Vimeo's Side Project Success
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A story about how Vimeo started as a side project from College Humor founders and grew into an $8B public company.
"The way Vimeo started is actually interesting. Three 18-year-olds - Ricky Van Veen, Josh, and Zach - started a company called College Humor. College Humor was basically like Barstool Sports but not sports, or like F*ck Jerry but before Instagram.
They had little side projects while living in New York. One of their side projects was a video uploading tool they built because they were uploading videos before YouTube was around - that became Vimeo.
Barry Diller, who runs IAC, bought it for $20 million in 2006. IAC's model is they buy companies, employ people to run them, grow them steadily, and then spin them out to go public. They held Vimeo for almost 15 years before recently taking it public.
They bought this business for $20 million and now it's worth $8 billion. The company has 200 million monthly users and 1.6 million paying subscribers. They found their niche focusing on high-quality video hosting for businesses and creators, with features like higher resolution uploads and online editing tools. While YouTube dominated consumer video, Vimeo carved out its own successful space in the professional market."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.