On May 25, Anjali Sud became the First Indian Woman to take a company public. Sud is the CEO of the video SaaS company Vimeo.
Founded in 2004, even before YouTube, Vimeo was the first company to introduce the “like” button.
Before she became the CEO in 2017, Vimeo was an ad-free video-media company playing catchup with Netflix and YouTube – it was investing in original content like Netflix and supporting creators like YouTube, all the while following a subscription model.
In her first 90 days as CEO, Sud reinvented Vimeo from being a media company to a SaaS company. Instead of just investing in content, they shifted their focus to develop tools for creators to better create production grade videos. It has become the Tik-Tok for good quality videos. Now, instead of competing with YouTube, Vimeo even lets users publish videos created using their tools to other platforms like YouTube, Twitter et al.
It has over 200 million Monthly Active Users and posted a 57% sales growth in Q1 2021. Vimeo boasts to be the biggest ad-free video platform in the world with less than 5 million videos. Though it is miniscule compared to about a billion videos on YouTube, videos in Vimeo are all of professional grade quality as it has stricter guidelines for acceptable videos.
On May 25, Vimeo got listed in Nasdaq. Though the shares were down 13% at the end of the day, the CEO has high hopes for them down the line. Its valuation lingers around $8 Billion, 33% higher than the $6 billion it fetched from investors in January.
