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.
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.
They do claim to be shipping new features to their acquired apps. Look at their website. It's got lists of such things.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
The classic PE strategy is to buy declining buy well known brands, borrow vast sums of money in the brands name, pay the PE firm huge consulting fees, and then bankrupt the acquired business.
Which isn't exactly what they seem to be doing but also isn't that far off.
Scotts point was that these brands have already declined, and that the only thing left is a very strongly loyal subscription base. That perked my ears up for sure.
The classic PE monetization strategy is to take an invisible asset and mine it: The one we all see is buying a quality brandname and mining it into oblivion. Plus various accountancy tricks to move the gold into the PE coffers.
In your example "very strongly loyal subscription base" is the offsheet or goodwill asset.
Not really. They dramatically overhaul the products. Bloated staff are cut, old tech-debt-saddled systems are thrown out and rewritten. In some cases they basically just keep the brand and the database and rebuild the product around that, in a smaller and leaner manner.
That is the PE playbook - buy ok company, revamp things to make it more efficient and profitable. The main difference seems to be whether the owners sell the revamped company or not.
It doesn’t look like they’re planning to sell these businesses, they’re essentially liquidating the reputation and goodwill of the prior company because they think they can squeeze the purchase price plus a profit from the dying husk before they lose all customers.
They squeeze the rest of the toothpaste out the tube and hope they get more than they paid for it.
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’s executing a private equity (and conglomerate) strategy out of permanent capital. That makes it more similar to Berkshire Hathaway than a private equity fund.
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.
Bending Spoons is a company that acquires SaaS companies/products that are not growing or losing users but have a known brand.
Bending Spoons buys these SaaS services on the cheap, cuts costs, jacks up prices, and milks remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.
That's a short term business model if I have ever seen one.
"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"
eh, i backed up in a few places a bit ago. the actual concern is BS charged me when they shouldn't have (5x the former price, annual), won't refund, and turned off the account anyway. and PayPal seems to have an open marriage with PCI-DSS/SOC2 right now
> Don't forget "slash the workforce, ensuring that the product will get worse over time"
Not commenting on Bending Spoons. But in general, a company built to grow is overprovisioned for one being put into maintenance mode. If you're growing, sure, let the designers change the UI every release. If you're trying not to lose customers, don't do that. Which means you don't need a crack team of in-house designers.
I agree that a company in growth mode needs more employees than one in maintenance mode. But wouldn't the owners already have cut unnecessary employees before selling out to PE or similar?
> wouldn't the owners already have cut unnecessary employees before selling out to PE or similar?
Usually not. It's emotionally difficult. And knowing what you need and don't need to cut (versus transition or aggregate with your conglomerate's administrative layer) is its own expertise. If you had that, you wouldn't need Bending Spoons or whomever.
> After the acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but a passive owner, making changes to the products’ user experience and features, as well as to the underlying tech; monetization strategy, including pricing; and team organization, including headcount.
> While this focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons claims a key difference: It “aims to hold forever, and has never sold an acquired business.” It is building a live portfolio, not presiding over a tech graveyard.
I don’t feel like the article was sortballing the company. They brought up things like the WeTransfer founder criticizing Bending Spoons’ decisions.
As for my opinion on the company, I don’t really see anything particularly negative about it. I think the fact that they’ve never sold an acquired business is a rather admirable trait.
In a way, they’re doing something that may not have been possible without this style of intervention, which is to keep companies/products that would have otherwise disappeared viable.
For a company like Evernote it wouldn’t be better for their customers if the company liquidated. There are worse things that can happen to your service provider of choice than price increases or worse customer support.
> There are four stages to any successful companies lifecycle
I usually say in interviews that my preferred time to join a company is at the end of stage 1 (start up) and the start of phase 2 (organizing).
Nothing makes me happier than to be told "Hey, we got this up and running and it's a mess. Now we need someone to turn this into a system that is easy to modify and maintain."
There's skill in being able to manage a declining or non-growth business in a way that still pleases your consumer base (and therefore reduces your attrition rate). Not everyone does it well.
There's nothing wrong with it per se. Plenty of great products were ruined because management refused to accept that it wasn't in a growth market anymore and should be run for minimising customer losses, not gaining substantial new ones. That, in turn, means laying off a lot of the design, engineering and sales talent that was necessary for the previous configuration.
You can also be a bastard and jack up prices while cutting e.g. customer service. (Though absent new major revisions, service costs should go down.) But I'd argue we need, in tech, more of this strategy of calm wind-down than the everything-must-be-growth mindset.
> 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.
If they are such stable long term SaaS businesses who aren’t losing customers, why are they selling to bending spoons?
because there's no joy in managing a declining company, especially when you made it grow in the past, and probably get enough money from the deal that you don't need to care anymore.
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.
They keep popular but unprofitable products that would otherwise be turned down alive.
There are Victorian-horror-esque costs to that, but it's still better that those projects be alive but enshittified than completely dead (If you disagree, you can just cancel your subscription, after all)
Are there any companies/products that got better after acquisition by these guys? I feel like the only times I've heard about them is when people are griping about how they're making stuff worse.
Contrary opinion I guess but they've modernized the two services I use that they've acquired: Evernote and Harvest. I was already a paying multi-seat customer of both so maybe the worst price increases didn't happen to me (yet); I suspect Bending Spoons has a real animosity to free/near-free tiers. But I certainly might get bitten soon.
I use Evernote for paperless household management (shared travel itineraries, scans of paperwork, saved recipes, etc.) as well as my personal notes. It was under Bending Spoons that they finally landed multi-player realtime collaboration, which ended a decade of annoying sync conflicts and bugs, at least for me. Every month there are new little features like @mention to include a linked note, that bring more parity with platforms like Notion – the kind of core improvements the original owners had completely lost focus on. And they record a monthly video evangelizing the new features. Would something newer be better? Who knows but I'm happy not to switch, I have thousands of notes in there which I access from laptop, desktop, phone, and web. Bouncing from one platform to another is not my favorite way to spend time. I'm quite happy with how they've managed a mature platform.
Harvest also started adding new features for the first time in many years. Their customer support did turn into a baffling AI bot for a while but eventually a human replied and apologized. Harvest is also a mature platform that just needs to not self-destruct in order to serve my needs; but small new features have been welcome.
Both these platforms have something in common too: Good old fashioned REST API's. I like to scan directly to Evernote from my Brother MFC printer/scanner. We log time into Harvest from a variety of other platforms and apps. I'm happy to have these workflows maintained. I might submit that this kind of specialized, deep-pocketed owner is the best-case scenario for long-term preservation of mature REST-based SaaS small businesses. Otherwise they get bought by Google, or dwindle when the founders move on?
I wonder if "loyal user base" just means people who feel locked in, or somehow don't know any better. I can't imagine another reason for the "loyalty".
Well I want to launch Straightening Forks: the B-Corp that hires experienced developers, designers, and other digital folks and instead of buying dying digital estate to extract the remaining bone hurting juice from its user-base, it would instead: re-implement (fork, LOL) open alternatives seeking viable business models or just FOSS a working path, with minimal product features serving those core users and their needs, centralising the core cross-product services and cost optimising the backend plus realising what's the actual features users "need" vs. "want", and try to create sustainable products which instead of just extracting value try to provide value in this world.
There is a market niche for projects cementary. Many companies or funds tend to buy projects at peak valuations (or artificial valuations based on blown up projections).
Re-valuating these projects on the books would be an embarrassing to the board. Losing face, shareholders questions.
Selling these assets (possibly via asset swap) to specialized cementary fund where they can be disolved and disappear in the haze is a different, more honorable matter.
89 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 65.2 ms ] threadThat said, tangentially, I do wish game companies would let games live on.
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.
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.
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.
Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446310
Weird Italian loveletter about the IPO:
Bending Spoons just went public: Italy won the World Cup
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48773549
Some history from only the past year in discussions:
Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45749161
Bending Spoons Acquires Eventbrite
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124673
Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699
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."
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.
When BendingSpoon or IAC acquired an asset, it's meant to be held by them in order to augment their existing portfolio.
M&A isn't the hallmark of PE - restructuring an asset in order to exit out of it at a profit is.
Which isn't exactly what they seem to be doing but also isn't that far off.
In your example "very strongly loyal subscription base" is the offsheet or goodwill asset.
I actually think the model is interesting.
They squeeze the rest of the toothpaste out the tube and hope they get more than they paid for it.
It’s executing a private equity (and conglomerate) strategy out of permanent capital. That makes it more similar to Berkshire Hathaway than a private equity fund.
Bending Spoons buys these SaaS services on the cheap, cuts costs, jacks up prices, and milks remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.
Rinse and repeat.
I looked through their assets and it clicked: “this is where software goes to die”
The ones that IBM passed up on, yes.
"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"
And yet dairy farms can last for centuries.
I haven't seen Evernote pro- nor reproduce anything
here is a solid article from this week's Economist (that mentions another real jewel of a company):
https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/01/can-bending-sp...
I believe it imports Evernote data too.
Don't forget "slash the workforce, ensuring that the product will get worse over time".
Not commenting on Bending Spoons. But in general, a company built to grow is overprovisioned for one being put into maintenance mode. If you're growing, sure, let the designers change the UI every release. If you're trying not to lose customers, don't do that. Which means you don't need a crack team of in-house designers.
Usually not. It's emotionally difficult. And knowing what you need and don't need to cut (versus transition or aggregate with your conglomerate's administrative layer) is its own expertise. If you had that, you wouldn't need Bending Spoons or whomever.
> After the acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but a passive owner, making changes to the products’ user experience and features, as well as to the underlying tech; monetization strategy, including pricing; and team organization, including headcount.
> While this focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons claims a key difference: It “aims to hold forever, and has never sold an acquired business.” It is building a live portfolio, not presiding over a tech graveyard.
That last line has me wondering who wrote this.
As for my opinion on the company, I don’t really see anything particularly negative about it. I think the fact that they’ve never sold an acquired business is a rather admirable trait.
In a way, they’re doing something that may not have been possible without this style of intervention, which is to keep companies/products that would have otherwise disappeared viable.
For a company like Evernote it wouldn’t be better for their customers if the company liquidated. There are worse things that can happen to your service provider of choice than price increases or worse customer support.
There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're a user of one of these services you might take it as a hint to find an alternative.
I usually say in interviews that my preferred time to join a company is at the end of stage 1 (start up) and the start of phase 2 (organizing).
Nothing makes me happier than to be told "Hey, we got this up and running and it's a mess. Now we need someone to turn this into a system that is easy to modify and maintain."
Debatable
You can also be a bastard and jack up prices while cutting e.g. customer service. (Though absent new major revisions, service costs should go down.) But I'd argue we need, in tech, more of this strategy of calm wind-down than the everything-must-be-growth mindset.
If they are such stable long term SaaS businesses who aren’t losing customers, why are they selling to bending spoons?
After acquiring Komoot, they fired everybody. Watching their goodbye video is a bit heartbreaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLJkK4Wn1HI
TIL! I always thought it was some creative play on "video".
It worked! That is one hell of a series of good DB migrations.
Sadly I was immediately forced to change my password. Still, 31 years is a good run for a password.
https://bendingspoons.com/documents/financials/2026/Bending%...
There are Victorian-horror-esque costs to that, but it's still better that those projects be alive but enshittified than completely dead (If you disagree, you can just cancel your subscription, after all)
The company that made me unsubscribe from Evernote after 8 years because it got slow, buggy and skyrocketed their prices.
Good riddance, now I am using Obsidian + an LLM and works way better.
I use Evernote for paperless household management (shared travel itineraries, scans of paperwork, saved recipes, etc.) as well as my personal notes. It was under Bending Spoons that they finally landed multi-player realtime collaboration, which ended a decade of annoying sync conflicts and bugs, at least for me. Every month there are new little features like @mention to include a linked note, that bring more parity with platforms like Notion – the kind of core improvements the original owners had completely lost focus on. And they record a monthly video evangelizing the new features. Would something newer be better? Who knows but I'm happy not to switch, I have thousands of notes in there which I access from laptop, desktop, phone, and web. Bouncing from one platform to another is not my favorite way to spend time. I'm quite happy with how they've managed a mature platform.
Harvest also started adding new features for the first time in many years. Their customer support did turn into a baffling AI bot for a while but eventually a human replied and apologized. Harvest is also a mature platform that just needs to not self-destruct in order to serve my needs; but small new features have been welcome.
Both these platforms have something in common too: Good old fashioned REST API's. I like to scan directly to Evernote from my Brother MFC printer/scanner. We log time into Harvest from a variety of other platforms and apps. I'm happy to have these workflows maintained. I might submit that this kind of specialized, deep-pocketed owner is the best-case scenario for long-term preservation of mature REST-based SaaS small businesses. Otherwise they get bought by Google, or dwindle when the founders move on?
Feels pretty exploitive.
Surely this isn't difficult???...
Re-valuating these projects on the books would be an embarrassing to the board. Losing face, shareholders questions.
Selling these assets (possibly via asset swap) to specialized cementary fund where they can be disolved and disappear in the haze is a different, more honorable matter.