[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?

[Nextgrid]

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.

[supoxblade]

Maybe?

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.

[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?