Former Evernote manager details Bending Spoons layoffs and non-disparagement severance clauses

A former Evernote engineering manager has published an insider account of the months following Bending Spoons' January 2023 acquisition of the note-taking company, describing deep vendor cuts, a near-doubling of subscription prices and a February 2023 layoff of 129 people. Writing in a personal essay that reached the front page of Hacker News, Alex Kras — who managed the team that built and ran Evernote's notifications system, handling 110 million messages in 2022 — says he is free to speak only because he resigned on his own terms: severance packages offered to laid-off colleagues came with non-disparagement clauses.

How the sale unfolded

According to Kras, then-CEO Ian Small announced the sale at an all-hands in November 2022, presenting Bending Spoons as a carefully chosen successor that would honor Evernote's legacy. Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari addressed employees but avoided making commitments to existing staff. The deal closed in early January 2023, with Bending Spoons co-founder Francesco Patarnello taking over.

The post also traces Evernote's long slide: founded in 2004 by Stepan Pachikov, scaled under Phil Libin with more than $200 million raised between 2009 and 2014, then repeatedly trimmed — an 18 percent staff cut in 2015 and a further 15 percent in 2018, the year Ian Small became CEO.

A roll-up built on locked-in users

Kras frames Bending Spoons as an app roll-up. Its founders, Italian engineers who met at the Technical University of Denmark, began by buying an iPhone keyboard app for roughly $10,000, cutting its costs, raising its prices and moving on to the next target. Bigger deals followed — Splice from GoPro in 2018, Remini in 2021 — and a $340 million funding round in September 2022, with actor Ryan Reynolds among the investors, preceded the Evernote purchase. The post lists later acquisitions of Meetup, WeTransfer, Vimeo, AOL, Eventbrite and Airtable, plus a July 2026 Nasdaq IPO that valued the firm at $18.4 billion on reported 2025 revenue of $1.31 billion.

Life inside the transition

The Italian delegation set up shop in a glass-walled conference room at Evernote's office, and employees watched their futures being decided in plain view. A welcoming party in Redwood City struck many as odd, since no commitment to retain staff had been made. Bending Spoons also embedded its own people into departments; Kras's team got what he describes as a shadow manager setting direction.

Before any layoffs, everyone was asked to sign a document whose core message, per Kras, was that employees are responsible for their own work-life balance and that the company would make no special accommodations for anyone. Those unwilling to sign could take a voluntary exit — he recalls around three months' salary, COBRA coverage and a laptop, while cautioning that his memory of those early terms may be off and that publicly reported severance in July 2023 ran to 16 weeks plus bonus and health insurance. Three of his six developers took the package and quickly landed elsewhere.

Cuts first, prices second

Evernote had roughly $100 million in annual recurring revenue but was still losing money. Bending Spoons reviewed every vendor contract: Zoom was dropped overnight in favor of Google Meet, a third-party interview platform and the marketing platform were cancelled, the office was marked for closure, and Kras's team was tasked with rebuilding push notifications in-house to shed another vendor. By his account, Evernote turned profitable within a few months — before anything was done on the revenue side.

Then the price hike arrived: the Personal plan rose from about $69.99 to $129.99 a year. The logic, as Kras tells it, was lock-in — users with years of notes and established workflows would pay rather than endure a migration. In February 2023, 129 employees were laid off across design, engineering, HR, sales and customer service, and the marketing department was eliminated entirely. Kras, a user since 2012 who says Evernote was one of the best places he ever worked, began job hunting in January and left on his own terms. He calls what he watched a business playbook that was clever and harsh in equal measure, and insists the essay is not an attack but the closing chapter of a company and a story worth recording.

Why it matters

This is one of the few unencumbered insider records of how a modern software roll-up digests an acquisition, and it explains the surrounding quiet: most people who lived through the transition signed non-disparagement agreements to receive their severance. The playbook it documents — buy products with locked-in users, strip vendor and headcount costs, then raise prices on customers for whom switching is painful — is now being applied across a portfolio that includes WeTransfer, Vimeo, Eventbrite and AOL, so its reach extends well beyond one note-taking app. For engineers and managers at likely acquisition targets it is a case study in how fast institutional knowledge can be dismantled, and for subscribers to aging SaaS products it is a reminder that today's price is not a promise.