(2026-01-21) Bending Spoons Laid Off Almost Everybody At Vimeo

Tell-HN post: Bending Spoons Laid Off Almost Everybody At Vimeo. Various comments:

I am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it. In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it

Tech was an outlier in this case because ZIRP allowed companies to retain full engineering teams to keep "engineering" the product even once product-market-fit has been achieved and the product has been stabilized and finished. This gave a lot of engineers the illusion that perpetual "engineering" of a single product/service is a sustainable model and career.

Bending Spoons' business model is to buy finished products, cut off the deadweight and keep operating the product and actually making profit off the finished product, which was always a normal thing in every other industry.

Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. If you keep reinvesting your revenue forever into "engineering" the product there's going to be a time where a competitor comes in with a finished product matching your customers' requirements and snatches him from you by both charging less and making a profit.

Software doesn’t win by being “finished” it wins by out competing other software

Yeah, if Youtube was "finished" we wouldn't have had Youtube Red, Youtube shorts, Youtube music, etc.

*YouTube continues to be engineered and continues to grow. It could have, realistically, been finished over a decade ago. But they repeated branch out into new markets with new features, and that seems to work from them.

But YouTube is still a growing and maybe a profitable business (they disclose its revenue but not costs). Bending Spoons buys stalled or failed products and keeps them alive with a central engineering team in Italy which is far cheaper than anything in the US.*

I'm going on a limb here and saying that the scale that YouTube was running on back in 2010-2015 is not the same scale as now, and if they had left their whole infrastructure unchanged, a "finished product", so to speak, the site would have been feeling dated and would have eventually been killed off.

check, for example, the Netflix tech blog and read about what has changed in the past 10 years or so when it comes to architecting video processing and video delivery systems. There's a tremendous amount of engineering work there which advances the entire industry.