How CEO Anjali Sud Has Helped Tubi Become One of the Most Popular Streaming Service in the U.S.

Anjali Sud has compared Tubi, the Fox Corporation-owned streaming service to “the little engine,” which is “just getting better and better.” When she joined the company as CEO last July, she believed that the company had an opportunity and the momentum to shape the future of entertainment. Now a year later, Tubi has established itself as one of the most popular streaming outfits in the U.S.  It now “consistently outranks Peacock, Max, Paramount+ and Apple TV+ in total viewing time, and is drawing even with Disney+,” The New York Times reported, citing Nielsen. “Only YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu are still ahead,” the report added. 

Sud saw Tubi as “a huge opportunity to put the viewer and audiences back in the center,” the 41-year-old Indian American told The Verge. “I think Tubi has an opportunity, the scale, and a unique business model and the momentum to shape the future of entertainment, and those opportunities don’t come along often,” she told the publication in an interview this June. “And so it just felt like an exciting time, and after spending so much time thinking about creators, I’m excited to help connect the dots between that ecosystem and audiences and how we build for them in the future.”

Fox bought Tubi for $440 million in 2020, the media company’s effort to move into streaming. The company has since “become something of a favorite for Lachlan Murdoch, Fox’s chief executive, who often touts its growth to investors in earnings calls,” The New York Times reported. Tubi runs “a different business model from those competitors,” The New York Times noted. The free platform gets its review from advertising, and “doesn’t require an account to use, making it more similar to services like Roku and Pluto,” the publication explained. 

According to The Times, what works for Tubi is its collection of  “tens of thousands of older shows and movies,” as well as reruns of older network programming. The streaming service also makes “some original shows and movies, but often at a low budget,” The Times added .”We have rejected the notion that quality comes from budget size or critical acclaim,” Sud told The Times. An example of that is “Slay,” a Tubi original movie released this year, and “features a biker bar and a battle between drag queens and vampires,” The Times said.

Acting Like An Entrepreneur

Sud joined Tubi after spending almost a decade at video-hosting platform Vimeo, including as CEO. She told Fortune that she credits “being promoted to Vimeo’s top job for being totally at ease running Tubi.” She was elevated to the CEO post at Vimeo at age 33, after just three years as general manager and head of Marketing. She told Fortune that she had no idea her boss was even considering her for the top job. “I never expected to become the CEO of Vimeo.” The company was in the process of searching for a new CEO, and had interviewed many very experienced people for the roles, she recalled. “I was not on that list,” she said. “I didn’t raise my hand for that.” 

Vimeo was unable to find a CEO a year later, and Sud was being seen as “a credible successor to Vimeo’s helm,” she told Fortune. As CEO, she is credited with rescuing Vimeo from disaster and getting it listed on NASDAQ. “By 2021, Vimeo had more than 200 million users spanning over 190 countries, of which about 1.5 million were paying subscribers,” Fortune said.” Later that year, the company went public in a spinoff from its parent company IAC at a $5 billion valuation, the magazine added.

Sud has compared her experience at Vimeo, to “acting like an entrepreneur” within the video hosting giant, she told Fortune. “You have to be comfortable not staying in your lane,” she said. “But the risk of not staying in your lane is you’re gonna piss people off,” she warned. “So the key is to support, celebrate, and recognize the people around you.” 

Unapologetically Ambitious and Impatient 

In a blog on the clothing website Argent, Sud has written about her takeaways from leading both Vimeo and Tubi. “The thing I’ve learned is that you can create your own opportunities, and we can all reinvent ourselves at any stage in our careers,” she wrote. From the beginning, all she wanted to do was “to learn, to grow, and to be ambitious,” she continued. “And I would say from the time I was 21 — my first job — through the day I became the CEO of Vimeo at 33, I was that way.” Realizing that no one’s one’s going to create a career path for her, she created her own. “I went from being a toy buyer to being a marketer to selling diapers online to running a global video platform.”

But Sud was often judged for her ambitions. “I think, especially as a woman, there’s something uncomfortable about saying that you’re ambitious or you’re impatient,” she wrote. “It sounds almost selfish,” she added. But, as her own “learning and development is inextricably aligned with her ability to add value to a business,” she is “unapologetic about being ambitious and impatient because I don’t think it’s at odds with what helps make a business great.”

Positive Impact on Community

Sud grew up in Flint, Michigan, which “shaped her quite a bit,” she wrote in the Argent blog. “At one time Flint was the epicenter of the auto industry, and then ultimately as that industry left, there was a real and lasting economic impact on the local community,” she wrote. Growing up in that environment she saw “the impact business could have on jobs and livelihood, schools, education, healthcare, everything.” That developed a desire in her “to do something in the realm of business as a way to ultimately have a positive impact on my community.” She was also inspired by her father who runs a a plastics recycling plant in Flint. She recalled spending on the plant floor, “watching my dad take so much pride in being able to create blue-collar jobs in our town at a time when that was really needed.”

Sud left Flint in 1997 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. In November 2018, she was named #14 on Fortune’s 2018 ‘40 under 40’ list. In 2019, she was awarded a Muse Award by the New York Women in Film & Television. She also is a designated Young Global leader of the World Economic Forum.  She is married to Matt Harrison, and the couple has two boys.