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

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.

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.

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.

(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.

Bending Spoons doesn’t care (yet), but they’re not at the point where stuff has proven unsustainable

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.)

Uri Geller being a … well, this is a family site. Finish that yourself.

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.

How does that fit with expensive hiring sprees? If anything I’d expect them to be continuously shedding absorbed employees.

- 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.

https://vimeo.com/86146321?share=copy&fl=cl&fe=ci

I suppose this is a matter of definitions. What do you define as a "business?"

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.