Vimeo's Anjali Sud on going upmarket

00;00;00;05 - 00;00;22;01

Patrick Campbell

Google is amazing. If Google charge me money to use it, I probably would fork over my credit card. Think of just how much time and money you've saved just in your lifetime by being able to have all of the world's information at your fingertips. Of course, it's not without its downsides, though. Your information is basically being sold both directly and indirectly.

00;00;22;10 - 00;00;43;11

Patrick Campbell

If you use some of other Google products like YouTube, you can't really control the experience because Google needs more ads to be put in front of other people and their docs and their email products aren't really enterprise ready. And of course, the list goes on. And while Google is great for general inquiries, the point I'm trying to make is that it's not the tool for everything, which is kind of the story of B2B SaaS.

00;00;43;20 - 00;01;06;14

Patrick Campbell

You need to find the right tool for the job or you need to end up building it yourself. One such story in this realm is a Vimeo who started by fixing some of the issues YouTube had for creators, but has since expanded into becoming the SaaS platform for business video. Through a massive positioning pivot to tell us about that pivot and teach us all the things that went on into positioning for a different market.

00;01;06;22 - 00;01;31;18

Patrick Campbell

We sat down with Vimeo CEO Anjali Sood, who took over in 2017. Through her expertise and guidance, Anjali has grown Vimeo to over 200 million users, as well as taking the company public in 2021. You'll find out all the wisdom that she gleaned through this transformation coming up next. For proof, a well recur, it's Protect the hustle. Here we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of B2B SaaS growth to make you an outstanding operator.

00;01;32;01 - 00;01;47;06

Patrick Campbell

On today's episode, Anjali Sood dives deep on video. We talk about the next wave of video being simple but powerful, how monetization adds value to a user. The signal to move up market and having a culture of open debate.

00;01;50;18 - 00;01;52;03

Patrick Campbell

Who are you and what are you guys do?

00;01;52;13 - 00;02;31;20

Anjali Sud

I'm Anjali Sood. I'm the CEO of Vimeo. Vimeo is not Venmo or Vivo, and we are also not the indie ad free version of YouTube anymore. That was what Vimeo was known for for over a decade. We started as the sort of high quality HD video viewing destination that a lot of artists and creative professionals went to, and I stepped in as CEO four years ago to actually sort of transition the company away from being a place where people come and consume content and instead become a safe platform for businesses.

00;02;32;06 - 00;03;03;21

Anjali Sud

And so what we are today is we're a video software company that offers a professional video solution for any business of any size to communicate with their customers and with their employees. Our mission is to enable professional quality video for all the specifically. Within that, we're really focused on helping large organizations and their teams and every employee in the world actually use the power of video more in their work and in their day to day because it's such a powerful medium.

00;03;03;21 - 00;03;26;27

Anjali Sud

But it's historically been really complex and time consuming and hard, and so that's why many people don't use it. So we're really trying to make that accessible and democratize it. And we think that if we build the right tools and software, we can usher in a better way of working one that is more engaging and human and inclusive.

00;03;27;02 - 00;03;36;26

Anjali Sud

It's very exciting. We are in the early days, despite being a 16 year old platform. I also call us a three year old enterprise software startup. I think as the pandemic has certainly shown, there's a lot of potential.

00;03;37;01 - 00;03;56;00

Patrick Campbell

We've always had video. I mean, for at least, you know, I think just under a century. Right? And then in the past like 20 years, there's just been this like massive move from like, oh, that's the thing I see on my TV. Or when I go to the movie theaters to, you know, YouTube obviously exists, but then businesses are using video in a lot of different ways, like what's what's driven that shift?

00;03;56;00 - 00;04;01;03

Patrick Campbell

And I guess why is video so important not to like tee up a softball here, but like just kind of curious your take.

00;04;01;04 - 00;04;22;17

Anjali Sud

Yeah, for over a century, video is a form of entertainment, right. And the creators of video were really Hollywood studios, filmmakers, the pros. And then you had social media platforms and iPhones come along and suddenly video became a form of personal expression for consumers. Right? And now we're all on TikTok and we're using video to to express our.

00;04;22;19 - 00;04;24;28

Patrick Campbell

Mr. Beast videos on YouTube of songs.

00;04;25;15 - 00;05;04;20

Anjali Sud

And so we're in this this third phase or wave of video where now video is becoming, I think, the cornerstone of business communication. And y to your point, it's because if you think about what the medium can do, yes, we can communicate complex ideas using images or text. Yes, we can engage in chat and in email. But video offers so much more because of the sort of nature of media and, you know, the example of and we've all experienced this since the pandemic, but your team is distributed, but you still want to feel like you're talking to to somebody.

00;05;04;20 - 00;05;30;22

Anjali Sud

You want to see their facial expressions when they explain something. You want a demo of a product to be visual, you want to sell something and you want to bring it to life. These are all natural things that businesses need to do. And yet video is is greatly under-penetrated. And it it's funny, you know, I always think about think about today how now every meeting has a video but then think about every other touch point at work that is in a meeting.

00;05;31;08 - 00;05;53;05

Anjali Sud

And why aren't we using video for that? That's the piece. That's sort of the next wave that we're in. And, you know, Vimeo, we believe that it is not a far cry in the future. That video will be used as much in your day to day at work as these other formats. Every employee in the world, you know, there are over a billion knowledge workers in the world.

00;05;53;05 - 00;05;59;11

Anjali Sud

Every single one of them can be a content creator now, and how can we kind of enable that so that they unlock the power of video?

00;05;59;13 - 00;06;21;27

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, it's always interesting, like looking at the the friction points with that, right? Because the I don't know if you've seen this. There's a couple of like TikTok creators who work at like a Burger King or at a paint brand. I can't remember which one it was and how the company handles that. Obviously, I think the last like year, year and a half pushed a lot of video just because of remoteness, you know, being a thing.

00;06;21;27 - 00;06;31;07

Patrick Campbell

But why didn't we have Vimeo from a corporate standpoint or marketing standpoint 16 years ago versus the like social video of like, you know, being the Atlas YouTube, that type of thing.

00;06;31;14 - 00;06;58;00

Anjali Sud

First I think our expectations at work are guided by your expectations at home. And I think one of the things that happened is consumer, as we got used to consuming high quality content Netflix on social now we expect you know the smallest businesses Instagram ad has to be have motion graphics and look professionally produced and be engaging and take our attention because we're scrolling through feeds.

00;06;58;09 - 00;07;23;29

Anjali Sud

What happened in social media, What happened with original content? It sort of raises the standards for content. And when you are used to then constantly being engaged with high quality content at home and social media on your phone, that that penetrates into your day to day at work. Right. It's the it's the reason why if you show up at work and someone has a two hour town hall and it's boring slides, like you're not going to get their attention.

00;07;23;29 - 00;07;51;05

Anjali Sud

Right. Our attention spans have have shortened. So the other piece is technology itself, Right. And how has technology actually evolved? Live streaming is a great example of something that used to be like if you wanted to produce a live event with scene switching and graphics and do it well, you literally had to be a TV studio. And the technology has has become so accessible that it can actually be produced in real time in a browser by dragging and dropping scenes.

00;07;51;05 - 00;08;13;15

Anjali Sud

That's the kind of thing at scale you can livestream to hundreds of thousands of people in pristine quality. Another sort of theme on technology is I you know, we've invested heavily in AI based video creation. And what that is, is, you know, most if you think about most employees, most businesses, most teams, they're not going to do craft like a script and do this really detailed kind of storyboard.

00;08;13;15 - 00;08;47;16

Anjali Sud

That's just not how they think. And AI is now enabling us to actually help them create compelling content and still totally customized in your own, but in a way that's much easier and can be done at scale. And I think the combination of sort of how consumer expectations have changed with then technology kind of reaching a certain level, I think that's why we're seeing what we're seeing today and then the last thing I'll say is I think there are societal sort of trends accelerated by the pandemic, but that were always happening.

00;08;47;18 - 00;09;08;09

Anjali Sud

We set out on the strategy in 2017 and we didn't expect the future would come as quickly as it did, but we certainly expected it because even before the pandemic, workforces were getting distributed, right? Companies had stores around the world are part retail partners around the world or, you know, people that they needed to reach. Customers were more and more commerce and business was happening digitally.

00;09;08;12 - 00;09;27;01

Anjali Sud

All of these things were happening. And so we were going to have to find a way to reach and engage with those people. And so I think all three of those really are factors for why the moment has come. Everything I see in the pandemic, I think, was it's just an acceleration of a permanent change of behavior that was going to happen.

00;09;27;01 - 00;09;28;27

Anjali Sud

And it just happened a little bit earlier.

00;09;29;09 - 00;09;50;06

Patrick Campbell

I what I find fascinating about it, because we've been doing video for a while, the technology was always holding everything back. And it's just kind of funny because the earliest companies in your space, some of them are still around. It was like, Yes, we can host something in the cloud. Basically everything around. It's terrible because all of the work is going towards making sure the hosting can work.

00;09;50;15 - 00;10;07;22

Patrick Campbell

Then it started to be like, Oh, you can have this feature or that feature that it was like, How do you do a best video? How do you create it? And you saw companies go from one video that was like this banner thing that they paid an agency thousands of dollars to do to basically having video series and the graphics, like you mentioned Instagram.

00;10;07;22 - 00;10;18;27

Patrick Campbell

And I guess was it almost like you were kind of waiting to pounce on this like world, Right? Because if you really think about it, it's like you could have done this ten years ago because there were there our competitors that were around ten years ago doing is this video.

00;10;18;27 - 00;10;43;11

Anjali Sud

Yeah. I mean, there's no question that I think for 16 years Vimeo has been sowing the seeds that have enabled us to be successful. The focus on professional quality video, you know, in many ways we built tools that were designed for the most discerning creators, but with extremely intuitive and simple. UX Right. And and, and that we had to do that because we were serving individuals, but they were artists.

00;10;43;22 - 00;10;49;16

Anjali Sud

And so in many ways, I think that DNA is exactly what's prepared us to come after this market and less.

00;10;49;16 - 00;10;50;25

Patrick Campbell

Forgiving than marketers do.

00;10;50;26 - 00;11;07;23

Anjali Sud

Yeah, I mean, you can't have, you know, when it's your it's your work. Yeah. So you can't have the quality be compromised. Who knows? It's hard to look back and say, you know, what would have been. But in, in the case of Vimeo with the reason that we pounced is because we saw very clear signals among our user base.

00;11;07;23 - 00;11;37;07

Anjali Sud

It was happening organically. The best opportunities start with an organic kind of adoption. Of course, I always wish we could have gone faster, but I also don't know that the demand would have been there. The same way it is today. There have been players of the space for sure, but I think while the technology was in some ways there, the ax and the friction that was still imposed upon people to learn how to use different tools, the price points, you know, we're I think in many ways to make something accessible.

00;11;37;07 - 00;11;54;21

Anjali Sud

It's not just the technology, but like every aspect of it has to be frictionless. You shouldn't need an account manager or an onboarding or a training to figure out how to use a tool. You should be able to experience it for free and then get more usage out of it before having to sign up for a $500,000 contract.

00;11;55;10 - 00;12;09;26

Anjali Sud

And I think those things did not exist in the ecosystem until at least that scale, until platforms like Vimeo came in and said, Let's make that happen.

00;12;09;26 - 00;12;33;11

Patrick Campbell

What's really interesting is I think I've used you and most of your competitors and so you guys are right in the Goldilocks where some of your, let's just say more enterprise type competitors are. It's enterprise like you need a manual almost to do it and then some of your other competitors, I feel like maybe they can do what you're doing, but they come off way too simple, almost like, Oh, there's no power here.

00;12;33;11 - 00;12;39;07

Patrick Campbell

Right? And was that by design? Is that just the natural like, how do you think about that landscape? I guess might be a way to put that as well.

00;12;39;08 - 00;13;08;12

Anjali Sud

It's very much by design and you actually it's like you read our internal documents. Nice. We describe our tools internally as simple yet powerful. Those are literally the two words we use. I'll say, you know, I think for traditional enterprise market. But the truth is it's really hard to move down market. You cannibalize your own business. It is much easier to move upmarket, right, because we're already building tools and capabilities for individuals and for self-serve use.

00;13;08;24 - 00;13;26;29

Anjali Sud

And then, you know, it's it's a much easier thing to say, well, let's provide more value and then charge for it. The other thing we have is we have a massive freemium funnel of existing users. We have 230 million free users on the site. So and then and, you know, over 70% of our enterprise customers start as those free or soft self-serve users.

00;13;26;29 - 00;13;45;21

Anjali Sud

So it's a very different motion than traditional enterprise. And then in terms of the okay, well, there are others in the market that might be really simple. You know, I don't know. It's hard for me to predict what will happen in the future. I will say there's a lot of startups in the space right now and a lot of getting great funding and working on great problems.

00;13;45;21 - 00;14;09;05

Anjali Sud

And I think it's good. I think it's good for the ecosystem. But ultimately we believe that the sort of winning platform in five years from now is going to be a single solution that enables every employee, every team across every use case to use professional quality video, because that makes it even more accessible if it's all in one place.

00;14;09;05 - 00;14;27;23

Anjali Sud

And so we have sort of a horizontal play and I think that is something that is hard for startups to do because it just takes a long time to build. And it took us again many 16 years of focusing and building and we did acquisitions and we integrated and it was a lot to actually get to that point.

00;14;27;23 - 00;14;43;06

Anjali Sud

So I say to my team, I think we have a legitimate head start in the space. It's also ours to lose and we have to be the ones that keep creating value for customers and and, and really sort of leading and defining how businesses will use video in the future.

00;14;43;08 - 00;14;58;24

Patrick Campbell

It's kind of interesting, too, because I think you're the one who kind of wants to win, I guess. I don't know, like some some of the folks in your space very focused on sales. And then there's another one that like it's almost as if like, do you want to grow like, like that? There's like that vibe, right? Like now, no sales.

00;14;58;24 - 00;15;19;22

Patrick Campbell

And it's not to say that, you know, sales is the only way to grow, but it's interesting. Maybe we get into like everyone wants to go upmarket market, right? And I think you guys perfected it. Vimeo has perfected it. I feel where you have this like really free user base, not quite the business marketer, but plenty of them in it.

00;15;19;22 - 00;15;32;07

Patrick Campbell

And then you started seeing the natural like them coming in. My first question there is did did you end up alienating some of the artists? Were they kind of like, Oh, you're going corporate? Or was it something where it's like, Oh, you can't use this feature now? Like, how did that go a little bit?

00;15;32;08 - 00;15;53;04

Anjali Sud

The short answer is, I don't believe we've alienated our core community, but I worry about it every day. And the reason I don't think we have it, nor do I think we will, is because we never think about monetization as taking value away from a user. Ultimately, when we look at our roadmap, there is so much more value to build.

00;15;53;04 - 00;16;09;13

Anjali Sud

We are just in at the tipping point of how video can be used at work. And so I think most of our creative community is still benefiting from the products that we're improving. We make just as many improvements to our free product as we do to our $7 a month plus tier as we do to our enterprise tier.

00;16;09;22 - 00;16;30;03

Anjali Sud

Right. And we do that because we believe that to be that enterprise tier, you also have to have free users coming and so you have to give them value every day. Certainly that value then accrues to the pros on our platform. Now what we're not doing and we've been very open and transparent about this, is we're not do we're not going after Adobe space, we're not trying to build pro editing tools.

00;16;30;11 - 00;16;51;14

Anjali Sud

That is a very different use case. And I believe talent is being appropriately held and we don't even hear from pros that they need that from us. So I think you'll always see Vimeo be a creative home for professionals. But there's no question that the majority of our revenue and our growth we believe, is going to come from businesses and that is who we are focused on.

00;16;51;14 - 00;16;57;13

Anjali Sud

Service.

00;16;57;13 - 00;17;17;26

Patrick Campbell

So when this leads to 2017 or 2016, I work, we're going in. So what I'd love to understand is if we're teaching someone else who's, you know, because you everyone goes out market eventually, what research or what went into the decision, What are the things that you're trying to teach me to go up market that you would go after so maybe start off with what went into decision was this, you know, always an inevitable thing?

00;17;17;26 - 00;17;19;20

Patrick Campbell

Was it a struggle? Like what did that look like?

00;17;19;25 - 00;17;41;13

Anjali Sud

The decision to go after businesses in general, I think was based on the signals we were seeing in the user base. So we started to notice organically we weren't marketing to them. We were building products for them that marketers and businesses, small businesses were starting to use the platform. And I even remember seeing like the chart I remember was looking at the types of videos uploaded to Vimeo.

00;17;41;24 - 00;18;02;07

Anjali Sud

We were seeing a clear trend instead of feature length documentaries and music videos. We were literally seeing demos for websites and social media ads like that's. You could literally see it happening and that's without us marketing our building products to those. These are. So I think we saw that and when we actually did, we spent a year and we said, Let's prove that there's a market here.

00;18;02;15 - 00;18;20;22

Anjali Sud

So we took a team and it's actually the team that I led internally and why I became CEO. We took a team about 50 people and we said, Let's launch a tier just for businesses called Vimeo Business. And we have one year and we'll see what happens. And it was MVP and it was, you know, scrappy and it was like a side project of the company.

00;18;20;22 - 00;18;36;23

Anjali Sud

But let's just see what happened. And what happened was we saw media adoption and growth. We saw all the rate metrics move up at the metric that mattered the most for me and I think gave everyone a lot of conviction was our NPS, our customers satisfaction score tripled in a year, was really hard to see.

00;18;36;23 - 00;18;37;17

Patrick Campbell

Impossible, I would say.

00;18;37;17 - 00;18;53;12

Anjali Sud

And this was again with an MVP. And so that gave us conviction. So it was like, okay, we're going after businesses. Everyone's all in. I became CEO, pivoted everything in it, and we did it, you know, quickly and with conviction. And I think that was a great lesson. It's like move once you have conviction, got to move fast.

00;18;53;12 - 00;19;15;22

Anjali Sud

Now where we struggled was, okay, you can go after businesses, but it's very different to go after a small SMB and a self-serve plan, which was our DNA versus going to the enterprise and going to the enterprise, I would say was a lot a lot harder. And I think it's it was hard in a couple of ways. First, the product itself, right?

00;19;15;26 - 00;19;41;18

Anjali Sud

It's a different kind of empathy and and product DNA to build for the enterprise because often the decision maker or the purchaser is different from the end user. And and you don't have that when you're dealing with individuals or SMB. It's the same persona and so there was definitely an education that we needed to do as a company to build the same passion and empathy that we had for creatives and, and the individual.

00;19;41;18 - 00;19;48;26

Anjali Sud

And probably the biggest thing we had to do was we would take a 16 year old platform that was designed for individuals and make them design for teens.

00;19;49;09 - 00;19;51;20

Patrick Campbell

And that's a major refactor.

00;19;52;06 - 00;19;53;08

Anjali Sud

Of the architecture.

00;19;53;08 - 00;19;54;12

Patrick Campbell

Just the way to model.

00;19;54;14 - 00;19;55;24

Anjali Sud

Everything have to change.

00;19;55;25 - 00;19;58;04

Patrick Campbell

How long did that Just that.

00;19;58;06 - 00;20;09;16

Anjali Sud

It took years. I say that we basically completed I would say that the most fundamental missing pieces of our enterprise offering two weeks before the pandemic.

00;20;10;18 - 00;20;11;29

Patrick Campbell

Which is kind of the right time.

00;20;12;20 - 00;20;19;00

Anjali Sud

We obviously didn't know that was going to happen, but thank goodness that we did it like I said.

00;20;19;15 - 00;20;21;02

Patrick Campbell

It's amazing execution.

00;20;21;06 - 00;20;41;10

Anjali Sud

I mean, we certainly didn't anticipate it. And, you know, there was there was a lot there. And I also say I, you know, as as we look today, we have a lot of work to do still on the Enterprise. I think we've done a good job on product. Now we're in a really good place. We have a sales team that is efficient and it's going well, but there's whole parts that we haven't optimized.

00;20;41;18 - 00;21;04;19

Anjali Sud

Our pricing and packaging definitely like needs work. It was it's still very oriented to the free and self-serve user base landing and expanding customer success user onboarding activation. Like we're we're good now we're not great yet. I would say you know for moving up market the best advice I would give is recognize that it takes a different DNA and embrace it fully.

00;21;04;19 - 00;21;20;15

Anjali Sud

And the sooner that you're willing to commit to it, focus on it, make trade offs to make it successful, breaks them like do it because it's a journey. And even a company like the media that has plenty of resources and and all that, you know, it's one we're still on.

00;21;20;15 - 00;21;39;05

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, it's kind of wild too, because I think a lot of people think, you know, it's classic. Like you see something done. You know, we watch a gymnast in the Olympics and we think, I could do that. Like and you're like, you don't realize, like, how much that DNA and how much work went into getting that DNA. A lot of people who are just like, listen, like if you keep scaling, it's amazing.

00;21;39;05 - 00;21;50;17

Patrick Campbell

We're also going to bring in a bunch of people with this DNA You want to find not quite pedigree, but you want to find DNA that like has done it before. And it's hard because sometimes they apply it in the wrong way and they assume everything's the same.

00;21;50;17 - 00;22;16;07

Anjali Sud

But yeah, I mean, I'll say, you know, it's funny, I do have thoughts on this, which is I think it's a mix like for me, the right components of the team. It's a really good mix of people who come from industries and areas and bring in experience that we don't have. But it's also a really nice mix of people who are proven within the company who can step up and take on other things and have tribal knowledge and contacts.

00;22;16;07 - 00;22;42;05

Anjali Sud

And I think the perfect team is a team that's a mix of those things. Another thing that I found really helpful is having a really nice mix of people at the table who come from everything from the large company at scale to the founder entrepreneur, because each of those skill sets and mindsets are really helpful. You know, we're trying to do things at scale, but we're also trying to be scrappy because the space is early and it's competitive and it's moving fast.

00;22;42;17 - 00;22;57;13

Anjali Sud

And so having kind of a nice mix of different backgrounds and perspectives who are all empowered to kind of debate and discuss and then ultimately grow together in the same direction, I think is is sort of the right mix to take to execute while.

00;22;57;13 - 00;23;19;03

Patrick Campbell

You're moving a tanker like a giant ship very quickly, like you're doing a lot of things that are hard to do. How did you manage like exec and leadership in this in this context? Because it was multiple product lines, multiple products that are getting built, refactor add, and then marketing has to evolve dramatically as well. And you're doing this in a really short amount of time.

00;23;19;15 - 00;23;27;21

Patrick Campbell

What's your team structure look like? What was even the cadence of like the conversations on a weekly? Like as much as you can give around the operational tempo would be amazing.

00;23;27;25 - 00;23;53;07

Anjali Sud

I think it all comes down to the team and the people you surround yourself with and it's never perfect, but one of the things I think we did well was knowing what we knew and knowing what we did didn't. Now I lead a fast platform and I don't have a product and technology background. And one of the first things I did was find somebody who was incredible at that and make him my partner in making almost every decision we make at the company.

00;23;53;24 - 00;24;16;10

Anjali Sud

And it's a small group of women who've gotten us to this point over the last four years, and it's a really nice mix. It's if you look at the team, it's a mix of people. As I said, who've come from large, huge companies who are founders and entrepreneurs who have been in the video space for 20 years, and then people who are just really smart and ambitious and were promoted internally and given opportunities and prove themselves.

00;24;16;18 - 00;24;30;26

Anjali Sud

And I think this is where my lesson is. There's no formula. It's the chemistry, it's the chemistry of the team and how you all complement each other and kind of fill in the gaps. And I wish there was like a here's what you do.

00;24;30;26 - 00;24;32;07

Patrick Campbell

You're essentially a numbers.

00;24;32;12 - 00;24;48;07

Anjali Sud

And I think you can get into a lot of trouble when you do that, when you do that. And I think, you know, it's interesting as you scale your investors say, okay, go bring in the experienced person. And and when you do that, the chemistry changes. And so you have to really it's an organism. You have to really optimize it thoughtfully.

00;24;48;07 - 00;24;56;25

Anjali Sud

And I say one of the things we've done a Vimeo is I have no philosophy or dogma on organizational design. I have reorganized the company.

00;24;56;26 - 00;24;57;12

Patrick Campbell

Many times.

00;24;57;12 - 00;25;22;14

Anjali Sud

Multiple times, and I will do it again. It's because every choice you make an organization design has tradeoffs and I think you organize for the problem you're trying to solve in the business opportunity, and that can change. So there was a time when our opportunity was in SMB. This was before the pandemic, and I had the enterprise team fairly siloed because I wanted them to move fast with autonomy and not be dragged into the inertia of everything else.

00;25;22;25 - 00;25;50;24

Anjali Sud

And then there was a time now where we can't operate that way. And actually it's really important that the enterprise business be the core of what we do, and so we have to centralize. And so, you know, what I have found is having really incredible leaders and players who can fill in gaps, who can be flexible, who are not going to get kind of mired by those decisions and can just find solutions in a very fast moving way, like as big as Vimeo gets.

00;25;51;01 - 00;26;07;07

Anjali Sud

We're still going to be early in this market. We're still going to want to move fast, we're still going to want to break stuff. And so we need people who can kind of be empowered and energized by that, not constrained.

00;26;07;07 - 00;26;19;12

Patrick Campbell

In one kind of tactical question, there is, are you someone in certain cases where it's like there's one initiative, Obviously there was a silo here. Is it like you're working on three of these initiatives at a time? Like any insight there can be super helpful.

00;26;19;12 - 00;26;39;26

Anjali Sud

It depends. It depends on the strategy in Vizio's case, because we are building an all in one solution, a horizontal solution, we don't have the luxury of saying we're only going to focus on this product and we're only going to market to this user. That's not the market we're going after. That's not our play. So we do have to be good at serving multiple users.

00;26;39;26 - 00;26;59;23

Anjali Sud

Now that can be quite dangerous if you spread yourself too thin or if you treat every single problem equally with the equal weight. And so what we've tried to do is the reality is there are, you know, 20 personas using Vimeo today. We've tried to narrow it down to the sort of select handful that we really believe we have to win at now.

00;26;59;23 - 00;27;19;05

Anjali Sud

And then even within that, we say, okay, let's plant multiple seeds. Let's give different leaders the opportunity and the freedom to go be great at these things. But let's also be clear that when we must make a trade off, this thing is the most important. And I think I don't know any other way to do it because I want to provide that focus and priority.

00;27;19;05 - 00;27;43;16

Anjali Sud

But we also can't miss opportunities and we're in a space where video is ubiquitous, the opportunity is ubiquitous. So and we have an opportunity to be everywhere. So what you want to do is be able to go into a meeting where everything just suddenly you have to make a really tough decision. And it's not an and or a maybe it's an or you can only do this or this, and everyone at the company understand which decision you'd make.

00;27;43;16 - 00;27;47;14

Anjali Sud

And they have to be like, Of course you would pick this one because this is the one we said we have to win.

00;27;47;15 - 00;27;53;20

Patrick Campbell

Got it. That's cool. That's interesting. And then even if that's the case, still disagree and commit if you're on the other side.

00;27;53;20 - 00;28;00;04

Anjali Sud

Oh, yeah. I mean know it's a fun one. Having a culture of of open debate I think is is critical.

00;28;00;05 - 00;28;15;01

Patrick Campbell

It's hard now though there's some people who are like you know they hear the word debate. We talk about this a lot and it's like debate yelling and ad hominem attacks. And it's like, no, it's just we can respect each other if we disagree. And eventually someone's going to make the call, whoever is supposed to be in charge of it.

00;28;15;01 - 00;28;15;27

Patrick Campbell

And so I think.

00;28;15;27 - 00;28;25;25

Anjali Sud

The culture is really set at the top. And, you know, one of the things that we do is the exact team disagrees with me all the time. I sometimes think a little too much.

00;28;26;07 - 00;28;27;19

Patrick Campbell

Like you guys treat me like a CEO.

00;28;27;19 - 00;28;41;10

Anjali Sud

But they do it. They do it respectfully, but they do it openly. And, you know, when your team sees you disagreeing with your boss, you know that time when like your boss said something and everyone in the room is like, I disagree with them and no one wants to say, yeah, they don't want to. Like, I never I never get away with that.

00;28;41;10 - 00;28;43;17

Anjali Sud

People don't give me that. That's good. That freedom.

00;28;43;17 - 00;28;44;15

Patrick Campbell

Is fantastic and it's.

00;28;44;15 - 00;28;48;24

Anjali Sud

Really important, right? Like I should never win an argument based on my.

00;28;48;28 - 00;28;49;17

Patrick Campbell

Title level.

00;28;49;19 - 00;28;49;23

Anjali Sud

Or.

00;28;49;29 - 00;28;50;16

Patrick Campbell

Never.

00;28;50;18 - 00;29;04;02

Anjali Sud

Right? It has to be earned. We try and model that at Vimeo at the top, and at least from what I can see, it seems to have you transcending because I'm in many meetings with, you know, people is a terrible idea below me and they're like, I fully disagree with you. That's a terrible idea. And I'm like, Agree.

00;29;04;05 - 00;29;09;24

Anjali Sud

But, you know, if everybody does, it actually becomes normalized. And then it's not hard on the ego. It actually feels.

00;29;10;09 - 00;29;18;07

Patrick Campbell

Just a culture. Yeah. How'd you get here? Like always? I know you're you're your Vimeo before becoming CEO as well. But like, what's what's kind of the quick history.

00;29;18;08 - 00;29;45;01

Anjali Sud

Literally up until the minute I was offered the CEO job, I never would have thought that would be something I would do. I started my career in investment banking. I was in mergers and acquisitions, and I never thought I wanted to be an investment maker, but I did really want to be financially fluent and I wanted to understand how acquisitions were done and how value could be created or destroyed by combining companies.

00;29;45;03 - 00;30;15;24

Anjali Sud

So I started my career doing that. I ended up working at Amazon for multiple years in sort of a general manager rotation program where I did everything from. I was a toy buyer, I sold diapers online. I did business development partnerships, and then I also ran marketing for one of their subsidiaries. And from there I ended up at Vimeo to run marketing and ended up sort of becoming de facto the sort of internal champion for this B2B strategy.

00;30;16;14 - 00;30;41;10

Anjali Sud

I was many ways fortunate that Vimeo at the time was owned by a parent company that like to promote from within and wasn't afraid to put a 33 year old who'd never run a company and wasn't a product or a technology person in charge. And so, you know, in many ways it was a very, you know, sort of not typical career path.

00;30;41;21 - 00;31;01;07

Anjali Sud

I don't think there's a formula. I think you're looking for people who, you know, they have the right instincts, they have the right decision making and judgment. They care about the user. They think about the market. You can be a marketer, you care about product, you can be a product person and not a very good at sort of thinking about product.

00;31;01;07 - 00;31;13;04

Anjali Sud

So I do have a fairly similar to how I got to where I am. I have a heavy bias towards the wrong people on the deep end and giving them opportunities. And I think people will surprise you at what they can do.

00;31;13;10 - 00;31;15;24

Patrick Campbell

All right, where can people find you and anything you want to plug?

00;31;15;24 - 00;31;36;21

Anjali Sud

I mean, I think if you are a business that is interested in using video, come check us out. There's probably a whole lot we do that you might not realize most importantly, we are hiring. There we go. And we're trying to build an incredible business and a different kind of tech company and we're looking for awesome, passionate people to join us.

00;31;36;21 - 00;31;37;20

Anjali Sud

So that's my.

00;31;37;20 - 00;31;39;03

Patrick Campbell

Blog. Thank you. Appreciate it.

00;31;39;03 - 00;31;41;20

Anjali Sud

Thank you.

00;31;41;20 - 00;32;07;19

Patrick Campbell

It's a huge shout out to Anjali for doing the podcast. Now you have all you need to think about positioning and particularly pivoting with positioning. Today we talked about the next wave of video being simple but powerful, how monetization adds value to a user, the signal to move up market and having a culture of open debate. If you want to support Praful and the podcast, we'd appreciate it if you left a five star review of the podcast or the equivalent rating.

00;32;07;19 - 00;32;25;10

Patrick Campbell

Wherever you listen and watch the podcast, Gods tend to like that type of thing and we like to appease the podcast gods. Thanks for listening. Make sure you subscribe to and tell your friends about Protect the Hustle. A podcast from Profile will recur The largest, fastest growing media network dedicated to the world of subscriptions.