Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud to Leave Video-hosting Platform to Pursue Other Opportunities

Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud is leaving the company to pursue other opportunities, the video-hosting platform announced this week. The former Amazon executive, who joined the company nine years ago as director of marketing, “was at the helm of Vimeo for the past six years,” the company said. Board member Adam Gross, a former Salesforce and Dropbox executive, will take over as interim CEO, effective Sept. 1, while the company looks for a permanent replacement. 

In a statement, the New York City-based Sud said she believes “deeply in the company’s strategy, team, and future success, and will continue to be an enthusiastic supporter for every moment of what comes next.” The 39-year-old is credited in rescuing Vimeo from disaster and getting it listed on NASDAQ.

When she joined Vimeo, 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. In a, April 2021 interview, she told The Verge that although the company is a 16-year-old company, they have implemented a “very different strategy,” in the past three to four years. She said she became the CEO “to pivot the company away from being a viewing destination or media platform, like Facebook or YouTube or Netflix, and really into a video SaaS or software company for businesses. Much more like a Slack or a Dropbox model, but for video.”

In a conversation with Nilay Patel of The Verge, Sud talked about how she built a profitable video business by moving from streaming to software. Calling Vimeo “a very different business model,” Sud told The Verge that the product has always been subscription based. “And what it means is that we are not focused on eyeballs and content on Vimeo, and we actually don’t want Vimeo to be an entertainment destination where people come,” she said. 

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.

In a December 2020 podcast with McKinsey & Company, Sud said Vimeo is “not a competitor of YouTube. We are not a viewing destination. We are a platform that helps anyone create and distribute videos anywhere on the internet. We think of ourselves as the mission control powering every professional team in the world that wants to communicate using video. As you can imagine, that has become more relevant during the pandemic.”

Sud was born in an Indian-immigrant family residing in Detroit, Michigan in 1983. 

In 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. From 2005 to 2014, she worked in finance, media and e-commerce roles at Sagent Advisors, Amazon and Time Warner, before joining Vimeo in 2014. 

“I’ve had a pretty winding career path,” she says in the McKinsey & Company podcast. “To be candid, I never thought of myself as an innovator and certainly not as an entrepreneur. I started in investment banking and spent several years at Time Warner just as technology and media companies began unbundling. I then moved to Amazon, where I got to experience many different functions and jobs,” she said. 

“I came to Vimeo to run marketing — a traditional executive job. 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 pivot the platform substantially. 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.” 

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. 

Sud is married to Matt Harrison, and the couple have a 5-year-old son, Saavan.