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.
> where only people of a certain character can work
Out of curiosity, could you expand on this? Gutting engineering playgrounds and other inefficient crap to maximize ROI sounds like a fun challenge. It's essentially performance optimization but applied to a whole infrastructure as opposed to individual parts.
Applied through the proverbial front door a few months back to have a chat and unsurprisingly got a generic rejection, but wouldn't mind trying again using a better channel. Question is of course whether they'd be willing to pay enough to make it worthwhile.
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.
>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.
> 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!
No, you cannot necessarily to choose whether to transact or not. For life's necessities (eg food, shelter) this is straightforwardly obvious. And you are making this claim in the context of the employment market, which is one step removed from that.
But even in the general case your argument still does not make sense. When we talk of a business providing societal utility, we don't include the business owner themselves in the integral. For example your assertion lets you conclude things like a casino owner who has made a pile of money but impoverished the community has made society better.
>No, you cannot necessarily to choose whether to transact or not.
I didn't say you could, pay closer attention or you will not be able to understand arguments or learn anything.
What I said was, "as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin."
however, your mistake does contain a germ of reinforcement to what I said: if you cannot choose to participate in a transaction, you will be less happy, i.e. allowing sellers to offer choices and buyers to make choices will increase happiness in every type of market.
before you make another mistake and go shooting off, I didnt say people will be happy, I said they will be happier, but happier is an unmitigated good.
Try harder to not be a condescending dweeb, or you will not be able to have amicable discussions or overcome your own airtight but inapplicable logic.
I did not "reinforce" the exception of what you said, I pointed out an error in your framing that necessitates coming at the analysis a different way. The context of what you're responding to is a company laying people off - reducing the number of choices in the employment market. We're not talking about the dynamic of someone creating a new business and having to emphasize one or the other, but rather an existing business where the owners are choosing to change things to be closer to one end of the spectrum between the two.
what you are actually saying is that a certain class of people "know better" than what another class thinks they want.
If you look at financial markets and finance theory, there is no validity to the idea that people are long term blind and short term mistaken. markets discount the future, they are the best estimates of the future rather than somebody with no skin in the game magically "knowing better"
its plausible for companies to be worth less than their assets. While it might be the best estimate its still not necessarily the best one. aka the market can stay crazy longer than you can stay solvent. Markets measure confidence as much as they measure value.
and this explains why the USA doesn't have universal healthcare, or why a generation of the world's population now serve as eyeballs for advertisers using applications specifically designed to be addictive in order to enrich silicon valley startups. You certaintly wouldn't get here if you started with the question "how do we want society to look like?"
Imagine if the owners of modern day factories thought a little more like this [0].
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.
Presumably Bending Spoons believes they can optimize a lot of that 400M expenses while keeping revenue flat or even growing it. At least they believe enough to make a 1.4B bet on it.
This sounds more like a reverse mortgage line of business, to me. Bending Spoons is betting they can eek enough revenue out of Vimeo to pay the interest on the $1.4B loan by cutting the $400M expense run rate.
The actual loan principal will be paid out (if it ever does) of the money they expect to bring in when they inevitably go to an IPO.
And at that point you have speculators carrying risk, bankers getting rich off interest, leadership raking in millions, and a once reasonably healthy business is jeopardized (subject to the performance of other Bending Spoons properties, risky management, etc). All in the name of growth that may or may not be achievable.
Your options are too coarse. There's good and bad ways to get fired (and there's nothing here saying they got a severance to begin with). How about a 3 month warning? How about guaranteeing a 6 or more month severance after those 3 monhts? How about even before this sell goes through you make sure employees benefit from the 1.4b with more than "well my company stock got a tiny bump"?
What I see here is "Business stays afloat, investes make money for now, customers get a continually worse service and eventually leave, and a lot of good talent is out on the streets over corporate greed". This is only a win if you're an investor, and only in the short term. So I'm not convinced this is better than option A in the long term.
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.
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.
You can't point out the place where they promised the workers jobs. Because there was no such commitment, either before or after the sale.
The company failed. In 4 years, they managed to turn the valuation from $8.5B to $1.4B. No employee should be in any way surprised by what happens when you watch your company's valuation fall that much. Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying any attention to the company's operating metrics (they only made $27m last year!) to a negligent extent.
It sucks for the people let go, but they can't be surprised.
you're arguing de facto with de jure. Not a historically healthy way to argue. We aren't lawyers here.
>Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying any attention to the company's operating metrics
Dude, I just want layoffs to be signaled ahead of time. You can defend billionaires all you want and gaslight engineers for not being marketing majors. My demands are very simple.
Everyone saw 21: -50m, 22: -80m, 23: 21m, 24: 27m and knew this was a dead company walking. With one or more annual founds of layoffs since at least 2023. Oh, and low revenue growth and falling subscriber counts.
That's not marketing or gaslighting, that's expecting people to pay minimal attention to their employer's financial performance. Minimal here being on the level of possessing object permanence.
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.
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.
You'd be surprised, even by navigating in this comment section. I guess they continue to do it because it works. Or because they no longer care about public sentiment.
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?
It's a moral failure to fire people without any notice for reasons unrelated to your company failining and not being able to afford you, yes. Let's not mince words here.
There are proper ways to let go of people, but that's not how it's done in the US.
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.
>The end of an at-will employment agreement is not a harm.
So if you got fired tomorrow for no reason in particular, you would not feel "harmed"? No family to support, bills to pay, or career to progress cut short? No trips nor big purchases that need to be re-planed or cancelled? No obligations you need to cancel because last week you were fine and this week it's all about scambling for a new job? This is the most asinine thing I've heard here yet.
I didn't have a choice in my society on what contract to take. And the power dynamic is unequal. I don't consider being suddenly laid off as "harmless" with that in mind.
They were at-will employment. That should have been considered with their every purchasing decision ever. Their personal and moral failures is not their employers failures.
Budgeting is trivial thing. Spend less than you earn. And it is not like these were minimum wage workers. They should have known to have plenty of buffers at this point. It is entirely their own fault of not reach that point.
1. Trump’s order in 2020 had nothing to do with fire, so it doesn’t support your position that this has anything to do with fires.
2. The water management plan has nothing to do with where water flows to fight fires.
3. A legal fight in 2020 is not caused by a bill that was passed in 2025.
> there would be no drought in 2020
That’s not how droughts work. A drought is a lack of rainfall. Moving water can reduce the problems caused by a drought, but it cannot prevent a drought.
All their examples rely on having poorly configured origins. At least the PHP and Tomcat ones might be blocked by a WAF, but the Next.js one would rely on the WAF blocking responses that included secrets (which I’m not sure they do).
I think the idea for the NextJS example was that there might be some configuration variables that are not sensitive for internal / staff users, but would be problematic if exposed externally—basically, relying on Cloudflare's WAF as a "zero trust" endpoint solution, like Google IAP.
I'm not sure how realistic this is in practice. Does anyone actually configure Cloudflare WAF this way? (As opposed to, e.g., Cloudflare's dedicated zero-trust networking product, which I think works completely differently?)
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