[hi_hi]

From the previous press about the aquisition:

BendingSpoon CEO: "At Bending Spoons, we acquire companies with the expectation of owning and operating them indefinitely, and we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together"

Vimeo CEO: "We are excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses"

Words no longer appear to mean things. While this isn't a surprise, it provides another data point that there can be no trust given to leaders words. I find it sad as it simply re-inforces this behaviour and normalises it.

[cowsandmilk]

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

[maint]

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.

[Nextgrid]

> 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.

[CadmiumYellow]

Same and I can cosign all of the above

[Invictus0]

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

[Quarrelsome]

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.

[fsckboy]

>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.

[mindslight]

> 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!

[fsckboy]

>This idea of market participants' choices being entirely free rests on the efficient market fallacy

in an inefficient market, you can still choose to transact or not, and you will only do so if you feel you will benefit.

in an efficient market, the net benefit across society will be higher, but nothing in what I said requires an efficient market.

so you are simply wrong.

[HKH2]

Society depends on long-term 'happiness'. Short-term 'happiness' often makes society worse.

[fsckboy]

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"

[Quarrelsome]

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].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville

[Invictus0]

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?

[supoxblade]

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]

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?

[johnnyanmac]

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.

[Quarrelsome]

what option C where you make _less_ money (you still make _some_) but your employees are better able to send their kids to college?

[serf]

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.

[hi_hi]

This was exactly my sentiment.

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

[x0x0]

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.

[johnnyanmac]

We just demontrated why it was a lie. Gaslighting the workers with "well you should have known he was a liar" does not absolve the liar of lying.

>and probably will even have targeted ongoing development.

well, 15 of them or so.

[x0x0]

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.

[johnnyanmac]

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.

[bagels]

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]

They are literally not harmed. The end of an at-will employment agreement is not a harm.

[johnnyanmac]

>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.

[Ekaros]

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.

[johnnyanmac]

>unlock even greater focus for our team

I guess that's the new buzzword for "by removing most of the team from the equation and focusing the rest on everything". Noted.

>our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses

2 issues here

1. why would I trust a company who will flip around and remove nearly all its labor overnight?

2. I don't know how this move makes them more "innovative". You're just going to be burning out the very few people left to support the product.

I'm bold enough to call this a blatant lie.

[growt]

After reading through the other comments about bending spoons and reading yours again: the bending spoons CEO is technically telling the truth! They intend to run the acquired companies forever. After cutting most of the staff, but he didn’t say that part of course.

[csallen]

I wouldn't even say it's "technically" the truth. It's just the truth. Nothing in the statement even comes close to implying that there wouldn't be layoffs. Hell, one of the quotes even mentions "focus", which if anything is a euphemism or hint for downsizing in these kinds of statements, not the opposite.

[onemoresoop]

"excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses"

There's no hint of laying off all the staff here though. Now it sounds like they "were" excited to lay off people to maximize profits.

Maybe "unlock even greater focus for our team" means to unlock their focus to find other jobs but it's quite perverse. I agree with the OP, that "Words no longer appear to mean things"

[csallen]

> There's no hint of laying off all the staff here though. Now it sounds like they "were" excited to lay off people to maximize profits.

What? Just because a statement says "we're excited to do X" doesn't mean they're not also planning to do A, B, C, Y and Z.

I'm not defending the layoff. It just seems weird to interpret the statement itself as somehow being misleading about a subject that it literally didn't mention.

[johnnyanmac]

There's letter and spirit of the word. You're arguing against the spirit of the word because the letter of the word is technically impossible to prove as a lie right now.

We call this lawful evil logic for a reason. It's how you empower stuff like Jim Crow laws (or the current US administration in general. "Well he isn't going to actually invade a NATO ally, he's just saying he wants Greenland. I want a Ferrari!")

[hi_hi]

You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! :-)

Those words weren't truth. Truth would have been to state the intent to fire employees in order to maximise profit. This was always going to be the outcome, and it was expected, why not just state it clearly?

Again, when truth becomes a grey area that is to be manipulated for maximising profits that benefit a minority of privileged individuals, we should be concerned and at the least, not normalise it with "its just business".

[johnnyanmac]

I don't like layoffs, but if the statement in September said "we are going to lay off most of our talent in January for blah blah blah corporate mumbo jumbo", it'd suck but I'd see nothing wrong with it. The employees get a 3 month warning to plan around, and the company can do whatever it wants from there.

But that's not the society we live in.

[ryandrake]

A reasonable person, when told "Company A is buying and will operate Company B," would interpret that as "all of Company B" including its assets, liabilities, cash, property, patents, AND employees. They would not think "Well, ackshually, they're just buying the corporate entity itself, which doesn't technically involve keeping the employees..."

[csallen]

If "reasonable person" means "someone with literally zero experience reading any business or acquisition news whatsoever" then I agree with you. Hell, the OP literally begins the announcement with, "As expected."

[johnnyanmac]

>"someone with literally zero experience reading any business or acquisition news whatsoever" then I agree with you.

Most people aren't entrepreneurs, and they may be an older folk who grew up expecting companies invested in employee retention and building careers.

Those "reasonable people" were lied to.

[akavi]

Only if you believe the primary purpose of a corporation is to provide employment, as opposed to generating profit for its shareholders.

(To be clear, I think the latter is both descriptively true and normatively good)

[johnnyanmac]

if corporations only exist to make the rich richer, maybe it's time to eat the rich. Corporations' outward goals used to be to satisfy their customers. That may have never been the internal case, but it isn't even pretended to be so nowadays.

Severely downsizing the company isnt a good vibe to a customer. I'd definitely be migrating off Vimeo if I did any serious business with them.

[ForHackernews]

Any reasonable person who has paid attention to business news over their lifetime would not be surprised to see layoffs following a corporate acquisition.

[johnnyanmac]

> who has paid attention to business news over their lifetime

So, less than a percent of a percent of people.

[perlgeek]

Try to be innovative without staff though...

[johnnyanmac]

Here comes the AI buzzwords.

I wish I was kidding. Their search result brings up

>Vimeo AI-Powered Video Platform

anyone who knew Vimeo pre-pandemic knows how eye-rolling this is.

[gcr]

The Vimeo CEO is also right -- this action technically unlocks greater focus for their team!

[hi_hi]

Yes, this occurred to me also. If that is how he intended it, it is extremely disingenuous, at best, and another example of manipulation.

[joe_the_user]

As others mentioned, the statement seems true.

But even more, it seems like the statement implies layoffs if they are acquiring a startup or growth-orient company. Bending Spoon is saying they intend to run the web site/web app as-is and make money. That means they will discard employees who have been employed with hope of growing/pivoting/etc the company. In start-ups, that can be a lot of the employees.

[999900000999]

Of course words don't actually mean anything.

I've been through this myself once upon a time I was at a company and the way they described it is they just changed owners habitually.

Within about 4 months of this ownership change they fired my entire office. Luckily I was already some place new.

[jongjong]

Yes. It's a zero trust society. Nobody can trust anybody else. The only thing that's trusted is money in a bank account... And we really shouldn't be trusting our eyes there because the money is backed by nothing and there is no reliable consensus between different banks (look at the details of correspondant banking and factor in things like the Eurodollar, stablecoins...).

It's like; the thing we trust the most cannot be trusted but so long as we keep using money in its current form, this implicit form of trust is devaluing the trust of everything else that's not money.

Our relationship with money sets the bar for all other relationships. If it's a deceptive relationship and we tolerate it, we will tolerate every other relationship which is equally deceptive. We become accustomed and tolerant to a certain level of deception. We are also emboldened to deceive others.

Our relationship with money is highly deceptive and getting worse over time. We can expect to see the same trend in our relationships.

I think money CAN buy trust; it works by devaluing the entire concept of trust to the level that it can afford to buy it outright. It maintains a monopoly on trust.

[johnnyanmac]

So are we just going to acept that words no longer mean anything and carry on through life distructing of everything we navigate through? That isn't the only way.

[whalesalad]

Things happen. Times change. It's just as important to know when to throw in the towel as it is to know when to persevere.

[killingtime74]

The acquisition concluded in November 2025, only 2 months ago.

[johnnyanmac]

That statement was from September. I can even dig up the discussion here on the annoucement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302

Reading the comments there, I shouldn't be surprised at this maneuver.

[taurath]

These are the things that happen - taking a company and strangling it to make a 10% short term return.

It’s like of funny, we give corporations personhood, but the type of person that can be owned by another person, or murdered for profit

[nasaeclipse]

Imagine what would happen if we tried these actions like we do for real murder trials.

"CEO John Doe is found Guilty of maiming Company B to the point of bleeding it dry of its funds, resulting in bankruptsy. Due to person-hood laws, we sentence you to life in prison. Thank you for your attention on this matter."