Bending Spoons is a company that acquires SaaS companies/products that are not growing or losing users but have a well-known brand and customers who stick around.<p>The execs at Bending Spoon buy these SaaS services on the cheap, cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.<p>Rinse and repeat. The goal is to generate the highest possible rate of return on invested capital in a law-abiding manner.
I had a vendor acquired by one of these outfits.<p>I looked through their assets and it clicked: “this is where software goes to die”
Consolidating stagnant or dying SaaS offerings makes sense, but it'd be nice if there were a version of this that's a better steward of the companies.
If that was good business then presumably the brand could have done it at some point during their long slow decline?
Arguably, they're a better choice for customers than a shutdown.<p>I mean, they're at least keeping the service alive for as long as possible.
So like Delphi?
That's a short term business model if I have ever seen one.<p>"customers who stick around." is anthesis to mid- to long-term customer loyalty when you do "jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible"
This is the Prospectus they used for the IPO which goes into all the details about them<p><a href="https://bendingspoons.com/documents/financials/2026/Bending%20Spoons%20Final%20Prospectus%20As%20Filed.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://bendingspoons.com/documents/financials/2026/Bending%...</a>
Is it not just a private equity fund masquerading as a tech firm?
Bingo.<p>My wife brought them to my attention recently because she heard about them from Scott Galloway, who was speaking highly of Bending Spoons on one of his podcasts. As she was explaining this to me, I said "It's just PE."<p>They must be doing some good PR/marketing, because, for some reason, "PE" isn't the first thing entering a lot of minds about Bending Spoons right now.
BendingSpoon isn't PE because they are <i>not</i> attempting a restructure to then exit out of the asset within a defined time period.<p>When BendingSpoon or IAC acquired an asset, it's meant to be held by them in order to augment their existing portfolio.<p>M&A isn't the hallmark of PE - restructuring an asset in order to exit out of it at a profit is.<p>The classic PE monetization strategy is to acquire an underperforming asset, restructure said asset, and then exit the asset at around 20% IRR.<p>BendingSpoons on the other hand is a holding company that is acquiring and consolidating stagnant but large SaaS platforms into a single mega-platform.<p>The economics are different as are the operational and organizational structures.
Isn't a PE firm going public just an admission of failure, and an attempt to make their private investors whole on the public market's back?
Isn't it just a different form of private capital designed for the later stage of a tech company? I'm not saying its good, but I am not remotely surprised by tech's transition from growth/disruption/hiring to cost-cutting/M&A.
It is. They are also enshittifying Komoot and EventBrite. Also by default they acquire a company and fire all staff within the week. Fuck Bending Spoons.
Pre-bending spoons Komoot was a beautiful app and community.
You could operate it one handed with your brightness turned all the way down and easily get the info you needed.
Now when I pull it up mid ride to route home I have to click through multiple upgrade to premium pop ups with tiny exit crosses.
All good things etc etc
is firing staff after acquisition inherently bad if it's the same staff/management that led to the app being devalued and losing users in the first place though
I wish they'd buy Spotify...<p>Keep one SRE to keep the servers running, one guy to do security updates to the app, and the team that acquires rights to music.
Why do you think that a platform with so many customers as to be industry defining, with dozens of interface options, with a massive feature set, with a global footprint and basically flawless uptime requirements, could be kept running by two guys?
You need at least 3 devs to keep adding popups to the app with offers, upgrades, and other "related content".
Whatever they are, they let Evernote devolve into a buggy pile of crap -- especially on Android. I migrated to Joplin, stopped paying for my obscenely expensive plan ($$$ per year) and haven't looked back.
Very off topic - Just 2 days of for fun I tried to login to AOL.com with my username and PW from 1995. (Same username as on HN in fact)<p>It worked! That is one hell of a series of good DB migrations.<p>Sadly I was immediately forced to change my password. Still, 31 years is a good run for a password.
I was reading a bit about their story, it feels like they managed to succeed by turning overly funded (and by then devalued) software products and restructuring them for long term profitability as they are not bounded to the classic 10 year time horizon of private funds. Wondering if we will see more plays like this as alternatives to traditional private equity and as fallback option for VC backed companies that bursted.
From the acquisitions I've followed, what they do is firing 80% of the staff the next week after the acquisition, raise prices, and put the app in maintenance mode. I don't know if they've done something more sensible elsewhere, but they mostly do wealth extraction.
They do claim to be shipping new features to their acquired apps. Look at their website. It's got lists of such things.<p>The steelman case for this is something like, mature apps that found product market fit are often over-staffed and doing a lot of duplicated work. You could get five of them together and consolidate their infrastructure/code to reduce costs, and have generalist devs who can work on any of those codebases. Then you need fewer people.<p>So this isn't an irrational thing to do. It's commonly done by firms like Google or Meta where they buy a small company and then rewrite it onto their own infrastructure to reduce costs. Sometimes the engineers are reallocated to other projects, or things drift and there are eventually layoffs. Google bought DoubleClick and then laid off 50% of the staff! Twitter didn't consolidate products but was clearly overstaffed, nobody imagines that Twitter was unique.<p>So the bull case for this is that it's finding efficiencies. The apps may not be the shiniest hottest things anymore, but they can still live on and be maintained if they're run more efficiently as a business. And yes this may involve layoffs or price rises, as often software startups hopelessly misprice their product and prefer to burn VC money than lose users or colleagues. Managers who aren't emotionally attached to the product or company can correct this, putting it on a long term stable path. That may suck for the user but probably sucks less than the company being under, or being acquihired and the product totally shut down.
While I agree that their specific approach sucks, I do wish more companies would declare products as "done" and stop messing with the UI and changing features every quarter, and just go into a long-term stability mode.
I'm a bit salty due to what they've done to the Komoot team. Komoot was (and still is) a great app for planing your outdoor activities.<p>After acquiring Komoot, they fired everybody. Watching their goodbye video is a bit heartbreaking: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLJkK4Wn1HI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLJkK4Wn1HI</a>
Whenever I see Vimeo in a headline, it reminds me of my lack of foresight. In college, the creator of Vimeo was in my friend group. I went to his on-campus apartment to pick him up for a party once. He showed me this "video sharing website" that he was working on. Its title was an anagram of "movie." This was in 1999. Digitized video was barely a thing. I looked at it, didn't understand how it would be useful, and assumed it was another one of his eccentric creative outlets that would go nowhere. A few years later, he was a multimillionaire and I was not.
Related:<p><i>Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446310">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446310</a><p>Weird Italian loveletter about the IPO:<p><i>Bending Spoons just went public: Italy won the World Cup</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48773549">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48773549</a><p>Some history from only the past year in discussions:<p><i>Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302</a><p><i>AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45749161">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45749161</a><p><i>Bending Spoons Acquires Eventbrite</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124673">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124673</a><p><i>Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699</a>
Remarkably on-brand, named after the signature trick of a well-known charlatan.
Down 13% in the last 5 days.
AOL Time Warner was the peak of the original dot com bubble.
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