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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 $4 to dig out my TSA known traveler number was too much. I loaded it all into another application (Obsidian which is going downhill as well).
Warren Buffett used to do the same for decades, in fact this is how he came to control Berkshire Hathaway which he calls his worst investment, as it wasn't rational and merely driven by ego.
He wanted to take a controlling share of the company and then sell it for pieces so he started to buy increasing stakes in it.
When Berkshire management understood Buffett's plan they decided to stop him to not let him cannibalize and kill the company, and they offered to buy back his shares for 11$ 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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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