Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B
investors.vimeo.com
investors.vimeo.com
Are they buying the products or users - they laid off the entire staff of Filmic after purchasing them.
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.
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.
It looks like next generation private equity, and my guess is more houses will start copying them.
Isn't this the same that Broadcom does on a larger scale?
But its basically an admission that the business is in its extraction phase and will no longer innovate.
Relevant quote:
Private Equity is engaged in buying artisanal semi-businesses, turning them into businesses, propping up the numbers while destroying them —then, hopefully, destroying itself.
What it means is that they have the top Italian talent, they pay them a very good italian salary that is still way lower than an american one.
So basically they have very capable people working on their engineering, at a fraction of the cost of the original staff.
That’s just PR to get students to apply and pay them peanuts. History shows that they acquire businesses, make them worst and destroy them.
"improve" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Evernote and meetup are in worse states post BS. Shipping features and shipping value is very different in this landscape.
>It looks like next generation private equity, and my guess is more houses will start copying them.
Yes, that's why I hate it.
I guess it's mostly a private equity play—usually after being acquired by BS, prices go up, paywalls go everywhere, companies get "more efficient" (aka layoffs) and the product stops evolving.
I wish there was a better outcome for beloved brands with good products that won't experience any more hypergrowth.
In case anyone else needed a reminder.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35080777
https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/montefiore-investment...
https://news.gandi.net/en/2019/02/futureofgandi-the-adventur...
In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote.[16] The acquisition was concluded in January 2023.[17] In July 2023, Evernote laid off all of its existing staff."
Oh great.
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?
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?
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.
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.
According to layoffs.fyi there were also layoffs in 2022 and 2023.
It makes sense. Without ad revenue or premium subscriptions, there's no viable way to pay for creators in the say way a proper "indie youtube". In addition, many creators who post on Vimeo very much did not want their content to be publicly viewable. That was a feature.
* 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.