Meet Anjali Sud, Who Reinvented Vimeo To Challenge YouTube, Netflix
Anjali Sud was born in an Indian-immigrant family residing in Detroit, Michigan in 1983. She completed her B.Sc in Finance and Management from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2005, followed by an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2011.
Today when you hear about Vimeo, some of you guys remember it as a YouTube competitor whereas most of you might not even know what it is.
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For people who do know and have ever used Vimeo's video service, you¡¯ll know that it wasn¡¯t really a good alternative. And over the years Vimeo suffered severe losses, making it difficult for the company to survive, losing ground to YouTube, Netflix and others.
However, one woman helped in changing the company¡¯s performance to an extent that Vimeo has gone public. Meet Anjali Sud, CEO of Vimeo, who made all this happen, who rescued Vimeo from disaster to getting it listed on NASDAQ yesterday.
Today @vimeo is a public company.
¡ª Anjali Sud (@anjsud) May 25, 2021
It has been a 16-year labor of love, rooted in our belief in the power of video. We put creators first, and put that power in the hands of millions.
To everyone who made today possible: Thank you ?
Now we keep building. #VMEO pic.twitter.com/vzPciuDzSA
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Early life
Anjali Sud was born in an Indian-immigrant family residing in Detroit, Michigan in 1983. In the year 1997, she left Flint to study at the Phillips Andover Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. She completed her B.Sc in Finance and Management from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2005, followed by an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2011.
During the years 2005 and 2014 she worked in roles of finance, media and e-commerce at Sagent Advisors, Amazon and Time Warner, before shifting to Vimeo in 2014.
Joining Vimeo in 2014
Anjali joined Vimeo in 2014 when the company was around 12 years old. This was also a time when the company was busy competing with YouTube and Netflix -- both tech giants who were at their peak (and probably still are) -- and provide a higher quality alternative.
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In a conversation with Nilay Patel of The Verge, she revealed how the company was heavily curating content for its platform as well as investing in their own content too. However, she felt that they weren¡¯t going to compete with original content in Netflix as it would require them to spend $17 billion on it. Also, YouTube was regarded as a one-stop solution for entertainment and people always chose YouTube like a ¡®hard to break habit¡¯.
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Helping small businesses enter the digital age with no technical knowledge
She thought of looking at a new direction to shift Vimeo from an entertainment and content platform to a platform that provided tools to help small content creators and businesses to make videos.
In a conversation with Forbes, she stated that she wanted to do with video what Squarespace and GoDaddy did for websites -- allowing smaller businesses to get into the digital world with minimal technical know-how.
She pitched this idea directly to CEO of Vimeo¡¯s parent company Joey Levin. Levin liked the idea and in no time she assembled a small team to begin her idea.
In no time the software solution was ready and as soon as the services went live, they saw a significant improvement in the revenue than the year before. In 2020, Vimeo reported sales of $84 million -- 54 percent higher than the same time last year. Today the platform has over 200 million users with 1.5 million paid users. She was appointed as CEO in 2017.
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Awards and Accolades
In November 2018, Sud was named #14 on Fortune¡¯s 2018 ¡®40 under 40¡¯ list. In 2019, she was awarded with a Muse Award by the New York Women in Film & Television. She also is a designated Young Global leader of the World Economic Forum.
