Anjali Sud was just 33 years old and had been working for nearly three years at Vimeo when she was plucked out to lead the company—and she had no idea her boss was even considering her for the top job.
“I never expected to become the CEO of Vimeo,” Sud, who is now 40 and leading Tubi, America’s most-watched free TV service, tells Fortune.
After all, Vimeo was only Sud’s fourth-ever employer. Plus, being in middle management as general manager and head of marketing, it wasn’t like Sud was an obvious front-runner for the role—nor did she put her name in the hat when the vacancy came up.
“There was a search. We interviewed many very experienced CEOs. I was not on that list,” she says. “I didn’t raise my hand for that.”
It wasn’t until a year into the CEO search that Sud says, “it became clear that the strategy the company had been pursuing probably wasn’t the right one.”
Call it being in the right place at the right time, or as Sud puts it “serendipity”, but that realization put the spotlight firmly on Sud as a credible successor to Vimeo’s helm.
Ripping up her job spec and following her own strategy
Although Sud was initially hired in 2014 to head up Vimeo’s marketing, she never had any intention of following the path (or job description) that was set before her—instead opting to make her own stamp, no matter the risk.
“I spent over a year at Vimeo not worried at all about my role and what it was going to mean for me, and really working my butt off to try and come up with a strategy for the business and prove that that strategy could work, because I believed in it,” she recalls. “I was willing to bet my career on it.”
“I thought at the end of the year, I probably wasn’t going to have a job in fairness, because I was like, ‘Oh, I’m just doing this…’ But I also really believed it was the right thing.”
Her strategy was to steer Vimeo away from being a video-viewing platform and competing with the likes of Netflix and YouTube for eyeballs into a video software company for businesses.
“Barry Diller was the owner of Vimeo at the time—and he’s a guy who likes to take risks too—and he just said: ‘Okay, well, if we’re going do this new strategy, this person has been championing it and he’s betting on it, let’s give her a chance to run it.’”
Diller’s bet on Sud paid off: Vimeo grew so fast in 2020 that it accidentally turned a profit in the third quarter, even as the company was trying to reinvest in growth.
By 2021, it had more than 200 million users spanning over 190 countries, of which about 1.5 million were paying subscribers.
Later that year, the company went public in a spinoff from its parent company IAC at a $5 billion valuation.
But in Sud’s eyes, it wasn’t just her winning strategy that made her stand out for the top job, but also her conviction.
“The number one thing that I feel like I did, and I always give this advice to young people who are ambitious and looking to grow in their careers, is recognize that the number one way to accelerate your career is to find a way to make the business successful,” she says. “It sounds so obvious, but that’s what I did.”
“And I think what you find is that, even if you don’t have experience, a lot of investors will bet on people who are willing to bet on themselves as if they’re putting the business first,” she adds.
“I know that now, as a CEO, I bet on people all the time. When somebody shows up to me and I can see that they’re thinking about what makes sense for the business—and they’re willing to really bet on it—I want to bet on them all day long.”
Want to be a CEO? Act like an entrepreneur
Sud likens her experience at Vimeo, where she got everyone on board with a new vision, even when the numbers weren’t there yet, to “acting like an entrepreneur” within the video hosting giant.
“You have to be comfortable not staying in your lane,” she said, with the caveat: “But the risk of not staying in your lane is you’re gonna piss people off… So the key is to support, celebrate and recognize the people around you.”
For example, despite being in marketing, Sud wanted to develop new products for Vimeo.
“I didn’t stay in my lane, but I also wasn’t like, ‘let me go show off my cool new product idea and piss off our head product,’” she recalls. “Instead, I would spend a lot of hours just saying, ‘Hey, what are your problems, let me help you, I’ll put this deck together and give it to you.’”
“I did that pretty consistently for a couple years with my peers and my colleagues and that allowed me to just earn a lot of trust.”
Although she warns that you won’t get instant credit by doing it her way, over time, you’ll build a reputation for creating a wider impact—which is far more valuable if you want to make the leap from individual contributor to leadership.
Plus, that experience is precisely why Sud’s at ease in her current gig as Tubi’s CEO, which she landed just under a year ago.
With nearly 80 million monthly active users, Tubi is the fastest-growing U.S. streaming service. Now, it’s trying to achieve trans-Atlantic success, having just launched in the U.K. with more than 20,000 films and TV episodes.
Unlike Netflix, Prime, or Disney Plus, Tubi is completely free to watch—but users have to endure adverts while watching their favorite content.
“Tubi has always done things differently in the industry. For a long time, they’ve sort of taken a different approach, starting with the viewer and starting from a place of whatever the problem is we want to solve, we’re going to find a way to solve it and we’re going to do it differently.”
“I was really excited about the idea of helping to shape and define the future of entertainment,” Sud adds.
“Audiences and their needs are changing rapidly, culture is moving fast and we need people who are coming in from a different perspective, that have seen different models, that understand change and evolution and I think that that’s probably some of the strengths that I can bring to Tubi.”
