Bending Spoons is a company that acquires SaaS companies/products that are not growing or losing users but have a well-known brand and customers who stick around.
The execs at Bending Spoon buy these SaaS services on the cheap, cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.
Rinse and repeat. The goal is to generate the highest possible rate of return on invested capital in a law-abiding manner.
achandra03today at 3:45 PM
Is it not just a private equity fund masquerading as a tech firm?
jabikotoday at 4:39 PM
I'm a bit salty due to what they've done to the Komoot team. Komoot was (and still is) a great app for planing your outdoor activities.
Whatever they are, they let Evernote devolve into a buggy pile of crap -- especially on Android. I migrated to Joplin, stopped paying for my obscenely expensive plan ($$$ per year) and haven't looked back.
khurstoday at 5:05 PM
This is the Prospectus they used for the IPO which goes into all the details about them
I was reading a bit about their story, it feels like they managed to succeed by turning overly funded (and by then devalued) software products and restructuring them for long term profitability as they are not bounded to the classic 10 year time horizon of private funds. Wondering if we will see more plays like this as alternatives to traditional private equity and as fallback option for VC backed companies that bursted.
com2kidtoday at 4:48 PM
Very off topic - Just 2 days of for fun I tried to login to AOL.com with my username and PW from 1995. (Same username as on HN in fact)
It worked! That is one hell of a series of good DB migrations.
Sadly I was immediately forced to change my password. Still, 31 years is a good run for a password.
ChrisArchitectlast Monday at 2:22 AM
Related:
Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO
Whenever I see Vimeo in a headline, it reminds me of my lack of foresight. In college, the creator of Vimeo was in my friend group. I went to his on-campus apartment to pick him up for a party once. He showed me this "video sharing website" that he was working on. Its title was an anagram of "movie." This was in 1999. Digitized video was barely a thing. I looked at it, didn't understand how it would be useful, and assumed it was another one of his eccentric creative outlets that would go nowhere. A few years later, he was a multimillionaire and I was not.
AdmiralAsshattoday at 4:31 PM
Remarkably on-brand, named after the signature trick of a well-known charlatan.
lain98today at 5:00 PM
Down 13% in the last 5 days.
xackytoday at 4:43 PM
AOL Time Warner was the peak of the original dot com bubble.