What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

The ones that IBM passed up on, yes.

Customer "inertia" or "lock-in" might be better terms to describe what the company is looking for in an acquisition.

Their ideal customer may well be someone who's forgotten they have a subscription on credit card auto-pay.

And yet dairy farms can last for centuries.

I mean, they're at least keeping the service alive for as long as possible.

So I downloaded my data, and had Claude vibecode a fully-featured clone in a single evening. Even if I was paying Anthropic API rates, it cost me less than a single year of my Solo plan.

I believe it imports Evernote data too.

Not commenting on Bending Spoons. But in general, a company built to grow is overprovisioned for one being put into maintenance mode. If you're growing, sure, let the designers change the UI every release. If you're trying not to lose customers, don't do that. Which means you don't need a crack team of in-house designers.

As for my opinion on the company, I don’t really see anything particularly negative about it. I think the fact that they’ve never sold an acquired business is a rather admirable trait.

In a way, they’re doing something that may not have been possible without this style of intervention, which is to keep companies/products that would have otherwise disappeared viable.

For a company like Evernote it wouldn’t be better for their customers if the company liquidated. There are worse things that can happen to your service provider of choice than price increases or worse customer support.

The portfolio grows -- "live", and faster than each of the businesses within it shrink. As they all do, by Bending Spoons' strategic design.

I usually say in interviews that my preferred time to join a company is at the end of stage 1 (start up) and the start of phase 2 (organizing).

Nothing makes me happier than to be told "Hey, we got this up and running and it's a mess. Now we need someone to turn this into a system that is easy to modify and maintain."

Debatable

Keep one SRE to keep the servers running, one guy to do security updates to the app, and the team that acquires rights to music.

When BendingSpoon or IAC acquired an asset, it's meant to be held by them in order to augment their existing portfolio.

M&A isn't the hallmark of PE - restructuring an asset in order to exit out of it at a profit is.

The classic PE monetization strategy is to acquire an underperforming asset, restructure said asset, and then exit the asset at around 20% IRR.

BendingSpoons on the other hand is a holding company that is acquiring and consolidating stagnant but large SaaS platforms into a single mega-platform.

The economics are different as are the operational and organizational structures.

I actually think the model is interesting.

The steelman case for this is something like, mature apps that found product market fit are often over-staffed and doing a lot of duplicated work. You could get five of them together and consolidate their infrastructure/code to reduce costs, and have generalist devs who can work on any of those codebases. Then you need fewer people.

So this isn't an irrational thing to do. It's commonly done by firms like Google or Meta where they buy a small company and then rewrite it onto their own infrastructure to reduce costs. Sometimes the engineers are reallocated to other projects, or things drift and there are eventually layoffs. Google bought DoubleClick and then laid off 50% of the staff! Twitter didn't consolidate products but was clearly overstaffed, nobody imagines that Twitter was unique.

So the bull case for this is that it's finding efficiencies. The apps may not be the shiniest hottest things anymore, but they can still live on and be maintained if they're run more efficiently as a business. And yes this may involve layoffs or price rises, as often software startups hopelessly misprice their product and prefer to burn VC money than lose users or colleagues. Managers who aren't emotionally attached to the product or company can correct this, putting it on a long term stable path. That may suck for the user but probably sucks less than the company being under, or being acquihired and the product totally shut down.