

I didn’t know if that would be successful, but I liked that the model was designed to create long-term relationships with customers. It was an early version of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model that we know today.
#Vimeo ceo sud ott tvpatel professional
Instead, Vimeo charged a subscription fee to video creators to access professional tools. At the time, Vimeo was the only open video platform that did not make money from advertising. The second reason was that I was intrigued by its business model.

I felt that video would go through the kind of disruption that e-commerce had gone through ten years before, and where there is disruption, there is opportunity. I was drawn to Vimeo for three specific reasons. I could have a more outsized impact on a smaller company’s future. When I went to Vimeo, it was because I was interested in impact. This is a hard area for smaller companies to master, but as we scale, I see the value of it more and more.Įrik Roth: What was it about a start-up like Vimeo that attracted you when it was so vastly different from investment banking and a big engine like Amazon?Īnjali Sud: I always define my experience at Amazon in terms of learning. Yet another aspect is the ethos of continuous improvement: the internal tooling of everything to be operationalized and scalable, a constant desire to increase efficiency of every single thing you did. The second is the willingness to forgo near-term profit in order to improve the value proposition. We would always start with the customer: you would write a press release of what the experience would be like for the customer before you even built a product.

One that stands out is customer obsession, something Amazon is known for. While I am not a traditional innovator, I’m quite proud of the amount of innovation that Vimeo has led in the past four years.Įrik Roth: What lessons did you take away from your time at Amazon that helped you at Vimeo?Īnjali Sud: I took a lot of the company’s values with me when I came to Vimeo. There was a clear hierarchy of folks above me, and I never thought that three years later I would be stepping in as CEO to substantially pivot the platform. I came to Vimeo to run marketing-a traditional executive job. I then moved to Amazon, where I got to experience many different functions and jobs. I started in investment banking and spent several years at Time Warner just as technology and media companies began unbundling. To be candid, I never thought of myself as an innovator and certainly not as an entrepreneur. Where did you start and how did you get to Vimeo?Īnjali Sud: I’ve had a pretty winding career path.

As you can imagine, that has become more relevant during the pandemic.Įrik Roth: Let’s talk about your journey. We think of ourselves as the mission control powering every professional team in the world that wants to communicate using video. We are a platform that helps anyone create and distribute video anywhere on the internet. Erik Roth: Can you first explain what exactly Vimeo is and does?Īnjali Sud: Vimeo is the world’s largest professional video platform and community.
