Vimeo

An Intrapreneurship Example of Business Model Innovation      

Vimeo is an exceptional example of how an Intrapreneur, Anjali Sud, transformed its companies’ business model inside out and went from being the Marketing Director to the CEO of the company. Increasing sales by 54% in a year, Anjali Sud changed the struggling online video platform to a successful SaaS business.

The Story Behind

Vimeo was a smaller and in some way cooler cousin to the online video platform YouTube. The platform attracted 100 million unique visitors per month, focusing on a more sophisticated video offering targeted to a more savvy and influential audience.

When Anjali joined, Vimeo was losing money, with annual revenue under $40 million, and was looking to build a subscription service to rival the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime. However, Sud had a vision for the company’s future not in Hollywood hits but Silicon Valley plumbing. Her plan was to shift its focus from entertainment to entrepreneurs.

At this time, Sud was the Director of Marketing and understood the opportunity to offer a one-stop platform for businesses to shoot, edit, store, and distribute video, akin to what Squarespace had done for websites.

Intrigued by the idea, and willing to explore a potential alternative avenue for the future of the company, Joey Levin, Chief Executive at Vimeo, gave Sud a small team to test her idea.

The Outcomes

This gamble paid off. In Q4 2020, Vimeo posted sales growth of 54% YoY and net subscriber growth of 25% QoQ, which led it to raise $450 million over two funding rounds in the last year alone. As a consequence, Vimeo shut down the subscription video streaming division in 2017 and made Anjali Sud the CEO.