Nothing the bending spoons ceo said isn’t true. They are still operating Vimeo.

I worked at one of the companies that were acquired by Bending Spoons and really the only positive things I can say about them is: They are honest and stick to their word.

It's a shitty business model, run by people who do not, in any way shape or form, care about people at all. But they are honest.

So if you work at a company and BS comes knocking: relax, accept the severance money and start looking for something new. It will be over soon. And you also don't want to stay even if offered because it will be an entirely alien environment where only people of a certain character can work.

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Invictus0 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's a large contingent on hacker news that still thinks it's some kind of moral failure to fire people

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Quarrelsome 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

some people look at business as making money for the sake of making money. However other people look at making money as a means to better society. This goes back over a century to the Quaker run businesses, like Lloyds, Rowntree, Cadburys, etc.

You can imagine if your ultimate aim was to improve society, then acquiring a firm but having to sack a bunch of employees as somewhat of a failure.

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fsckboy an hour ago | parent | next [-]

>some people look at business as making money for the sake of making money. However other people look at making money as a means to better society.

if the two sides you describe agree on those definitions as mutually exclusive but in union describing the universal set of people, then they are both wrong.

as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin. you give somebody your money in exchange for something you want and would rather have: this creates happiness out of thin air.

if you think a better society is a happier society, then going into business to make money is the same as going into business to make society better.

	▲	HKH2 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Society depends on long-term 'happiness'. Short-term 'happiness' often makes society worse.
	▲	mindslight 30 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin That is a big if which is straightforwardly false. This idea of market participants' choices being entirely free rests on the efficient market fallacy [0]. Whereas the reality is that even the structure of a market itself creates friction. One of the main points of business schools is learning how to recognize and take advantage of this structural friction, which business people then conveniently forget when it's time to assuage their own egos regarding their counterparties. [0] which is basically in the realm of asserting P == NP. The supreme irony is that if the efficient market fallacy were true, then central planning would also work as well!

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Invictus0 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Option A: the business goes bankrupt, investors lose money, customers lose the product, all employees get fired.

Option B: the business stays afloat, investors make money, customers keep the product, some employees get fired with a severance.

You think option A is superior?

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supoxblade 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Here's the rub: Vimeo was profitable, and had no debt. Per their last public filing(s), in 2025 the company had: - ~$400M expenses - ~$420M revenue (therefore ~$20M profit for the year) - ~$300M of cash in the bank (no debt)

Vimeo has not had major growth in recent years, but it was making progress, however slowly. Just nowhere near the 10x expectations out there. Nobody was going to lose anything.

	▲	makeitrain 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For a company that makes a flat $20 mil per year, how long will it take to make back the $1.4 billion they paid for it?

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serf 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

it's not immoral to fire people.

it's immoral to lie to people.

very few people can do the mental gymnastics required to equate " we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together " to "you're all getting fired."

at some point in the now far-distant past CEOs used to make heartfelt speeches and memos to a soon-to-be-downsized staff about how hard decisions had to be made and blah-blah-blah; now it's more about sequestering the decision makers away from the damaged goods while projecting daisies and sunshine for would-be investors.

The game has shifted far from the human factor into a purely financial/investor loop. Good for some people but generally worse for people .

And before I hear it : Yes it was always about money, but business wasn't always about investors . That projection of liability to a remote party is exactly the issue.

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hi_hi 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This was exactly my sentiment.

Going from "you're fine" to "you're fired", when it was always going to be "you're fired".

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x0x0 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Bending Spoon's business model has been -- at least for a decade -- buying companies that didn't operate profitably; stopping or slowing ongoing eng investments; and operating them profitably. Often that involves raising prices, but everyone is adults here.

Nobody lied. Vimeo will continue to operate, and probably will even have targeted ongoing development.

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csallen 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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Remnant44 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

While you may be correct in the sense that, in a public acquisition statement, people should be inferring enormous context and not taking anything said at face value.

It's simultaneously true that this is the farthest thing from effective, honest, and clear communication. Reading between the lines here is required precisely because we all know that any acquisition statements made are, at best heavily coded, if not completely just fluff.

You can recognize that and still get angry that it's par for the course for such things to be not just devoid of useful information, but often actively deceiving.

	▲	aeonfox 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Reading between the lines Tbf, and in support of your broader point, there's no reading between the lines, because genuine intent is indistinguishable from deception with this kind of stuff, because the latter imitates the former. There's only expecting the worst, and being only occasionally wrong.
	▲	csallen 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah I agree, I don't think anyone is a fan of this fluff

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nehal3m 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You're not wrong, but how screwed up is it that we expect leadership at companies we spend most of our waking time on to bullshit through their teeth at the people that make the damn thing work in the first place?

I'm so tired of the investor driven economy.

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bagels 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Obviously sometimes a business is unsustainable, and it's unavoidable, but it's pretty sociopathic to not consider that people are harmed by being laid off.

	▲	Invictus0 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They are literally not harmed. The end of an at-will employment agreement is not a harm.