: heavy layoffs, feature removals, big price hikes, perceived stagnation and bugs; some long-time users finally quit.
  • Meetup, Komoot, WeTransfer, Harvest: mixed technical improvements but worse search/UX for some, aggressive monetization, strong price resentment.
• Vimeo-specific concerns:
  • OTT/whitelabel customers (Criterion Channel, Dropout, various niche streamers) may be locked in with high switching costs and fear rising bills and product rot.
  • Smaller creators and long-time subscribers are already cancelling or exporting archives, expecting price hikes and reduced support.

Labor, Geography, and Employment Norms

• Strong anger at mass layoffs shortly after “excited partnership” messaging; many see this as outright dishonesty even if legally standard.
• Debate over US at-will employment vs. stronger European protections; some argue US engineers were always on “borrowed time.”
• Discomfort with replacing US staff with cheaper-but-skilled European teams; parallels drawn with offshoring debates and broader erosion of loyalty.

Broader Reflections and Responses

• Ongoing argument over whether software should ever be “finished” vs. needing perpetual evolution to stay competitive.
• Growing distrust of SaaS and subscriptions: lock-in plus owner changes make users feel bait-and-switched.
• Some are moving to self-hosting, Bunny Stream, Peertube, or new entrants (e.g., framerate) rather than risk future PE-driven “enshittification.”