IMO, they buy companies, lay off en masse and sell the now sunsetted products.

Reminiscent of "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, but he gutted and then flipped whole companies.

I think of them as the bakery outlet store that sells only stale goods.

They also have a very intense workplace culture, I had a manager who was part of Evernote while their site was being laid off by Bending Spoons, and he heard some wild stories, they pay above average for a European tech company (but with geo-fenced brackets), crunch a ton and then crash out at a big new year's party were they fly all their teams to some resort, among other things.

This guy dubbed it “get Komooted”, as they pulled the same trick for used-to-be-great cycling app Komoot: https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/

The app quality almost immediately went down the drain after the acquisition by Bending Spoons.

Yep. They fucked up Komoot so badly that I'm building my own cycling app

They didn’t burn Evernote to the ground to my surprise, but I jumped ship the day they bought it.

It turned out that I have grown out of Evernote anyway, so no big loss.

I guess somebody out there has gotta make the croutons

Warren Buffett used to do the same for decades, in fact this is how he came to control Berkshire Hathaway which he calls his worst investment, as it wasn't rational and merely driven by ego.

He wanted to take a controlling share of the company and then sell it for pieces so he started to buy increasing stakes in it.

When Berkshire management understood Buffett's plan they decided to stop him to not let him cannibalize and kill the company, and they offered to buy back his shares for 11$ a share which he accepted as it would've been a 2x return on his investment in a very short time span.

But then they made the critical mistake of low balling him by 1$ per share when it came to sign the documents, and he got so much emotional that he went and bought the entire company to prove a point and fire the management.

It was not a good idea and he would not make money on that acquisition, so after selling off the assets he decided to make it the holding for its other investments.

It's the circle of life - all businesses reach a point where they don't have significant growth potential or became a "keep the lights on" operation, and at that point their investors and founders wish to exit and cash out in order to invest in greener pastures.

That's where businesses like Bending Spoons, Red Ventures, and IAC come in for digital media.