"Today we're laying off a large part of the Airtable team " | Hacker News Reader

"Today we're laying off a large part of the Airtable team "

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45 pointstortilla24 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49168844

Airtable hides a recap in plain sight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49173507 - August 2026 (0 comments)

Bending Spoons buying Airtable for $2.2B - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49168838 - August 2026 (4 comments)

Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166182 - August 2026 (118 comments)

As an Italian, I am ashamed that our peak tech company is this bunch of unethical private equity sharks who see themselves as the forefront of innovation. I wish them really all the worst possible. Quite sure that when the bubble hits, their debt exposure might help generate some very high levels of schadenfreude.

"Bending Spoons is not private equity."

Proceeds to do private equity things.

WAR IS PEACE.

Really enjoyed using Airtable over the years. It helped kickstart loooooads of cool projects.

Shame that they never really did anything with their billions in funding. Interfaces were underwhelming, and I would've been embarrassed to release Omni to the public quite frankly.

The writing's been on the wall for a while. I practically rebuilt and improved it for myself using Claude and won't be looking back.

Can you elaborate? What is wrong with Omni, and why is interfaces underwhelming?

Bending Spoons doing Bending Spoon things, next get ready for the 400% price hike and then they will completely fuck the product.

Edit: I think Federico Simionato is particularly bad at product design.

Any open (edit: non Google) alternative recommendations?

google sheets

NocoDB

Visual DB

I’m sad for what is about to happen to Miro…

I finally switched from Evernote to Joplin after I got an email saying my (absurd) $149 annual subscription was going to switch to a $249 one.

Spent a half hour picking Joplin, configuring OneDrive as the sync DB and finding and running a backup script that let me dump and reload a decade of notebooks.

Then I went to finally cancel the beautiful app they destroyed with greed, only to see that the previous tier of pricing was still available. They just decided to "upgrade" me, for profit.

Then after cancelling, they offered me a 40% discount to stay. Lol.

This private equity playbook looks great for a few years, then the ship takes on too much water and the company is worth 0 after burning through all the goodwill and inertia available. Good riddance.

Something somthing "AI won't replace people, but people who use AI will replace people who don't".

Something something Bending Spoons buying Airtable for $2.2B

This is why the west is dying. Instead of creating value, many are simply trying to cut. Nothing grows by cutting, you actually have less. This is why costs of chewing gum to housing is going uo, soo many parasites like this and so little who create new value.

Money supply expansion and attempts to suppress its effects are what is killing the west. That and usury, and a lot of dishonest people.

Like if we jack up mortgage rates to 100% housing prices would drop massively right? Okay at some point mortgages weren’t widespread and now they are, therefore a large percent of the increase in housing costs comes from mortgages enabling the bidding up of housing and land by pulling future earnings into the present. The effect on land is zero sum, and while the effect on the structure is positive sum to a degree (it’s a big contributor to housing getting bigger than it used to be and bigger than it needs to be), the overall effect is negative and so we would be vastly better off banning the practice. Of course that will never happen, but I find it curious that it isn’t even discussed.

There are too many people who just want their cut, on what someone else works hard to produce.

> Like if we jack up mortgage rates to 100% housing prices would drop massively right?

No mortgages are going up because everyone wants to be a "seller" and get a commission from selling houses or mortgages. Just selling something doesnt produce value, its just a tax.

In my country (AU) when i was a kid there was a single government owned electricity and gas company. Todays there are dozens, but they all sell the same "power" and "gas" from the same number of power stations. The business cost of executives, managers, offices, advertising all went up by 20x, all too sell the "same".

This is why those two utilities went up, doesnt take a genius to figure out that if there are MORE hands asking for their cut, the price can only go up.

Housing is the same, theres a limited supply of homes everywhere, because almost NOBODY wants to live far away from the center of the city. The entire housing business is about people buying and selling or renting between themselves and the public. That doesnt add supply it doesnt create new value. Its just a lot of people taking a cut.

Of course downvoted here, but I don't think there is any better word than parasites to describe PE companies like Bending Spoons.

So why downvote ?

I upvoted, I said of course downvote here by HN

Bending Spoons is a new /dev/null in the making

Get used to it, this is the direction of the industry in the age of AI and Bending Spoons is just ahead of the curve.

They really are surfing on the swirling waters of a flushed toilet. All of their products are clearly doomed with AI in the mix, so profitmaxxing is logical but distasteful.

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