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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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