The story of what Bending Spoons has built is very impressive, and I’m a customer of theirs through Evernote, WordPress uses Meetup a ton. I think Automattic’s Noho office used to belong to Meetup. They’ve built an incredible engineering and product culture that can terraform technology stacks into something much more efficient. I think their acquisitions of Vimeo and AOL are brilliant. This interview with Luca Ferrari on Invest Like The Best goes into their story and unique culture. I also always love a good Matrix reference. 🙂
I was thinking of ditching my Evernote subscription a few years ago due to the stagnant nature of the product. Out of the blue Bending Spoons bought it. I thought I’d give them a few months just in case they were able to turn it around.
I’m still a subscriber. They completely changed the app. Technological improvements for the existing features, then a host of new features, driven by their engagement with users. I’m really rather impressed.
I opened the Komoot app the other day and saw that (at some point) they acquired that too. Hoping for the same experience!
Unfortunately their adding of new features doesn’t take away from the lack of stability and reliability in the core product (taking/storing/searching notes, clippings, PDFs, etc.). I’m a longtime paying user (since Phil’s time) but Evernote can’t be relied on for mission-critical work, whether for business, preparing for a professional exam, or writing a novel (all of which I’ve tried using Evernote for and been burned by lost data, sync problems, search problems, or lag to the point of being unusable). It’s a shame as I don’t know of any real Evernote competitor with structure built-in, and I’d gladly pay much much much more for a stable service.
Yes, Bending Spoons is impressive, especially their history of layoffs:
– WeTransfer: 75% of staff
– Evernote: Most of Evernote’s US and Chile-based employees plus a round of 129 layoffs in February 2023.
– Filmic: The entire staff.
– Meetup: mass layoffs.
– Brightcove: more than 85% of staff.
– Vimeo: TBD
That you didn’t mention any of this is in your post is incredble.
He says in the interview that’s their model. They don’t buy businesses with the intention of running them as they were before, they idea is they could be run radically more effectively.