The layoffs are the latest restructuring by Bending Spoons, the Milan-based tech conglomerate that acquired Vimeo for $1.38 billion in an all-cash deal that closed in the latter half of 2025. While Bending Spoons may be unknown to many, it has quietly become one of the tech industry’s most prolific buyers, now owning Meetup, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, and many others.
Bending Spoons identifies a popular product it thinks it can improve inside and out, and buys it from owners who have reached their limits.
After the acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but a passive owner, making changes to the products’ user experience and features, as well as to the underlying tech; monetization strategy, including pricing; and team organization, including headcount.
Bending Spoons identifies a popular product it thinks it can improve inside and out
Bending spoons are a bunch of no-talent hyper capitalist private equity fuckwits whose core competence involves acquiring companies and cutting any novel, interesting, or long term projects that require any investment whatsoever to the bone, regardless of whether or not said cuts destroy long-term core competencies, and then extracting as much value as possible from the remains until it goes tits up. They are a plague of a company, and they’ve sucked the life out of more than a few companies that don’t deserve to have been parasitized like that.
This fluff article is comically obvious, disingenuous, and gross. They are a bad company, and they provide no real value to anyone except their shareholders. Which, I guess, makes them “successful” in this day and age.
Source: worked at a company they acquired. Left before the acquisition, but I had some good friends who were still there when it happened. They cut upwards of 90% of the staff, hollowed out the parts of the business that, while less profitable, was by far the most interesting and challenging technical domain and enabled novel R&D, and converted from primarily B2B to a direct-to-consumer subscription model that completely flopped.
Evernote, Eventbrite, Wetransfer, that’s not a shining portfolio. Nice catalog of has-been tech platforms which people abandoned generally because of what Bending Spoons did to them…
But hey, what can you expect from a company cringely named after a reference to a once-great movie ?
…I get that it ties up the has-been thread you started in the first paragraph but The Matrix isn’t a once-great movie. It’s still great lol
Isn’t it a reference to the trick that mentalists have been doing for decades? My mind immediately went to Uri Gellar.
The company is specifically referencing The Matrix but yeah, that’s where Wachowskis got it from
This is an incredibly undeservedly positive profile for this company. So many paragraphs here look like they were written by Bending Spoons or are uncritically repeating direct claims by the company.
The company’s playbook has become clear: acquire underperforming but popular tech brands, then transform them to serve millions of users more efficiently through controversial changes to beloved products and substantial workforce reductions. It followed this pattern with Evernote and WeTransfer, and is now repeating it with Vimeo.
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Despite often being described as a private equity firm, Bending Spoons describes itself more specifically as a company that acquires and transforms digital businesses. Having grown to a headcount of 400 to 500 employees (whom the company calls “Spooners”), its main focus is on making improvements to products and services that others have created.
“Transform them to serve millions of users more efficiently”? “Its main focus is on making improvements to products and services…”?
Awfully strange ways to say their business model is “find companies with entrenched or locked-in userbases and then turn goodwill and inertia into profit by laying off all but a skeleton crew, increasing prices and lowering services and quality.” Good thing that is totally different from what a private equity buyout does.
It’s 100% covert advertising. The users of Vimeo know better and are likely jumping ship ASAP. This is to convince people who haven’t left or don’t know better that things are fine and Vimeo is open for business.
yep we are. Vimeo was the home of indie filmmaking and vfx demoreels. it is more or less forgotten now
Where are people moving to from Vimeo?
I’ve seen more artists gathering their work on ArtStation, and Youtube
In the biz Ilthese are called advertorials.
Aren’t those those the same Guys that fucked up Komoot? To hell with those assholes.
Did they fuck up komoot? What did they do? I never really used it, but did not hear anything after the acquisition.
Sorry, i meant fucked the employees. https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/
I have to say that, apart from occasional popups suggesting premium subscription, I’ve not seen the experience change much - yet. The app has had cosmetic changes, but these haven’t been negative. It’s possible there is note coming down the line, but right now I’m still using it fine
“Good” to see European companies getting on the enshittification gravy train. I’d wondered what happened to Evernote. Now I know who caused me to bail so fast when it went to shit.
It blows my mind that Vimeo was worth that much.
I think most of their value was as a streaming backend for other companies, not their user-facing video sharing platform.
Ahh diggit!
