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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

Can someone in the know explain Bending Spoons?

I routinely see job postings by them in my local dev circles, significantly above market rate, and the offers seem to keep reappearing forever. Their site namedrops known apps and services like wetransfer but otherwise seems to be just buzzwords.

Are they VC buying existing IPs? What is exactly going on?

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Hundreds of millions in revenue and three acquisitions in 2024 — what’s behind Bending Spoons’ success? | Sifted https://sifted.eu/articles/bending-spoons-italy-startup-ipo

So private equity is behind it.

Yeah, but AFAIK that means people buying companies, leaving them with a skeleton crew and milking the remaining users as long as possible.

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

I guess that companies which get bought might be a bit "overstaffed" from the startup phase or because planned further development. If one removes this staff, you need less people to minimally maintain a running app. But itcs just a guess, you'll loose knowhow too, when drastically reducing your staff.

They hire at higher pay because they want people that can/are willing to do the job of multiple people

And often at places cheaper than US talent, so that above average pay in the EU comes out to below average pay overall.

Being a part of that skeleton crew likely involves different skills to building the product in the first place.

I describe Bending Spoons as an Italian private equity company. The CEO openly admits that the business model involves buying companies and trying to squeeze as much profit out of them.

They are private equity, which is where your company ends up if they fail to 10x and/or go public

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