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.
Gergely Orosz did an interview with them in 2024:
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
>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.
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/
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.
That's where businesses like BendingSpoons come in.
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.
Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45749161
Bending Spoons Acquires Eventbrite
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124673
Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
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 market valuation is way off. But worry not: market will fix that.
This helps ensure a better noise to signal ratio that Meetup simply couldn't provide.
lhoff•51m ago
As of now my use cases still work and it certainly helped that I bought the lifetime all-world map package.
w4der•5m ago