Anjali Sud, Tubi: Conviction, Contrarian Bets, and Building What Others Miss

We were told we would sit under our picture, so I think I'm on this side.

Well, I was promoted to be the CEO at Vimeo. I was I think 33 years old. I did not expect that or see it coming until the minute I was offered the job. So first I should say there's definitely an element of just serendipity and just kind of being in the right place at the right time. And I don't want to pretend that that's not part of it, but there are ways to put yourself in situations where you can be lucky. That I think can apply to a lot of people. And for me, it was a couple things. One, I joined Vimeo at a time where it felt like culturally there was a real interest in giving people opportunities to kind of try stuff and own things. And not every company is like that. And I think it is important to kind of look at the people above you and look at how they've risen and just see is this a culture where there's room to say, okay, well, you might not have a ton of experience, but you have this interest, you have this passion, I'm going to bet on you. And I think there's more of that happening by the way, largely because of AI and some of the trends you're talking about. I think the other one is really simple, which is just you have to demonstrate that you're going to create business value and bring solutions and ideas and fill in gaps. For me, I was running marketing but the role I was really playing internally was kind of like a GM. And I was proposing ideas and strategies in Vimeo's case shifting to compete with YouTube to being a B2B video enterprise player. And I was in everything. I was in the product. I was playing the role of every function because I just really thought it was a good idea. And I was doing that for a good period of time before there was ever any indication that that would be our strategy. And then of course the last part is you have to be a great empower of people. You have to bring people along, get them super excited about what you believe. You have to uplift them. You have to enable them. You have to recognize them and I think that actually played a larger role than I even appreciated and when I was promoted, that could have gone very very badly. Suddenly you have someone who was more of a middle manager suddenly they're the boss, you're making a lot of change and probably the single biggest thing that enabled us to make that transition and enabled me to step into that role was having earned trust among my peers and those below me and above me and creating a path where we could succeed together as we made some really challenging decisions and kind of tried new things.

Yeah. I mean I think people always say it's lonely at the top and it is but I always felt like I still was part of a team. I still feel that way at Tubi about me and my executive team. Like I do think of it as we're in it together. Obviously the thing that changes is you make the final decision. You're the tiebreaker and the buck stops with you and the accountability is just different. I liked that to be honest. I was kind of already ready for that. And so that part was actually great. The thing I didn't like that was hardened is that what you don't appreciate is that when you are the boss, people stop telling you what they think, right? And my information asymmetry increased and my ability to know if there was a problem. When you're in the org, you see the problems, you see the challenges, but what you realize is there's an abstraction that happens at every layer. And when people don't tell you what they think or escalate a problem because they don't want it to come across like they can't solve it, you lose an ability to understand what's happening. And so that for me has been the biggest gotcha is the blind spots can increase dramatically just at the same time that you as a decision maker have to make the best decisions which means you need to be the most informed. And I will say one of the things is building a culture where people feel like they can call you out or tell you where they disagree. But I can also tell you very tangibly the biggest thing that helped me was hiring founders. And by hiring, I mean acqui-hiring in some cases, but bringing in people who didn't need the job and didn't think like employees. And it's probably one of the single biggest things that I think changed our ability as a team culturally to just focus on the business, focus on the problem. And we all say every idea is the same, but in reality in most companies, we're humans, that's not how it ends up working. And so I think it's just looking around, do you have people at the table who are super comfortable with a contrarian view who are going to tell people exactly what they think without fear of what that means for them or just not political frankly. And what's amazing is when you bring a couple people in like that, the whole rest of the team, because none of us want to work in an environment where we can't be open, everybody tends to kind of move that way. So I think that for me was a really important unlock and something I try and do proactively.

So many. I think it depends on the business. I'd say what I experienced at Vimeo very different than at Tubi. So I think it depends. But being intentional about operating principles for sure. For me a lot of it was what frameworks am I creating where we aren't afraid of failure and we're not afraid to say what's not working every time. How do I create every meeting is what's working what's not working and how do we create an environment people feel that their job is to surface what's not working. I think as a CEO, the hardest thing is being a good listener, I still have to work at it so much, but your point on speaking last and being a truly listening, right? Instead of thinking about what's the right answer to the argument, that's a really hard thing. I will also say org structure matters. Org design really, really, really matters. So many problems that slow companies down and impact people's ability to do their best work comes from not having clear expectations about what they're supposed to own and do. Nobody wants to step on everyone else's toes. It's very natural and yet often the hardest most impactful things you can do in a business are cross-functional, right? If you want to disrupt and innovate you have to be thinking holistically. So I actually would say that's another one. It's a thing that I never wanted to deal with, no one ever wants to deal with like oh we have to make a change or we have to change the org structure, it's not fun. But I do think at the CEO level that needs to be a thing you are obsessed with.

Completely agree. It's definitely playing out. We've completely changed on the topic of org structure and hiring. We've made some pretty big changes. Can you

At Tubi? Yeah. So, we probably about a year and a half ago, which I'd like to think is somewhat early, we created a program called Tubi Builders which was specifically looking for early career talent who are AI native studying certain areas of machine learning which is really important in our business. And we effectively changed our hiring and our recruiting and our structure to now bring in a lot more of those people. They're on rotation programs, so they touch multiple different things. So engineering, product, QA, design. We're doing the same thing in marketing, creative industries, to be makers, and we bring in people and we literally let them immediately start shipping. They're building and the way we recruit, the way we look for those people, we used to do coding tests, right? Now it's obviously very different and often we're actually filtering more for attributes like agency sense and judgment, taste, being proactive. These things we've fundamentally changed our hiring loops and the way we look at people. And I would say it's early but what I can see so far I would consider those programs successful for us. What we are finding is we are embracing a lot of the newest potential use cases in AI faster. We're finding that those folks come in and they're sort of change makers in the org and people on the team are less intimidated to go ask this person about what they're working on and to help me with a project. And so we're leaning in and I do think the traditional notions, if we use product development as an example, we had these very specific roles that were like you do one thing and you hand it to the next person, you hand it to the next person. I just think it's changing and I think it's super exciting because who doesn't want to be able to tackle multiple different functions? We all want to do that. We all want multi-dimensional jobs. So I think it's great.

It's definitely an important topic right now. First I'll say the capacity to embrace new things and continuously learn I don't think is generational. There are people at all generations, all levels of experience who are like that thing is super interesting. I'm going to go figure it out. And I have seen that and we see it at Tubi for sure. There are also absolutely people who struggle in this environment and who will struggle in this environment. I think the inevitable answer to that will be not everyone will be like, their roles will need to evolve and not everyone will be right for that kind of a culture. But I think it's really important as employers that we do everything we can to support, inspire, give people the skill sets to be able to embrace things. And I think it behooves us because institutional knowledge is really important. That's another thing I've learned. You always underestimate the value of institutional knowledge when you're getting stuff done. And it's really important to set those folks up. So I mean we do a lot around case studies, inspiration trainings, hackathons. I used to do off-sites where we would all get together and go out for drinks and dinner. We don't do that anymore. We do AI hackathons together in the office with pizza and beer and it's great. And I expect everyone to do it but I also don't want to create an environment where it's like you're in or you're out because I think that misses the point that great organizations bring lots of different people with lots of different perspectives together and it's the trick is how are we all going to come together in that way and let's see how that goes. But from my perspective, we continue to grow the business, continues to do well, and I think we are kind of moving in that direction. One of the challenges of course is dealing with boards. I serve on boards where we're constantly pushing and change and bring new people. How do you handle that?

So I think from a strategy perspective, the thing that I got conviction around to kind of pivot to the enterprise, there were two things that were happening. One was just that I thought it was going to be really tough for us to compete with YouTube. We were a paid service. We had an ad-free video player and I just was looking at that model and thinking it's going to get commoditized over time and we aren't going to have the reach of a YouTube because we're not free. So that part of it is defense. You just have to recognize if you have a right to win in a market and I just didn't think we had a right to win. I think the other part that I was at the time very excited by was video wasn't being used in business. This is before the pandemic. This is before town halls were live streamed. This is before Zoom. So you're looking at the world and thinking, well, video is on, people are uploading their videos of their shorts and their artistry on the internet, but won't video also be part of business? And I think for me the conviction was just there's a whole market here and there'll be tailwinds there and how do we then build our way into that? The thing that is hard is it is, and I certainly think we all learned it the hard way at Vimeo, it's just when you have a core business that does one thing, it's really hard to simultaneously build a new business without negatively impacting the core. And this tension of how do you protect the core while also moving forward? How do you not cannibalize yourself but also recognize that you got to be all in on the new thing? That balance I definitely look back and think it was hard to get right.

I would say it's both. Early on I would have been more aggressive. Way more aggressive. And I just would have created clarity and ensured that we all agreed with that clarity of you got to rip the band-aid off. Later on, I would say it was a little bit the opposite and I'll give you a perfect example. The pandemic really made it hard to assess signal from noise. So suddenly imagine we had a live streaming product and we would go to companies and say hey would you like to live stream your town hall and literally they would all say that sounds fun and interesting, like five years come back to us. Pandemic happens overnight, that business spikes and it stays elevated for a period of time. And so now we're like, oh my gosh, it's happened, the demand is there. But as the pandemic moved out of the pandemic, we also saw that some of that was just very specifically because of the environment. And so parsing how much of it was the trend in the market in an enduring way versus an external factor that just happens to you, getting that right about how big, how much do you double down, how much do you triple down. We went public on that thesis, right? So I think being able to parse what's happening in a market that's enduring versus one-off is the thing I think I didn't fully appreciate.

Yes. Yes. I don't think you can know what I mean, no one can know. But I would say I could have asked that question to myself more clearly and looked for the signals because what I might have done post-pandemic is not invest as much in serving that demand but still believed that two years later, five years later the demand would grow, right? It's not that the strategy and direction of travel is wrong, it's just the how you think about investing and going after things. And I would say it this way. I don't know that we would have done anything differently, but I know I didn't really ask that question.

I certainly ask myself that all the time now at Tubi when we look at trends in the media industry.

Well, I'll first say when I told my parents I was joining Tubi, they were like, 'What? What is that?' And I remember googling the platform and there was this Onion article about the founder digging for DVDs in a bin at a dollar store and then you look at the top questions on Google and it was all like, 'Is this a legal service?' And of course I loved all of that. But I will tell you for me there were a couple things that made me like there's something here I want to explore. One was I had started my career many moons ago in media. I actually worked for AOL Time Warner, the biggest media company at the time. And when I was there, I remember the CEO had been asked about this Netflix, this mail DVD startup. This is 15 years ago. And there's a somewhat famous quote from that CEO at the time saying that would be like the Albanian army taking over the world, like Netflix, this is AOL Time Warner. And now of course look at where we are today. And I just was watching what's happening in media and thinking, there's such a focus in traditional media on cable subscriptions and streaming services that have subscription prices and it's moving in one direction. At the same time, if you just look at how we're all spending our time, we're on YouTube, we're on Instagram, we're on TikTok. So much of our time spent on leisure and entertainment is actually happening in free ad-supported environments and I just got a conviction in my head that the future of entertainment will be free and ad-supported. And it wasn't just because I felt like I was watching it. I was seeing my own time spent and other people and I was just seeing that it's got to be, in a world of infinite choice things have to be easy and they have to be personalized and they have to feel the value exchange just has to be better.

Yeah. I think it was redefining the TAM, right? If you define the market as streaming, you're going to look at it in a certain way. If you define the market as attention, just attention, then the trends and the things you'll see look different. And I think I was just like, I think we're defining the market too small. And if it's really attention, why can't there be a version of basically YouTube that is movies and TV series and high quality premium production content? Well, the reason historically would be one, it was too expensive to create that content. We see that the barriers are coming down. We see the impact of AI on that. Two, we lived in a monoculture where you would have one show everybody watches, but now because of personalization and on demand content, you're not just tuning in at 8:00 to watch one thing. We watch what we want, when we want, where we want it. And then three, consumers, the other assumption was consumers won't tolerate ads. And I think again, you just look at YouTube. I bought this ring on Instagram. Instagram served me an ad and I was like this, we've all fallen for it. And so it's like why can't advertising actually be more personalized and useful just because that's not true in our television experience today? Why should that not be true in the future? So I think it was really seeing those things and saying I think there's something here. And that was three years ago and obviously we have a lot of work to do but I do think generally we are seeing that that is playing out in terms of where consumers and advertisers are going.

So many things. I could go on. I'll say this. What's old is new. Gen Z and alpha love nostalgia viewing. One of the most popular titles on Tubi is Scooby-Doo. And it's not the kid. It's like 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds watching Scooby-Doo. I don't know what else they're doing, but definitely the classic cartoons are very big. Creators, digital native TikTok, YouTube creators moving to Hollywood. A great example is one of our most successful movies was based on a character a TikTok influencer named Keelin Campbell created on TikTok live. And what's so interesting is a lot of times when people talk about the creator economy in Hollywood they look at Mr. Beast or Miss Rachel. These creators have huge audiences. Keelin probably only has like five million followers on TikTok. But what's interesting is the depth of the fandom and the passion that his fans have. When we produced his movie and put it on Tubi with no marketing, it literally shot up into the top 10 streaming films in the industry. And that's because the fans, it's niche's core. But it's also just like creators are both the studios and the content and the marketing because they have the direct relationship with the fans and how that's changing. We're seeing it even in the box office now, those things are changing. Lastly, I think you're just going to see a complete, there are so many niche fandoms that you're starting to see really break through. Audio books translating into film, IP that's coming from social platforms, all of that is happening. Romance is very big right now. There's all these areas that are popping up. I think what my overall summary is, historically in media culture was top-down. A studio would decide what is going to be made and that would define how we all look at culture. And now culture is very much bottom-up and the fans are much more the arbiters of what will win and do well. I think that's a really exciting thing.

So we move really fast at Tubi because the industry is moving fast and we see that as our competitive advantage. We're 700 people, over a billion in revenue, profitable, and we've stayed at that size for the last few years. I think we'll probably continue to do that because what we find is everyone being able to share context and move fast does matter in our industry. So with our team, first we are a distributed team. We have offices kind of around the country in the world. And this won't surprise anybody. It's a real investment of money and time to bring people together, but it's really important. The leadership team at Tubi, we literally get on planes and see each other for dedicated time once a month and then we have our top leaders across about 50ish people that we also bring together multiple times a year.

I mean, I would say there's lots we do around decision-making and planning, but the biggest thing is really genuinely context sharing and trust. And I actually think I wouldn't have thought that a couple years ago. I would have been like let's make sure the agenda is packed with really smart pre-reads and we make a lot of good decisions. And we do do that. But I would say actually I now think over 50% of the time of those things are about connecting and building trust. The way to do that though, as I was mentioning, it's not just let's go out for dinner and get drinks. I do think you have to let's swarm around a problem and do a hackathon together or let's really address some extremely tense hard thing that no one wants to talk about. We're going to sit and we're going to talk about it and we're not leaving this room until we work through it. And it's a little bit less structured time, but I think it's important because otherwise think about your day in a remote distributed team. It's so structured. It's all Zoom calls and decisions and Slack messages. So I do think you have to almost overcompensate with that. I think walk-and-talk meetings, the walking one-on-ones where you just go for a walk together, I have found that to be the best in terms of really having good conversations with people and understanding what they care about. I think maybe the only other thing I would say about the team is documentation in an AI agentic world. I haven't figured it out, but I'm seeing it's becoming more and more important. Because if we aren't documenting, how do you share the context? How do you provide information async? In an agentic world, that documentation becomes important. One of the biggest challenges we have right now is each team operates differently. We have a content studio in Hollywood and we have engineers in Silicon Valley and it's trying to come up with a way that we're all going to like a shared form of documentation when someone's reading scripts and finding talent and a marketing team is out there doing crazy guerrilla marketing and then you have engineers. So finding a way to kind of connect everybody around how to communicate that doesn't stifle the thing that they do best has been probably one of the biggest areas that we're figuring out.

Yeah. I think it's changing so much. I do think flatter orgs, broader spans of control for a lot of teams is important but I also think it really depends on the function, on the role, on the business. So I hesitate, sometimes I see these generalizations. I think they're easier in product and engineering because traditionally you have large teams that operate in a certain way, but I would say I'm actually more in favor of a GM structure. So for example, when we wanted to expand outside the US, it's actually not broad span of control flat team, it's a GM who has ownership and autonomy and they have a very lean team and they have to go and work with everybody else. And when we decided to bring creator content onto Tubi, we did the exact same thing. One person, very small team, but they have a mission to go and do something big and they're going to figure out how to do it within the org. So I think it just depends. I think when you have a broad function where it's already working, you know exactly what you have to do and all you're trying to do is increase speed and velocity, then I think flatter, broader spans of control, less management layers. That is important. Every time you add a person, there is an administrative tax, there is a coordination tax and it slows you down. So I think it's important, but I also think when you're innovating and building things there are sometimes you need humans who have a lot of room to experiment, try, be inefficient so that you can get to a place where you've stood something new up that can then scale. So it really depends.

Absolutely. I mean, think about it all the time.

It's not a hot take really. I think of Tubi as in many ways a distribution platform, but our mission is that we want everyone to have access to all the world's stories and the way we try and do that is help every story find its audience. Every story has value and every story should find its audience. So the way we think about it is we work with independent filmmakers, we work with studios, we work with creators. So I think we see ourselves as really trying to be a platform that enables discovery of all stories. The one sort of take I would give is I think we're going to see a significant and exponential increase in content and in storytellers because with AI lowering those barriers, many more stories will get made and actually a lot more storytellers will be out there. The thing that I'm acutely aware of is the amount of storytelling is exponential, but attention is finite. The US population is not growing and there are 24 hours in the day. It's not scaling exponentially. It may not even grow at all.

Maybe that is the one unlocked there. I think of it as in that world what does it mean? And I think what it will likely mean is that niche will be core. Basically everything will be personalized and it won't be that one story is getting 90% of the attention and you're just going to see this, and that's why I think platforms that have scale, low barriers, no friction, deep personalization are at the absolute forefront of how to help each one of us discover the thing that we love and don't treat us as a demo or a genre. That's just not how we are. We're all interested in lots of things. But I think the ability for platforms to do that is going to become even more important because we want to expand the pie, but with that much increase in content with the attention where it is, there's going to be some real friction there.

I mean, there are many leaders I respect and admire and I would say most I think don't have my style. So I've always felt more like I don't know. I've never been able to identify a leader that I'm like that's like me. That's my style. But there are so many I respect. Just last week I had a chance to be on a panel with Meg Whitman. I'll use her as an example because I've looked up to her my whole career as someone who built such large big businesses, HP and eBay. And I think what I really respect, and I'd say stylistically we're quite different, but what I think is really interesting is she also did Quibi with Jeffrey Katzenberg. And I think what I respect so much about leaders is when they are somewhat fearless about always trying to build and always trying to make things that add value into the world. I think you all probably know business is never always up and to the right, it's not linear. So just when you see people trying things and out there constantly trying to find new ways to add value, I think it's admirable. Especially because as you become a CEO and you're a leader, it's kind of easy to be like oh I had that success story, I'm going to go semi-retire and live my life. So for me, maybe because I'm in my second phase and I hope there's many more after this, I just really respect when I see people still in the game going for it, fighting every day, willing to get dirty in there.

Yeah.

Well, look, I think like probably everyone, we have our OKRs. We do them monthly. We review how we're doing against them. Maybe I'll share two things that may be interesting. One, I'm a big believer in stretch goals and 50/50 goals, meaning you should have a 50% chance of hitting it. And one thing that's slightly controversial is often companies do that using OKRs, but I actually use them for all goals, meaning bonus, everything. I'm like there's one goal and it's a stretch and everyone should feel extremely uncomfortable, including me, that we're going to miss it. And that was something new I did at Tubi. And it makes me very unpopular during planning periods, but it's worked so well because what it does is it gets people out of incremental thinking and it makes you more fearless. If I think about some of the things we've done like streaming the Super Bowl when we've never done a live event, some of the bigger swings we've taken at Tubi, I really think it's part of it because if everyone around you has a goal that seems like probably we're not going to hit it, well you waste less time managing expectations and trying to come up with a plan that helps you hit the goal so you can beat it by 5%. You just get out of it. So I would say that has been really helpful. How do I know when we need to make a change? For me it's now really one thing. I would call it agency, which I know is a popular word right now. Whenever someone who owns something, they have some part of the business or the team that they own, comes to me with a problem and not a solution or asks me what they should do, that's a flag. It doesn't mean that sometimes we need to work more on it, but for me I'm like uh oh, that's not good because I'm by definition definitely not the expert. I should probably be the expert in nothing. So I do think it's really important that the people who are owning things show up as owners and bring solutions and ideas and understand that that is what they uniquely do. And I think it's really important when you look at org design that for the must-win things, the things you have to do, you have to have a person that you trust and is empowered and does that in each of those areas. And when you don't and you punt on dealing with it, it does have a negative impact on the collective team's ability to succeed.

Yeah. It's certainly been, I think the last year and a half for sure I've seen it in the boardroom across multiple organizations. I think there's a couple things I've observed. One is boards serve as governance and advice, but really you do need the CEO and the management team to have conviction and they should really be the ones leading you to the right answer because the information asymmetry is actually quite significant. If I'm on a board, I'm there four times a year. I can help by asking a tough question, but really you want the CEO in particular to have a perspective and you want to start with the default of let's assume the information asymmetry is there and that's right. When faced with crisis, the two characteristics I think make the most difference from that leader and the team one is equanimity and calm under pressure. You see the difference when you have a leader who is calm, who is able to sit in the discomfort of uncertainty and difficulty and find a way to see through to what matters with clarity and communicate that. It is so important. And the other thing I would say is never waste a good crisis. Never waste a good crisis. And I've been fortunate to be able to see some leaders in this time take what could have easily turned into 'let's be the victim' because things are happening that are out of our control to 'I'm going to turn this into an opportunity to make change that has been necessary for a long time and use this to make us way better.' I've seen it recently and it's actually really inspiring to see. So I have deep appreciation when you have leaders who are able to do that.