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 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.
“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.
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
Bending Spoons identifies a popular product it thinks it can improve inside and out
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
If Bending Spoons buys something you use, you should run to the exits and search for an alternative.
