alt.hn

6/8/2026 at 3:04:17 PM

Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO

 https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/italys-bending-spoons-files-us-ipo-2026-06-08/

by mmarian

6/8/2026 at 4:50:20 PM

I'm old enough to have been acquired by Computer Associates at a company that acquired my company. CA's business model was to buy companies and then fold their products into an omnibus license, all of their customers, including the ones they just acquired, becoming involuntary licensees whatever the cat dragged in this quarter.

It turns out a lot of corporate IT has no idea how to switch vendors in case a product they use gets acquired by a company with this business model.

by Zigurd

6/8/2026 at 5:21:40 PM

> It turns out a lot of corporate IT has no idea how to switch vendors in case a product they use gets acquired by a company with this business model.

This always shocks me. I moved a company off of Salesforce in 45 days without a big issue. Day 1 was a bit slower but by day 2 folks were back at full speed. I've pulled off EMR migrations, ERP, accounting, etc. Moving is scary but doable.

Sometimes the execs will just pay rather than risk anything. At my last job I spent 7 months researching and building a migration plan for an app that was literally costing us customers/patients because it was so bad. Came back with a plan to move to a better system (of of 38 I researched), 6 month implementation, $800k/yr savings directly, another $400k indirectly from other tools we could cancel because the new tool would do all of that. The board ignored me and the rest of the C-suite, and went back to the vendor and signed a new agreement that INCREASED the yearly bill from $1.2m to $1.8m/yr. They completely cut me out of all the negotiations, I didn't even know it was happening, and I was the CIO. I quit, and they're now being sold at a firesale price.

by burnte

6/8/2026 at 7:57:19 PM

Why was the board involved in that decision to begin with?

by Seattle3503

6/8/2026 at 8:50:50 PM

That is both an excellent question and the root problem at that company. The PE firm was a majority shareholder, drive the board, and there were two board members who were HEAVILY involved in the company. Too heavily, they kept making decisions about them and not the company, and that's why I left. Several months later the PE firm was tired if waiting for results, fired those two board members and sold their share of the company at a big loss.

I was really surprised, because one of the two I'd worked with at three other companies, all of which had successful exits (including an inpatient healthcare provider that we ran and sold during COVID!). Something changed, and at this company he made it all about him making the calls and not just trusting his CEO and company staff. He froze out the C-suite, manipulated facts to cause a change of leadership, and in 6 months he forced the new CEO to do all these dumb ideas we'd already tried repeatedly, taking the company from being break even and close to profit to a $2m/month revenue shortfall. There were structural process issues inside the company but he just kept insisting we needed a bigger marketing spend, "marketing can fix any problem."

by burnte

6/9/2026 at 4:24:42 AM

> The PE firm

ah, can stop there

by LearnYouALisp

6/9/2026 at 6:37:46 PM

Lots are bad, some aren't.

by burnte

6/8/2026 at 11:44:01 PM

What is your ERM of choices? Opinion on EPIC?

by greazy

6/9/2026 at 1:59:37 PM

I think for most companies EPIC is too much, and EPIC tends to agree, they won't talk to you unless you have at least a thousand providers.

I can't pick one over all, it really depends on what your health care company does. I researched dozens to find one for our company, and it was one focused on behavioral health.

In general I'd say stay away from Nextgen like the plague, and avoid Netsmart too. Those are the worst I've ever seen. I could write a small book about Nextgen's failures.

by burnte

6/8/2026 at 5:45:45 PM

Curious what did you move them into from SF? SF is usually treated as this infallible perfect piece of software by non-tech folks, especially those looking to pad their resumes.

by fakedang

6/8/2026 at 8:48:07 PM

I worked at SugarCRM for years. It's often easier than one suspects once you figured out what a customer pain points are and show them a less burdensome solve. Most businesses do not need the kitchen sink approach of SFDC or SAP, they just have rarely had that demo'd to them.

by zeruch

6/8/2026 at 5:53:31 PM

Do _you_ know what three easy replacements are? If no, how do you know those people are looking to pad their resumes, did you figure that out from your non-SF conversations?

by temp_praneshp

6/8/2026 at 8:39:51 PM

SF has worked very hard to cultivate that reputation, and at the end of the day they're mostly an overpriced application host. Once you communicate to the stakeholders that what they have in SF is just another application, and not actually "special", the conversations become a lot easier to have. They feel like Salesforce has them over a barrel at renewal time and helping them understand they CAN move makes a lot of conversations happen.

The answer to what have I switched people to is at the end of this post.

One company was using SF as a patient management system because their EMR wasn't set up right. They spent 6 figures a year on SF just to communicate with patients, make and change appointments, send and receive documents, record insurance information, etc. I spend 2 months fixing the EMR and they moved everyone to that, canceled, SF, and saved $200k/yr on SF and another $250k/yr on SF consultants. For a $50m/yr business, that's a lot.

Another was using SF as a ticket system. Those folks we moved to FreshService. $180k down to $15k/yr. From my experience, ticket systems tend to be one of the most common existing applications that get duplicated inside SF. People think they have to build it in SF rather than just linking your apps. There was another company who kept SF for their CRM aspects but we moved them to an external ticket system that linked to SF and cut their SF bill from $550/yr to $270/yr.

Then there have been cases where I'm brought in while in the middle of a development project. One of my favorites was this consulting firm said they could do all these things and integrate their EMR and Salesforce and that they had done it before with their custom middleware. But every month there'd be a new change-order from them where they said certain things weren't possible, and it came with an invoice! They were CHARGING this company to reduce the scope of an approved, signed, paid contract. I jumped in and said, "we're not paying any of these change orders, you don't get to charge us to do less work. You promised all these features, you said your software ALREADY DID them. What's the problem?" Then for two months we went round and round where I was able to offer them methods to do every single feature they said wasn't possible, and then they'd invent another reason they couldn't do it. I said we're done, canceling the contract, not paying any open invoices, not paying the remainder of the invoice, and in exchange I wouldn't recommend we sue them to get back everything we paid so far. Their own lawyer agreed, and we parted ways. They had us sign a Salesforce contract before we even paid them, so we were a year into a 3 years salesforce contract and literally nothing had been built out. By this time it turns out I had a reputation in the salesforce finance department, so it didn't take a lot of arguing to get them to offer a 50% reduction in exchange for paying off the contract immediately and canceling it.

What they get moved to depends on what they actually need. 50% of the time it's not a CRM at all but a more appropriate app like an EMR, ticket system, ERP, scheduling apps, invocing solutions for existing accounting apps, etc.

The rest of the time it'll be to CRMs and marketing tools that already exist, or custom extensions/connectors to their apps or a way to link their apps and a CRM. I've moved folks to Monday, Nutshell, Hubspot (who I don't like either but they're better than SF), a dozen others.

I haven't dealt with a company yet that couldn't move to a cheaper alternative with no loss in functionality. If execs have emotional ties to SF then I can't do anything. I had one client, the sales VP shot down a conversion because he liked being able to say "we run on Salesforce!" Literally. he liked being able to brag they could afford Salesforce. I just left that one alone.

by burnte

6/9/2026 at 4:11:40 AM

> I had one client, the sales VP shot down a conversion because he liked being able to say "we run on Salesforce!" Literally. he liked being able to brag they could afford Salesforce. I just left that one alone.

Unfortunately this is what I meant by the braggarts and resume padders. It's usually only after these people leave that the company takes a serious look at their books and then decide that they want to move away from SF.

Salesforce is the most bloated piece of any software I've ever seen, and I've seen Azure. Apples and oranges, yes, but Azure is far more navigable than Salesforce.

Once when planning to buy some property, I watched for 10 minutes as the real estate sales agent painstakingly took about 10 minutes to navigate through and book an apartment for me. Enough time for me to start second-guessing about buying the property. Had SF been faster, I would've been stuck with some really illiquid shit.

by fakedang

6/8/2026 at 6:59:27 PM

Sometimes these deals are backroom friends/frat bros/sex etc and make no sense without knowing that crap.

by gedy

6/8/2026 at 8:42:54 PM

Oh yes, I've had proposals rejected for terrible reasons. "I like bragging we can afford Salesforce." "We're special, other companies can't do what we do and other platforms can't do what Salesforce does." "I go back years with Salesbozo, he's giving us deals no one else gets, I trust him." (meanwhile they're paying 10% under list, not a good deal at all).

One of my absolute favorites was, "well, our Salesforce consultant is the husband of the VP of marketing so we can't do anything that would eliminate his contract." In the end we got rid of Salesforce, him, AND the VP of marketing.

by burnte

6/8/2026 at 9:11:20 PM

Yeah I hate the double standards here, if someone lower level recommends someone that they know or heaven forbid related to HR acts like they must quash this awful nepotism and scheming ha.

by gedy

6/9/2026 at 12:03:04 AM

HR works for leadership. Everything is consistent from that starting point.

by ethbr1

6/8/2026 at 5:01:10 PM

The number of corporate IT departments got caught when VMWare licencing shifted from Dell EMC to Broadcom https://www.techradar.com/pro/broadcom-has-allegedly-hiked-v...

by Maxious

6/8/2026 at 6:15:11 PM

This still confuses me. It's clear they wanted to 10x licensing costs and /10 customers which assumably raises margins, but i still dont see it working out.

My international enterprise and all our business partners moved every broadcom product we have to a competitor. On top of that, they were very aggressive and combative with their sales+cease and desist threats.

They earned enemies for life. Some of us care about business relationships. Broadcom is dead to me and anyone that will listen to me.

by kryogen1c

6/8/2026 at 8:00:24 PM

> They earned enemies for life. Some of us care about business relationships. Broadcom is dead to me and anyone that will listen to me.

That's the thing: Broadcom don't. Care, bother, whatever. You are not even a blip.

by justsomehnguy

6/8/2026 at 7:38:36 PM

That's what people have been saying about Oracle for decades, and they're still going strong

by nikanj

6/8/2026 at 5:06:25 PM

For context, Broadcom bought CA.

by Zigurd

6/8/2026 at 3:55:53 PM

IMO, they buy companies, lay off en masse and sell the now sunsetted products.

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.

by k310

6/8/2026 at 4:23:15 PM

They also have a very intense workplace culture, I had a manager who was part of Evernote while their site was being laid off by Bending Spoons, and he heard some wild stories, they pay above average for a European tech company (but with geo-fenced brackets), crunch a ton and then crash out at a big new year's party were they fly all their teams to some resort, among other things.

by w4der

6/8/2026 at 5:12:46 PM

New Year's party with your coworkers at a resort sounds like hell. Or a script for a Jonah Hill movie.

by ElProlactin

6/8/2026 at 4:25:50 PM

Wow sounds very family friendly!

by orsorna

6/8/2026 at 5:02:14 PM

So?

Doesn't sound any worse than the average restaurant.

by cucumber3732842

6/8/2026 at 8:36:55 PM

How many people work in your family? How many different events in random parts of the world can your family attend together at mid-night December 31st?

by marcosdumay

6/9/2026 at 6:24:03 AM

[dead]

by Woshiwuja

6/8/2026 at 4:35:37 PM

This guy dubbed it “get Komooted”, as they pulled the same trick for used-to-be-great cycling app Komoot: https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/

The app quality almost immediately went down the drain after the acquisition by Bending Spoons.

by frevib

6/8/2026 at 4:56:59 PM

With LLMs, I feel like they'll have the last laugh.

by doctorpangloss

6/8/2026 at 10:05:12 PM

I don't like PE players like Bending Spoons, but I have used Komoot extensively for years, for cycling (and more recently hiking), and haven't seen any decrease in quality since the acquisition.

by insane_dreamer

6/8/2026 at 5:19:31 PM

Yep. They fucked up Komoot so badly that I'm building my own cycling app

by flaviolivolsi

6/8/2026 at 5:22:27 PM

They didn’t burn Evernote to the ground to my surprise, but I jumped ship the day they bought it.

It turned out that I have grown out of Evernote anyway, so no big loss.

by bayindirh

6/8/2026 at 8:22:45 PM

I really liked Evernote but they raised the price too much for me.

I used it mostly as an archive for long term storage where I could find things easily and it was pleasant to use. When it was $36 / year it made sense for me. I probably only used it a dozen or two times every year so it cost me roughly $1 / session.

Then they quadrupled the price for me and paying $4 to dig out my TSA known traveler number was too much. I loaded it all into another application (Obsidian which is going downhill as well).

by criddell

6/8/2026 at 11:41:43 PM

In what way is Obsidian going downhill?

by kepano

6/9/2026 at 12:23:45 PM

Like Evernote, they keep adding more and more features and functionality to the core product. The original idea of it being a great notes application over a directory of markdown files (and attachments) was simple and brilliant.

I think they jumped the shark with the canvas feature. They had to add a non-markdown file to the directory system and signaled that they were okay moving on from the original idea. Obsidian has only gotten fatter since then.

Canvas and the other big changes are all interesting ideas, but they should be a separate product or products. IMHO, Obsidian should be recognized as complete and go into a maintenance mode where stability, security, and performance are the development goals.

I think they worry that if they slow down, their paying customers (of which I am one) will jump ship. For some of us, it's the opposite.

by criddell

6/9/2026 at 1:45:59 PM

(context: I help make Obsidian)

Canvas can be disabled in Core Plugins, like most other features.

In general I mostly see the opposite criticism: that Obsidian out of the box is too barebones and that it requires plugins to be useful.

I tend to be more on your side though. I prefer Obsidian to be as streamlined as possible and hate bloat. Last year I asked the community "what should we remove from the app?" And I mostly got feature requests :(

https://x.com/kepano/status/1890957031017730335

It's a hard thing to balance, but what makes me hopeful that Obsidian won't become bloatware is:

1. We're only seven people, we don't have investors, and we plan to stay a small team so we don't have the same growth pressure that Evernote faced. We simply don't have that much bandwidth.

2. The file-over-app approach makes it easier to build opt-in interoperable tools like you describe. We've explicitly focused on shipping things like Obsidian API, URI, and CLI instead of building everything into the app (most other teams in our space seem busy stuffing a bunch of AI junk in their apps). One example is Obsidian Web Clipper, a separate tool we made that has matured into a great separate product.

3. Plugins (both core and community) mean you can make the app as streamlined as you want.

by kepano

6/9/2026 at 3:21:27 PM

> Obsidian out of the box is too barebones and that it requires plugins to be useful.

From my perspective, it's absolutely not. I have a couple of vaults, and only one of them has one community plugin installed, and that's edit history. I'm pretty happy with what it provides out of the box.

I have a couple of friends who uses bigger/heavier plugins like media manager to basically transform Obsidian to other tools, but as a note taking tool and wiki/digital garden publishing platform, it does a great job out of the box.

I currently trust it to keep my most valuable notes, to be honest.

Please keep it up that way. I really feel sad when the tools I like go haywire and I'm forced to stop supporting the people behind that because I can't use the tool anymore.

Thanks for all the hard work.

by bayindirh

6/9/2026 at 4:16:21 PM

I appreciate the response and am glad to hear that my less-is-more preference isn't dismissed.

It's been a while so I went through my plugins settings. About half of the core plugins are enabled and I've never enabled community plugins.

The responses to your post on x are pretty disheartening. So many zero-effort replies along with gems like "make it simple like Notion".

by criddell

6/9/2026 at 7:25:30 AM

I'm wondering about this as well. I don't see a decline either. I use their Sync and Publish services as well.

by bayindirh

6/9/2026 at 7:27:34 AM

Hi! Not the OP but I've used Obsidian since before 2020 till about 2022 when I switched to org-mode and Emacs.

I like the new Obsidian features like the CLI a lot but I still feel Obsidian inherently is incredibly similar to org-mode and Emacs (guess that's why I was drawn to both) in the sense that both work with local data and file formats that usually can be opened in any text editor but both of them bolt so much stuff on top that the files themselves (markdown or org) become incredibly coupled and hard to use by themselves.

Now of course in Obsidian's case you're not forced to install a lot of plugins that lead to this issue but I don't know a lot of people that have the diligence to keep their notes "light". Though if I remember from your blog post showcasing how you do note-taking you might qualify.

And then it's also the fact that you've got a powerful piece of kit and now you're not supposed to mold it to your needs and preferences and avoid driving it hard, instead you're forced to practice discipline. Sure, there's something to be said for that too but that's besides the point.

If I understood correctly Obsidian is readying for a plugin marketplace akin to the Unity Asset Store and I'm personally thinking this might drive you to monetize Obsidian harder even though you've shown throughout the years you're a great steward of it.

To get to the point finally I guess people are worried that because Obsidian itself is not open source at some point it might evolve in a way that becomes incompatible with most peoples' preferences and for me that's where something like org-mode and Emacs inch ahead because it's FOSS.

That said thank you for Obsidian. It was my entry point towards clearer thinking and brought a semblance of structure when I needed it most. I don't use it anymore but I watch enthusiastically from the sidelines.

tl;dr the chance of a paid plugin marketplace might signal a shift in the community

by aquariusDue

6/9/2026 at 1:54:37 PM

> the chance of a paid plugin marketplace might signal a shift in the community

Where the heck are you getting this from? We are explicitly not doing this.

by kepano

6/9/2026 at 2:37:23 PM

My bad! I've mixed up some parts from this official blog post[0] and some talk in the community.

I thought the "What does it mean for a plugin to be Paid or have Optional Payments?" part from the FAQ was hinting towards the chance for people to sell plugins on https://community.obsidian.md/ and Obsidian itself would facilitate the transaction for a small cut at some point in the future.

I'm glad that's not the case and I apologize again for the confusion though I hope it's clear now why I believed this in the first place.

[0] https://obsidian.md/blog/future-of-plugins/

by aquariusDue

6/9/2026 at 4:12:03 PM

I really don't understand how one could come to that conclusion. The blog post states that "Obsidian Community is not a store". I wrote that so that the community explicitly knows we are not going in that direction.

The new labels are meant to indicate which plugins have payments, since many plugins connect to paid services. There is no intention for Obsidian to ever become a middleman.

by kepano

6/9/2026 at 4:45:03 PM

Yeah, that's on me. Thanks for clearing this up. I hope my previous comment didn't come across as doubling down on my mistake!

Now after our interaction I don't worry that much that Obsidian is closed source, it's clear that it's in the right hands.

Also I want to say that I hope JSON Canvas catches on, initially I was worried that the Canvas feature would lead to a "soft lockdown" but it isn't the case and I've found out about it recently. Thank you for the work that went into it!

by aquariusDue

6/8/2026 at 5:04:07 PM

Warren Buffett used to do the same for decades, in fact this is how he came to control Berkshire Hathaway which he calls his worst investment, as it wasn't rational and merely driven by ego.

He wanted to take a controlling share of the company and then sell it for pieces so he started to buy increasing stakes in it.

When Berkshire management understood Buffett's plan they decided to stop him to not let him cannibalize and kill the company, and they offered to buy back his shares for 11$ a share which he accepted as it would've been a 2x return on his investment in a very short time span.

But then they made the critical mistake of low balling him by 1$ per share when it came to sign the documents, and he got so much emotional that he went and bought the entire company to prove a point and fire the management.

It was not a good idea and he would not make money on that acquisition, so after selling off the assets he decided to make it the holding for its other investments.

by epolanski

6/8/2026 at 9:01:52 PM

Buffett wasn't liquidating textile mills. What would happen is that all the publicly traded New England textile companies themselves would close down unprofitable mill locations to stay alive and would use the resulting cash from liquidating the real estate to do a tender offer. Buffett simply bought the shares and waited for the next tender offer to happen.

When Buffett eventually did take control of the Berkshire, he poured tons of money into it to try to keep it alive, and eventually lost every dollar he invested. He didn't make the decision to shut down the last mill until 1985! That was 20 years after taking control. Throwing all that good money after bad to try keeping it afloat is why he called it a 'monumentally stupid decision'.

by missedthecue

6/8/2026 at 4:27:53 PM

I guess somebody out there has gotta make the croutons

by konfusinomicon

6/8/2026 at 4:20:55 PM

It's the circle of life - all businesses reach a point where they don't have significant growth potential or became a "keep the lights on" operation, and at that point their investors and founders wish to exit and cash out in order to invest in greener pastures.

That's where businesses like Bending Spoons, Red Ventures, and IAC come in for digital media.

by alephnerd

6/8/2026 at 3:43:46 PM

Per Wikipedia, Bending Spoons owns: AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite, Evernote, Harvest, Issuu, Komoot, Meetup, MileIQ, Remini, StreamYard, Tractive, Vimeo, and WeTransfer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons

by elffjs

6/8/2026 at 4:01:49 PM

You missed filmic. Wow. So these people are the reason why Filmic went overnight from one of my favorite iOS apps to something for the trash heap.

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. I haven't used evernote in almost a decade but it actually seems.. fine? I stopped using it when the company started selling merch as a latch ditch effort to make money.

by postalcoder

6/8/2026 at 4:33:14 PM

They're basically the retirement home for once-good apps and services who still serve a dwindling core audience but are not longer growing or even a real contender in their field.

by fckgw

6/8/2026 at 4:57:09 PM

At least Evernote was saved by Bending Spoons. At one point, even Evernote was getting roughly a third of its monthly revenue from merchandise, which is pretty wild for a paperless note-taking app and a decent sign that the core business was already in bad shape. For the rest, though, they seem very good at squeezing hard whatever is left.

by BonoboIO

6/8/2026 at 7:54:09 PM

Yep, but now they’re jacking the pricing to the moon and everyone is starting to leave for other apps. I almost did it this year and probably will do it next year.

by drob518

6/8/2026 at 9:01:11 PM

I left last month. $250 a year or something crazy like that. Obsidian has a free web clipper, I'm planning on using that since I was just bookmarking stuff.

by jonfromsf

6/9/2026 at 6:30:58 PM

Exactly. I’m trying out Obsidian this year. In Bending Spoon’s defense, they have been improving the app, particularly the sync, but I don’t care about many of the new features (e.g., AI stuff).

by drob518

6/8/2026 at 3:45:06 PM

> "Founded in 2013, Bending Spoons reported a net income of $27.5 million on revenue of $601 million for the three months ended March 31, compared to a net loss of $112.2 million on revenue of $259 million a year earlier. A large chunk of its revenue comes from recurring subscriptions, providing a more predictable stream of income."

Gergely Orosz did an interview with them in 2024:

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...

by raphman

6/8/2026 at 4:42:48 PM

Clever, shitty numbers and they decide to IPO at the peak of the "actually SaaS is worthless" hype. I wish them the worst, considering their business model.

by stefan_

6/8/2026 at 6:27:21 PM

In Italy they are really frowned upon by developers. They add 0 value. And it's not like "Oh, VC firms add 0 value to companies they acquire", this is really messed up.

by gekoxyz

6/8/2026 at 4:42:50 PM

So roughly $100m/year profit(edit). They are looking for a 20Bn valuation but interest rates are at 5%? How does any of this make any sense? That or we are in a real bubble.

by csomar

6/8/2026 at 4:55:33 PM

You're mixing up the numbers. Their annual run rate is $2.4 billion. Revenue grew 140% YoY. That's an 8x sales multiple on good growth. The valuation is not egregious.

by postalcoder

6/8/2026 at 5:13:49 PM

Sorry I meant profit. On a 5% interest, you get 1bn (pure profit with no risks) per year for a 20bn of capital. Their revenue grew 140% YoY but does that account for new acquisitions? Also, their profit needs to grow x10 in order to match bonds. It may have made sense in a 0% interest rate world but not at 5.

by csomar

6/8/2026 at 5:29:48 PM

It's a business model that's like a shark: perpetually swimming and eating or it's dying. That's how they can show big increases in revenue, but the profits are always decaying along with the products.

by Zigurd

6/8/2026 at 4:08:57 PM

I'm often thinking about building a better Meetup, it's so expensive for organizers these days. But then I acknowledge the network effects and I give up. And they own Eventbrite too! Savvy people.

by mmarian

6/8/2026 at 4:15:59 PM

I see a lot of people using https://luma.com/. I'm sure it's not as big as Meetup but it does have a decent community of users, and you can set up pretty much anything with their free plan.

by burkaman

6/8/2026 at 5:10:54 PM

I had a good giggle when I opened their homepage and it looks exactly like the Performative-UI library[1] currently in the #1 spot.

by baggachipz

6/8/2026 at 4:20:20 PM

Luma doesn't do discoverability well unfortunately. Also very tech centric.

by mmarian

6/8/2026 at 4:27:44 PM

I think it depends where you are. SF is all tech stuff but https://luma.com/chicago for example is mostly non-tech.

by burkaman

6/8/2026 at 4:41:06 PM

Oh, didn't know that. My perspective is from the UK.

by mmarian

6/8/2026 at 4:19:08 PM

At least in the Bay, Luma and Partiful are much bigger than Meetup now.

by alephnerd

6/8/2026 at 4:21:02 PM

Interesting. Luma is getting traction in London. Not so much outside.

by mmarian

6/8/2026 at 4:24:19 PM

It's about the user bases - Luma and Partiful are almost entirely professionals in careers like Tech, Finance, or Entertainment (especially LA), and the events almost always vet before accepting people.

This helps ensure a better noise to signal ratio that Meetup simply couldn't provide.

by alephnerd

6/8/2026 at 4:38:11 PM

Interesting point, but I personally didn't find Meetup had a noise issue. You could filter for the right stuff, pretty easily. Also I don't see how Luma/Partiful will avoid this problem eventually.

by mmarian

6/8/2026 at 10:50:26 PM

I've looked at Luma and have mixed thoughts. The UI is a massive improvement over Meetup. However, it seems to be following the standard VC funded business model of attracting users and pushing excessive monetization once users are dependent.

by gulugawa

6/8/2026 at 4:42:33 PM

Partiful feels like it has replaced Facebook Events, Meetup, and the other formerly-popular hubs for in-person event planning.

by bsimpson

6/8/2026 at 4:52:16 PM

Hmm, didn't know of Partiful. Quick look at landing page, seems more geared to parties and more social media-y? Meetup's event listing was good as it was; well, before they started charging for you to even see who's attending.

by mmarian

6/8/2026 at 6:11:10 PM

In NY + SF, it's used for anything you might want to attend that would be organized by an individual - parties, meetups, food crawls, classes, concerts, local events, etc.

by bsimpson

6/8/2026 at 7:06:48 PM

Interesting, learned something new, thanks!

by mmarian

6/8/2026 at 4:13:48 PM

Isn’t this just Luma?

by baron816

6/8/2026 at 4:21:54 PM

See reply I just made in other thread.

by mmarian

6/8/2026 at 10:47:10 PM

I think we should try to build local hobby-specific websites and then have aggregator sites for event discovery.

I made one for in person board game events in the Washington DC area at https://dmvboardgames.com/

by gulugawa

6/8/2026 at 8:11:02 PM

Mark my words: they will keep growing until they collapse, and once that happens, they will use their reach and contacts with the Italian government to ask to be bailed out out of debt. It’s not a matter of “if”, but “when”.

It’s a well known strategy that has been applied by several Italian companies, FIAT (now Stellantis) first and foremost.

by easyThrowaway

6/8/2026 at 3:53:27 PM

Their strategy always was "buy company" and "instantly lay off about everyone" to save costs and rapidly increase subscription pricing (1).

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/

by foresterre

6/8/2026 at 4:16:08 PM

You can imagine all of these moderately successful SAAS companies that see peak subscribers starting to fall off on top of legacy tech stacks and no will to make drastic steps to get back to growth and understand why they sell. I've never seen BS as specifically ruining companies (although they've certainly been known to jack up prices for the remaining subscribers) but it's not a good sign when they do buy something you use.

by threetonesun

6/8/2026 at 5:32:17 PM

What would you rather have? A five-year struggle to turn around a stagnant SaaS, or a big fat check? It's a simple and effective model. First one out gets the biggest check.

by Zigurd

6/8/2026 at 3:44:55 PM

Interesting, Vimeo sat under IAC for almost 20 years claiming it would go public, when it finally did it was eventually sold off to Bending Spoons not even 5 years in.

by righthand

6/8/2026 at 3:47:21 PM

While I'm not a huge fan of the Bending Spoons model, Vimeo sure got improved quickly.

by michelb

6/8/2026 at 4:05:09 PM

What exactly? From what I’ve heard, most of what was released in the months after the acquisition were features that were already in development/behind feature flags.

by muglug

6/9/2026 at 5:03:54 AM

Speed, UI improvements, esp in the backend. Vimeo has been languishing for years. If this was all done by the original team, I wonder why they didn't roll it out years earlier. I've switched several clients away because of it.

by michelb

6/8/2026 at 3:37:52 PM

They also own Komoot and I am anxiously awaiting the enshittification.

As of now my use cases still work and it certainly helped that I bought the lifetime all-world map package.

by lhoff

6/8/2026 at 4:23:57 PM

It has already started, many features which you could previously access without an account are now locked behind a login screen.

by w4der

6/9/2026 at 11:04:46 AM

From my view, komoot got a lot better since it was bought by BS. I don't know how they did this while laying off a lot of devs, but compared to the years before, a ton of useful things got shipped.

Disclaimer: I have the yearly subscription. Maybe the new features are only available for customers who are subscribing, not the one-time purchases.

by sarnu

6/8/2026 at 3:51:00 PM

It's still a big mystery to me how they were able to pull billion-dollar acquisitions while being one or two orders of magnitude lower in revenue.

>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.

by moralestapia

6/8/2026 at 3:55:19 PM

Leverage. They’re essentially an 80s style junk bond LBO house.

by adw

6/8/2026 at 11:02:53 PM

I looked at the Bending Spoons employee handbook, and they openly admit that employee performance is evaluated on "making an impact". To me, this means adding pointless features for the sake of getting better ratings.

Since Bending Spoons purchased Meetup, I have noticed the UI becoming more cluttered and hard to use. Also, I consistently get ads asking me to buy an organizer subscription to host events, even when on the page for a group I'm an organizer for.

After seeing this emphasis on "impact" cause Meetup's UI to degrade, I'm skeptical about the company's long term future.

by gulugawa

6/9/2026 at 2:23:04 AM

> I looked at the Bending Spoons employee handbook, and they openly admit that employee performance is evaluated on "making an impact". To me, this means adding pointless features for the sake of getting better ratings.

I worked at a company that was all about impact. Take the site down, that's a lot of impact ... If they wanted something else, they should have been more specific.

by toast0

6/8/2026 at 6:21:32 PM

Another IPO that I will be avoiding.

by defmetrix

6/8/2026 at 4:23:07 PM

IPOing just before an evident .com tech bubble is about to explode is courageous. Good luck to everyone.

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 expected market valuation is way off. But worry not: market will fix that.

by kome

6/8/2026 at 4:51:56 PM

> despite the naysayers, they improve things a bit on most of their acquisitions

There seem to be quite a few commenters stating the exact opposite, with concrete examples in hand (especially for Komoot). Do you have experience with any of the services they've bought, and can say how they've been improved?

by greggoB

6/8/2026 at 5:19:02 PM

Not the OP, but from a stock market perspective, improvement can mean "lay off workers, and raise subscription prices". Not good for the users, but good for the kinds of people who like reading news about IPOs.

by fhdkweig

6/8/2026 at 5:55:33 PM

Fair enough, though I do bristle at the use of the term "real value", like somehow it's a general net positive. They should at least qualify with "for shareholders" so we can know that their interests are specifically directed at financial enrichment

by greggoB

6/8/2026 at 5:11:37 PM

why is it courageous?

It seems the perfect time to do it while the market is still bubbly.

by riffraff

6/8/2026 at 3:45:02 PM

But how will they make it about AI...?

by xnx

6/8/2026 at 3:48:09 PM

Hmm, assuming that the AI bubble might pop a little bit after the upcoming IPOs, maybe it's better not to call yourself an AI company then?

by raphman

6/8/2026 at 3:54:10 PM

That seems like a very odd assumption to make.

by joxdosba

6/8/2026 at 4:03:30 PM

20VC had an interview with them: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/luca-ferrari

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.

by martin_drapeau

6/8/2026 at 4:29:32 PM

So first they fire all the staff and then they "care and improve the products"? Who? Who does that? They fired the staff, so who improves the product?

by baobabKoodaa

6/8/2026 at 4:37:34 PM

They fire everybody and then they bring in way cheaper European developers.

by kryptiskt

6/8/2026 at 4:52:50 PM

Especially Swiss developers, best bang-for-buck on the continent ;)

by greggoB