Bending Spoons Acquires AOL
Sara Fischer (via Hacker News):
Apollo Global Management has reached a deal to sell AOL to Italian tech holding group Bending Spoons in a deal valued at roughly $1.5 billion, Axios has learned.
[…]
AOL still drives hundreds of millions of dollars of free cash flow. […] Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari said AOL has around 30 million monthly active users across its email and web content properties.
[…]
Bending Spoons has also raised $2.8 billion in debt financing that will be used to fund the AOL deal as well as future research and development investments and merger and acquisition opportunities.
Previously:
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Holy shit. That's what I said out loud when I read this, sorry. So many headlines lately 90s me thought I'd never see.
THE AOL acquired by...the company that buys apps that can't seem to monetize?
Which now that I say that, makes perfect sense, but still. Weird sentence to read.
I used to work at Vimeo as a software dev. I was there when Adam Gross tried selling us to Bending Spoons the first time (and failed).
There were internal rumors that Anjali Sud, Mark Kornfilt, other execs, and the board fudged numbers to take Vimeo public in 2021, using the height of COVID money and online service traffic to justify it. Anjali was never able to get the stock to recover after it made its descent, and she ultimately left. I can't vouch for the truthiness of it, but again, this is what we were speculating internally.
After Anjali, Adam Gross, a board member, stepped in as an interim CEO, but refused to drop the interim title. Little did we know he was preparing us for a sale. Little did we know it was a sale to Bending Spoons - infamous for nuking like 90% of existing staff, which scared the shit out of us.
Most of my time there was turbulent. We went through three rounds of RIFs, which demoralized staff and made everyone distrustful. The entire c-suite did a full turnover while I was there, and then some, which also didn't help on that front.
After each RIF, teams got disbanded, reorganized, and re-chartered, which further confused, demoralized staff, and introduced weird inefficiencies. I (mostly a backend engineer) ended up on a team that was purely front-end React/TS and hated it. Constant changes in product direction meant that a bunch of my work never actually made it into prod. I ended up leaving on good terms, but not great terms.
Vimeo made a lot of stupid and hostile product and sales decisions, stuff that pushed the creative base of the site off to other services, and Vimeo did it because they realized they couldn't compete with YouTube. Users left in droves for iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Adobe, YouTube, etc.
Vimeo thought they could make up for it in enterprise sales, but Brightcove and other players were better suited for that task. The execs, I think, realized that there wasn't any solution, and the only way out was to sell to someone else and make it their problem.
All this to say that I'm really curious at what Bending Spoons sees in either AOL or Vimeo. They're both at various stages of dying. AOL has... ad tech and people who have legacy @aol.com email addresses?
