Italy's Bending Spoons, Owner of AOL and Vimeo, Files for Nasdaq IPO
80 points - today at 3:04 PM
SourceI'm old enough to have been acquired by Computer Associates at a company that acquired my company. CA's business model was to buy companies and then fold their products into an omnibus license, all of their customers, including the ones they just acquired, becoming involuntary licensees whatever the cat dragged in this quarter.
It turns out a lot of corporate IT has no idea how to switch vendors in case a product they use gets acquired by a company with this business model.
The number of corporate IT departments got caught when VMWare licencing shifted from Dell EMC to Broadcom https://www.techradar.com/pro/broadcom-has-allegedly-hiked-v...
kryogen1c
today at 6:15 PM
This still confuses me. It's clear they wanted to 10x licensing costs and /10 customers which assumably raises margins, but i still dont see it working out.
My international enterprise and all our business partners moved every broadcom product we have to a competitor. On top of that, they were very aggressive and combative with their sales+cease and desist threats.
They earned enemies for life. Some of us care about business relationships. Broadcom is dead to me and anyone that will listen to me.
For context, Broadcom bought CA.
> It turns out a lot of corporate IT has no idea how to switch vendors in case a product they use gets acquired by a company with this business model.
This always shocks me. I moved a company off of Salesforce in 45 days without a big issue. Day 1 was a bit slower but by day 2 folks were back at full speed. I've pulled off EMR migrations, ERP, accounting, etc. Moving is scary but doable.
Sometimes the execs will just pay rather than risk anything. At my last job I spent 7 months researching and building a migration plan for an app that was literally costing us customers/patients because it was so bad. Came back with a plan to move to a better system (of of 38 I researched), 6 month implementation, $800k/yr savings directly, another $400k indirectly from other tools we could cancel because the new tool would do all of that. The board ignored me and the rest of the C-suite, and went back to the vendor and signed a new agreement that INCREASED the yearly bill from $1.2m to $1.8m/yr. They completely cut me out of all the negotiations, I didn't even know it was happening, and I was the CIO. I quit, and they're now being sold at a firesale price.
Curious what did you move them into from SF? SF is usually treated as this infallible perfect piece of software by non-tech folks, especially those looking to pad their resumes.
temp_praneshp
today at 5:53 PM
Do _you_ know what three easy replacements are? If no, how do you know those people are looking to pad their resumes, did you figure that out from your non-SF conversations?
defmetrix
today at 6:21 PM
Another IPO that I will be avoiding.
IMO, they buy companies, lay off en masse and sell the now sunsetted products.
Reminiscent of "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, but he gutted and then flipped whole companies.
I think of them as the bakery outlet store that sells only stale goods.
They also have a very intense workplace culture, I had a manager who was part of Evernote while their site was being laid off by Bending Spoons, and he heard some wild stories, they pay above average for a European tech company (but with geo-fenced brackets), crunch a ton and then crash out at a big new year's party were they fly all their teams to some resort, among other things.
ElProlactin
today at 5:12 PM
New Year's party with your coworkers at a resort sounds like hell. Or a script for a Jonah Hill movie.
Wow sounds very family friendly!
cucumber3732842
today at 5:02 PM
So?
Doesn't sound any worse than the average restaurant.
This guy dubbed it “get Komooted”, as they pulled the same trick for used-to-be-great cycling app Komoot: https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/
The app quality almost immediately went down the drain after the acquisition by Bending Spoons.
doctorpangloss
today at 4:56 PM
With LLMs, I feel like they'll have the last laugh.
flaviolivolsi
today at 5:19 PM
Yep. They fucked up Komoot so badly that I'm building my own cycling app
bayindirh
today at 5:22 PM
They didn’t burn Evernote to the ground to my surprise, but I jumped ship the day they bought it.
It turned out that I have grown out of Evernote anyway, so no big loss.
konfusinomicon
today at 4:27 PM
I guess somebody out there has gotta make the croutons
epolanski
today at 5:04 PM
Warren Buffett used to do the same for decades, in fact this is how he came to control Berkshire Hathaway which he calls his worst investment, as it wasn't rational and merely driven by ego.
He wanted to take a controlling share of the company and then sell it for pieces so he started to buy increasing stakes in it.
When Berkshire management understood Buffett's plan they decided to stop him to not let him cannibalize and kill the company, and they offered to buy back his shares for 11$ a share which he accepted as it would've been a 2x return on his investment in a very short time span.
But then they made the critical mistake of low balling him by 1$ per share when it came to sign the documents, and he got so much emotional that he went and bought the entire company to prove a point and fire the management.
It was not a good idea and he would not make money on that acquisition, so after selling off the assets he decided to make it the holding for its other investments.
alephnerd
today at 4:20 PM
It's the circle of life - all businesses reach a point where they don't have significant growth potential or became a "keep the lights on" operation, and at that point their investors and founders wish to exit and cash out in order to invest in greener pastures.
That's where businesses like Bending Spoons, Red Ventures, and IAC come in for digital media.
Per Wikipedia, Bending Spoons owns: AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite, Evernote, Harvest, Issuu, Komoot, Meetup, MileIQ, Remini, StreamYard, Tractive, Vimeo, and WeTransfer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons
postalcoder
today at 4:01 PM
You missed filmic. Wow. So these people are the reason why Filmic went overnight from one of my favorite iOS apps to something for the trash heap.
my knee jerk reaction is to throw shade at the ppl operating the company but, upon second thought, there's an obvious pattern of them relieving the company from people who knew less how to run (and sustain) it. I haven't used evernote in almost a decade but it actually seems.. fine? I stopped using it when the company started selling merch as a latch ditch effort to make money.
They're basically the retirement home for once-good apps and services who still serve a dwindling core audience but are not longer growing or even a real contender in their field.
At least Evernote was saved by Bending Spoons. At one point, even Evernote was getting roughly a third of its monthly revenue from merchandise, which is pretty wild for a paperless note-taking app and a decent sign that the core business was already in bad shape. For the rest, though, they seem very good at squeezing hard whatever is left.
I'm often thinking about building a better Meetup, it's so expensive for organizers these days. But then I acknowledge the network effects and I give up. And they own Eventbrite too! Savvy people.
I see a lot of people using https://luma.com/. I'm sure it's not as big as Meetup but it does have a decent community of users, and you can set up pretty much anything with their free plan.
baggachipz
today at 5:10 PM
I had a good giggle when I opened their homepage and it looks exactly like the Performative-UI library[1] currently in the #1 spot.
Luma doesn't do discoverability well unfortunately. Also very tech centric.
I think it depends where you are. SF is all tech stuff but https://luma.com/chicago for example is mostly non-tech.
Oh, didn't know that. My perspective is from the UK.
alephnerd
today at 4:19 PM
At least in the Bay, Luma and Partiful are much bigger than Meetup now.
Interesting. Luma is getting traction in London. Not so much outside.
alephnerd
today at 4:24 PM
It's about the user bases - Luma and Partiful are almost entirely professionals in careers like Tech, Finance, or Entertainment (especially LA), and the events almost always vet before accepting people.
This helps ensure a better noise to signal ratio that Meetup simply couldn't provide.
Interesting point, but I personally didn't find Meetup had a noise issue. You could filter for the right stuff, pretty easily. Also I don't see how Luma/Partiful will avoid this problem eventually.
Partiful feels like it has replaced Facebook Events, Meetup, and the other formerly-popular hubs for in-person event planning.
Hmm, didn't know of Partiful. Quick look at landing page, seems more geared to parties and more social media-y? Meetup's event listing was good as it was; well, before they started charging for you to even see who's attending.
In NY + SF, it's used for anything you might want to attend that would be organized by an individual - parties, meetups, local events, etc.
Isn’t this just Luma?
See reply I just made in other thread.
> "Founded in 2013, Bending Spoons reported a net income of $27.5 million on revenue of $601 million for the three months ended March 31, compared to a net loss of $112.2 million on revenue of $259 million a year earlier. A large chunk of its revenue comes from recurring subscriptions, providing a more predictable stream of income."
Gergely Orosz did an interview with them in 2024:
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
Clever, shitty numbers and they decide to IPO at the peak of the "actually SaaS is worthless" hype. I wish them the worst, considering their business model.
So roughly $100m/year profit(edit). They are looking for a 20Bn valuation but interest rates are at 5%? How does any of this make any sense? That or we are in a real bubble.
postalcoder
today at 4:55 PM
You're mixing up the numbers. Their annual run rate is $2.4 billion. Revenue grew 140% YoY. That's an 8x sales multiple on good growth. The valuation is not egregious.
Sorry I meant profit. On a 5% interest, you get 1bn (pure profit with no risks) per year for a 20bn of capital. Their revenue grew 140% YoY but does that account for new acquisitions? Also, their profit needs to grow x10 in order to match bonds. It may have made sense in a 0% interest rate world but not at 5.
It's a business model that's like a shark: perpetually swimming and eating or it's dying. That's how they can show big increases in revenue, but the profits are always decaying along with the products.
foresterre
today at 3:53 PM
Their strategy always was "buy company" and "instantly lay off about everyone" to save costs and rapidly increase subscription pricing (1).
So far they've been relatively soft (for their doing) on Komoot, which I too am most anxious off.
Bikepacking.com has a good read about Komoot; it was probably unsustainable in the long run before bending spoons took over anyways (2), yet I much rather had they stayed a sort of indie company driven by their passion. I will cancel my long standing Komoot subscription the day enshittification news breaks.
(1) https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/03/komoot-acquired-history-...
(2) https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/
threetonesun
today at 4:16 PM
You can imagine all of these moderately successful SAAS companies that see peak subscribers starting to fall off on top of legacy tech stacks and no will to make drastic steps to get back to growth and understand why they sell. I've never seen BS as specifically ruining companies (although they've certainly been known to jack up prices for the remaining subscribers) but it's not a good sign when they do buy something you use.
What would you rather have? A five-year struggle to turn around a stagnant SaaS, or a big fat check? It's a simple and effective model. First one out gets the biggest check.
righthand
today at 3:44 PM
Interesting, Vimeo sat under IAC for almost 20 years claiming it would go public, when it finally did it was eventually sold off to Bending Spoons not even 5 years in.
While I'm not a huge fan of the Bending Spoons model, Vimeo sure got improved quickly.
What exactly? From what I’ve heard, most of what was released in the months after the acquisition were features that were already in development/behind feature flags.
moralestapia
today at 3:51 PM
It's still a big mystery to me how they were able to pull billion-dollar acquisitions while being one or two orders of magnitude lower in revenue.
>inb4 leverage
Yeah, I know leverage exists but still, you cannot go to a bank and ask them to help you acquire something 100x worth your cap.
Leverage. They’re essentially an 80s style junk bond LBO house.
They also own Komoot and I am anxiously awaiting the enshittification.
As of now my use cases still work and it certainly helped that I bought the lifetime all-world map package.
It has already started, many features which you could previously access without an account are now locked behind a login screen.
IPOing just before an evident .com tech bubble is about to explode is courageous. Good luck to everyone.
That said, their business model seems fairly solid, and despite the naysayers, they improve things a bit on most of their acquisitions. So there might be some real value in what they do. Yet, the expected market valuation is way off. But worry not: market will fix that.
> despite the naysayers, they improve things a bit on most of their acquisitions
There seem to be quite a few commenters stating the exact opposite, with concrete examples in hand (especially for Komoot). Do you have experience with any of the services they've bought, and can say how they've been improved?
Not the OP, but from a stock market perspective, improvement can mean "lay off workers, and raise subscription prices". Not good for the users, but good for the kinds of people who like reading news about IPOs.
Fair enough, though I do bristle at the use of the term "real value", like somehow it's a general net positive. They should at least qualify with "for shareholders" so we can know that their interests are specifically directed at financial enrichment
why is it courageous?
It seems the perfect time to do it while the market is still bubbly.
But how will they make it about AI...?
Hmm, assuming that the AI bubble might pop a little bit after the upcoming IPOs, maybe it's better not to call yourself an AI company then?
That seems like a very odd assumption to make.
martin_drapeau
today at 4:03 PM
20VC had an interview with them:
https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/luca-ferrari
I came in thinking they would be like PE and just put products on life support sucking all the recurring they can. But it seems they care and improve the products. I think that has merrit.
baobabKoodaa
today at 4:29 PM
So first they fire all the staff and then they "care and improve the products"? Who? Who does that? They fired the staff, so who improves the product?
kryptiskt
today at 4:37 PM
They fire everybody and then they bring in way cheaper European developers.
Especially Swiss developers, best bang-for-buck on the continent ;)