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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons

Interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476

> In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote.[19] The acquisition was concluded in January 2023.[20] In July 2023, Evernote laid off all of its existing staff and announced it would relocate to Europe to be closer to Bending Spoons' headquarters.[21]

Damn.

How does that possibly work? How do they continue with zero of the staff?

They replaced them with staff in Italy. Bending Spoons is an Italian (Milan) company.

They wanted the product not the developers.

Simple. They get new staff whose job is to shove intrusive surveillance and advertising into the product and push out an update, they don't have to support or develop the product.

The company bought the product to bilk money out of its existing users. They throw the product in the bin once all the users have gone.

Sadly, some ants get infected with corydceps. Tragic for the ant, but the other ants get it the fuck away from their colony, because they don't want to be next.

As an Evernote user, Bending Spoons has been iterating fast over the past couple years to improve the product. It’s much better than it used to be.

What the value prop of continuing to use Evernote versus other newer solutions like Notion? Interested to hear from someone still using the product

Notion is more than I need. 99% of the time I just need to write something down for later.

I have tried them all, and ended up with a fileofax rip off, and a box of index cards!

Transitional severance agreements to have the current staff transfer operations to new staff.

This is exactly how European companies do when they acquire American ones, especially "Tech" companies that have well-paid technical staff. You can hire in Eastern Europe for far less, and can hire in Western Europe for still a significant bargain compared to what engineers and associated people make in California - plus, dealing with an 8+ hour time difference is brutal compared to keeping it all in Europe.

A friend I know is going through such an acquisition, funny thing is it's a European company acquiring his, but owned by an American PE firm. The American PE firm knows that cutting-edge tech is developed by expensive engineers on the West Coast, but when it's time to milk a more mature company for cash flow, you want cheaper European staff.

Almost anywhere in America is also cheaper than California.

Yep. The NYC area is one exception. I've worked at a company that was acquired, and they laid off quite a few of the NYC-area employees. Rumor had it that some of them were making more than their managers, and their managers' managers.

> Rumor had it that some of them were making more than their managers, and their managers' managers.

So on par with actual value created.

It's pretty wild to describe Italy as 'Eastern Europe'

They didn't describe Italy as Eastern Europe, they said you can hire in Eastern Europe for far less. Eg. you can do that from Italy and keep people in the same timezone and relatively close by.

Someone wrote about Bending Spoons' history and playbook:

https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma...

I enjoyed this part:

No On-Call Rotations: Bending Spoons aims to build systems so reliable that they eliminate the need for on-call rotations. This is unusual in the tech industry, where on-call duties are standard to promptly address system issues.

For most of their products, they have no on-call schemes at all. Engineers are encouraged to think through all corner cases to ensure robustness, knowing there is no fallback like an on-call team.

I wonder if that's got lost in translation somewhere. I can understand not having on-call operations teams (an anti-pattern) but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Unless they mean to say its part of all devs job expectations and not a paid extra.

I don't want to imply Bending Spoons is this awesome, as I know nothing much about them (except that they named their company after a weird scam, lol), but there's a pretty reasonable principle that might apply here:

If our service goes down for any reason, uh... wait until Monday afternoon, then try again. (Sorry!)

Like, who would die if AOL was down for 36 hours?

I think they’re actually named after the scene in the matrix where the little kid (and then Neo) can bend the spoon with their mind.

Oh! LOL that's admittedly cooler than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Geller

I've heard this name on the radio in GTA2 for years but I never looked up the name. Fascinating.

Considering AOL's business model was to keep old folks paying for dialup, and once they moved off of dialup continue paying for access to the AOL portal, a good chunk of their user base may already be dead and still being billed.

>but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely.

Bending Spoons is Milan based and most of Europe has very strong right-to-disconnect laws. It's not really uncommon here to not have anyone on call unless you're some big multinational.

All companies I've worked at had (paid) on-call set up. The right to disconnect isn't incompatible with business needs and the law contemplates it. Also, nurses and doctors do it too.

Yeah that law is really about not taking advantage of low paid-by-the-hour employees vs high paid salaried.

But give people any excuse and they'll run with it.

In the UK custom has always been to require a standard opt-out to be signed as part of hiring process.

On calls are also the norm in Europe.

We get time and money compensation for that.

Seems reasonable if they're putting most of their acquisitions into maintenance mode. In my experience the vast majority of outages are caused by bad deploys of new code or configuration.

Is anyone surprised that you can build stuff that require no support for years? I do, know people that do. Thinking about robustness is the default path.

holy smokes this is worse for consumers and employees than being bought by PE

I'm still waiting to see how they complete destroy Vimeo they just bought.

oh wow and they got Vimeo and WeTransfer too!?

And Komoot and Meetup, and of course Evernote.

Relevant coverage of some acquisitions doesn’t bode well for AOL staff:

1. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-lay-off-75-185...

2. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/route-planning-app-kom...

So companies go there to die

Another way to look at it: When a companies bubble bursts, when people realise that it is just a note taking app (or whatever), and that its never going to grow 10x again, VC investors want shot of it.

Without a constant stream of new investment, the company simply can't afford to be loaded up with SV staff producing features that nobody will pay for. Bending Spoons change the business model to 'normal business'. They move to much cheaper European staff, stop work on nonsense 'features', concentrate instead on servicing their existing customers with a stable platform and well thought out incremental advances.

So they take businesses that are dying because nobody will give them free money any more, and make them into real sustainable businesses that can stand on their own two feet?

Nono, this is a pro-scammer point of view. They absolutely go for a minimal upkeep, maximum dark patterns strategy.

It's not about sustainable business, they are literally enshittifiers. I know quite a few employees, they literally debate whether a UX change to make a X to close a payment modal almost invisible is "too evil or not" and they go with it anyway.

So, we're not kind to companies who ruin their product for a short-term revenue increase then why all this positive spin for a company whose business model is to do exactly and only that?

And clearly they're hard at work whitewashing that page... check the Talk Page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bending_Spoons

Bending Spoons is correctly following the [[Wikipedia:Conflict of interest]] process. They are pointing out information which could be improved and are requesting an independent party confirm they are correct. They disclosed their conflict. All companies are allowed and encouraged to do this. Not many do.

Source: I'm a wikipedia editor unaffiliated with bending spoons.

Edit: I see another complaint about IP editing. I am looking into this.

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