Anjali Sud, rejected by major banks, transforms $5.7 billion Vimeo
The COVID-19 pandemic has vastly expanded the use of online videos, says Anjali Sud, chief executive of Vimeo, an online video creation and hosting platform.
Vimeo is currently part of IAC (Interactive Corp.), which has a $21 billion market value. Vimeo is on track to be an independent publicly traded company in a few months. This week, as part of its spin-off, Vimeo raised $300 million from T. Rowe Price and other institutional investors. The funding round valued Vimeo at $5.7 billion.
From March to October 2020 “we saw an acceleration in demand beyond our expectations,” writes Sud in a blog post. During that period, Vimeo added over 30 million new members, saw over 60 million new videos created and uploaded, and powered millions of live events that went digital for the first time. The surge in demand was “more than the prior 3 years combined,” adds Sud.
Since the pandemic began last year, use of New York-based Vimeo’s videos has rapidly expanded beyond its traditional base of designers, musicians and artists who post videos online to promote their work. Its customers now include small store owners, marketing their products, as well as big companies - including Amazon, Deloitte and Siemens - using it to train their employees and sales force.
India and France-based textile designer Helena Baja Larsen and Toronto-based Vivian Kaye, who runs KinkyCurlyYaki, an African haircare eCommerce store, used the platform to make videos for Instagram to drive traffic to their websites.
Starbucks, the global coffee chain, is using Vimeo’s enterprise platform to distribute training videos and COVID-19 updates via tablets to their store employees. Email service Mailchimp is using Vimeo’s video messages to describe new products and get feedback from its employees, who are all working remotely.
Last May, Columbia University, New York, used Vimeo for its virtual Class of 2020 commencement and graduation ceremony.
Vimeo, which serves over 200 million users, partners with other service providers including retailing platform Shopify and web hosting service GoDaddy.
After becoming CEO in 2017, Sud focused Vimeo on serving creators of videos instead of trying to compete against Netflix. The company’s mission is “to enable professional-quality video for all,” Sud says.
Videos can cost thousands of dollars, including costs for a story board, renting cameras, editing and licensing video footage and music. Vimeo’s digital platform and templates enable users to create videos quickly and cheaply as well as host them. The company thereby tackled the biggest barrier to creating videos, namely cost, Sud, 37 years old, said on CNBC today.
Earlier at Vimeo, Sud was Senior Vice President of Creator Platform, Head of Global Marketing and Director of Marketing. Prior to joining Vimeo in 2014, she held various management positions at Amazon and was a member of the mergers and acquisitions team at Time Warner. Sud has served on the board of directors of Dolby Laboratories since May 2019.
After college, Sud sought jobs at major investment banks. “I got rejected by every big bank” including Goldman Sachs, she told Forbes. She took an analyst’s job at Sagent Advisors, a small New York-based mergers and acquisition advisory firm, with less than 200 employees.
Sud holds a B.Sc. from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She graduated from Phillips Andover, a private high school in suburban Boston.
Calicut University grad Narayan Menon is Vimeo CFO
Vimeo’s Chief Financial Officer is Narayan Menon. Prior to Vimeo, he was the CFO at Prezi, a cloud-based presentation software provider and a Vice President of Finance at Intuit.
Earlier Menon, 54 years old, held a variety of senior finance and operational roles at Microsoft, Skype and Cisco. He holds a B.Tech. in Engineering from the University of Calicut, Kerala, a M.Tech. in Engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology, India, and an MBA from Indiana University. Menon serves as an advisor for the Rutgers University Big Data Program.
Sud often seeks advise from her dad
Sud expects the rise in demand for videos to continue in a post-pandemic world, especially for tasks like employee and sales training at companies. Vimeo’s parent IAC, which has spun off ten businesses since Barry Diller founded it in 1995, offers lucrative stock options to managers for meeting revenue and profit targets. So, it is very likely that when Vimeo goes public shortly, Sud will be richly rewarded with stock.
Sud often seeks advise from her father. An Indian immigrant, he operates a plastics recycling plant in her hometown of Flint, Michigan. One advice she got from him, which she passes onto others, is “to live outside of your comfort zone,” she told Business Insider. In other words, “put yourself in positions where you might not have a ton of experience."
Before joining Vimeo, Sud worked in investment banking, was a toy buyer and marketed baby diapers online. A “willingness to fail” she told Forbes “and putting yourself in vulnerable positions can often be the fastest way to succeed.”
UPDATE May 26,2021: Anjali Sud paid $1.5 million in 2020; owns 3 million Vimeo shares
This week Vimeo started trading as a public company, with a market value of $7.1 billion. In 2020, Vimeo had a net loss of $51 million on $283 million in revenues.
.In 2020, Anjali Sud, Vimeo’s CEO, was paid $1.2 million in salary and bonus. She also has three million stock acquisition rights (SAR) which vest over the coming years..
Narayan Menon, Vimeo CFO, was paid $4.5 million in salary, bonus and stock options. He owns 1.8 million SARs.