Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Appetel, editor and chief of the

verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm

talking to Anjali Sue, the CEO of Vimeo. You probably think of Vimeo as a smaller

competitor to YouTube. The company's been around for 16 years and that's what

it was for most of that time. But when Anjali took over as CEO she stopped all

that and reinvented Vimeo as a software company that serves video creators. And

that business is booming. At the end of 2020 Vimeo had over 1.5 million

paying customers generating 83 million in revenue. In fact Vimeo was growing so

fast in 2020 that it accidentally turned a profit in the third quarter even as

the company was trying to reinvest in growth. Later this year Vimeo is going to

go public in a spin-off from its parent company IAC. That's a remarkable

success story and it's all because Anjali decided to stop competing with

YouTube and Netflix and Disney Plus and other consumer video companies and

find a better market to play in. But it also means that well there still

aren't any great competitors to YouTube. I asked Anjali about that about where

Vimeo sits in the creator economy and how she sees the company growing in the

future. And of course we talked about what it's going to be like to run Vimeo

as a public company. One thing to note I'm fascinated by how the internet has

made it so hard for content itself to be valuable. We rarely pay for a song or a

movie or a podcast directly anymore. You might pay for a subscription that gets

you access to a library of content or advertisers might pay to borrow some of

your attention. But it's almost impossible to build a business around selling the

...