 Hello, Internet. Welcome to the final Google Hangout of Small Empires. This episode was about Vimeo and we are wonderfully joined by some of the Vimeo team here and obviously as well as Stephen and Kirk and Alexis who you guys know very well by this point. So we have Andrew and Andrea from the Vimeo team and you guys can introduce yourselves and obviously talk about Vimeo and what you guys do for the company. Yeah, sure. So I'm Andrew Pyle. I'm the CTO here at Vimeo. And I'm Andrea Allen. I'm the Director of Video Production at Vimeo. So why don't you talk about Vimeo a little? Sure. Yeah, so Vimeo is a big-ish video sharing website. We've been doing this for about ten years. It's changed quite a bit over that time and I think at the time of this video when the Small Empire Sigma shot, we're a little over 160 people. We're here in New York. It's 2014 and we're just about to go into the holidays. Yeah. So everybody's taking a big side relief? Well, today's kind of a, people are pretty psyched today because it's our holiday party tonight and we showed the video in front of the whole company and people are pretty into it. So there's a lot of like Vimeo nationalism going around the office. We're ready to get turnt. And Vimeo knows how to get turnt for sure. Okay, wait, speaking of Vimeo nationalism, what is the story behind the pizza flag and the pizza culture? For a while there was this big joke every time we would go out for pizza or people would be like, oh, you want pizza? And it just got to be this running joke in the office that pizza is the best thing ever and we started doing things like drinking, there was a pizza beer I think that was passed around at one point. Is that a Mark thing? Pizza culture is alive and well here at Vimeo and we decided that, I think Chris decided we needed to have a pledge to the pizza flag and he wrote it up and it's beautiful. Yeah, we should give Mark a shout out. Yeah, Mark, for, Mark, don't put that in your mouth. We've got this guy who works here on the community team and he brings in special guests. This could be people who work at Vimeo or just people who are from the Vimeo community and he finds the craziest stuff online, buys it and then they eat it together and he films it and it's insane. It's like the weird stuff. He puts it up on Vimeo. You find it in the back of the Chinese bakery that have cartoon rabbits on them and you're like, what is this? And then you eat it and it's like, I don't know, some fruit that you've never heard of. Yeah, he had like pizza flavored beer once. Yeah, octopus chips. There's, I mean, there's one, damn it. Wait, one of them is called eating meat in a bag from the garbage. Did you just add that? Are you serious? I missed that. Are you making that up right now? Where is this? I'm going to link it to you guys. Right there. It's, the thumbnail is just him pulling a piece of meat out of a bag that looks like it came from the garbage. Oh, Mark, you're getting, this looks accurate. Oh, Mark. That's our designer Justin on the right, our designer. So yeah, a lot of these are shot in the office. Oh, I'm scared to watch it. I would not want to take meat out of the garbage from here. Yeah, I don't really understand. This episode's product, meat in a bag from the garbage. Wow, yeah, accurate. So cool. So before we get too sidetracked by that, I think that that's a pretty good example of what we noticed when we were there and just about like the company culture that you guys have at the Mio. It seems like it's very vibrant and people are very happy there. Yeah, it's something that I sort of take, I mean, it's weird to take that seriously to use those words to take something that, but I really do. Working with people that are so talented and so good at their jobs can be very intimidating, but what's great is that everybody, the thing that everybody has in common, whether it's a developer, an engineer on the back end, or someone who's a designer, or someone who works in marketing or PR, we all are like really into having fun. And although that sounds like, yeah, okay, everybody likes to have fun, Vimeo takes it to a level that I've never worked at a company where we've been at the level of fun. It's almost like this requirement. We outdo each other. We try to see how much fun. Let me just give one example. Every year we go to, we call it the summer retreat, and we go somewhere outside of the city. It would be best if it was in international waters. We're working on that. But we go outside of the city and we take over basically like a campsite that is usually for kids. It's like a summer camp. It's a summer camp. And we take it over for a whole weekend, and we just kind of like rage and go nuts. And it's one of my, it will continually be a new favorite memory every year. There's nothing quite as therapeutic as like going into the woods with 150-year co-workers and just like having it out for a weekend. Yes. Getting turned in the woods. Getting turned in the woods. It's the best way. You really get to know people that you, you know, not everybody works with everyone else. But all those barriers are down when, you know, you're out in nature having a train, going on a canoe ride, having a drone around the camp. You know, there's just like anything. Yeah. And it's, you know, work is a place you spend like most of your life for better or for worse. So it's like you really need to like the people you spend that time with. And, you know, I think Vimeo, it's a lot of people who work here are like relatively young but they've also worked here for a long time. So they're like pretty close friends through actually like a big chunk of their lives which is kind of, kind of weird to think about. But so yeah. Is most of your team based in New York or do you have international offices as well? Yeah. Almost everyone's in New York right now except for I think there's like two or three people in London. Oh wow. And a couple in LA. And a couple in LA. Sorry. So, you know, my parents had, you know, had people around the world like who work remotely. A lot of that is while we wait for their visa stuff to clear. Yeah. And Andrew, you've been with Vimeo since like day zero, right? Well, I've been, yeah, I've been here since late 05 which is basically like, you know, Vimeo launched in like earlier that year but it wasn't like what it is today. Back then it was basically a personal site of our founders and it was only his videos. So I actually came to work at College Humor way back in the day and kind of grew up with the company and as Vimeo became more and more of a primary thing I moved on to doing that. Yeah. And I joined up in, well I joined Vimeo and started posting my own videos in 2006 and then came to work at Vimeo in 2008. So I've also been here a little bit. Not as long as Pyle obviously but. I mean you're the longest. Yes, he's grandma. He's grandma Pyle. What is Vimeo, the name? Is that just a name that someone came up with? Jake. Yeah, our founder came up with that Jake Ladwick. It has two meanings. One is video with me in it and the other is it's an anagram of movie. Oh. And the me part of that is pretty integral actually because on Vimeo you're only allowed to upload videos that you create or had a big hand in creating and I think that really lends itself to back at the beginning you could watch a video and when you left a comment you knew that you were speaking directly to that creator and I think this is mentioned by Alexis in the video but that is actually part of the reason that I think the community grew in the way that it did rather than how it does on other sites like YouTube where it can be a little caustic because you don't, if you're just kind of throwing that comment out into the ether it doesn't matter what you say but when you're talking directly to the person that made that thing you're going to be a little bit more careful and nice. Yeah, it's kind of an alien person. It grew out of this place where people put their own, I won't say exactly private but personal videos and that's really what the me was about. Ironically there's YouTube which launched pretty much in the same month but we didn't really know about each other so it's funny that the two big video sharing sites are me and you. Yeah, it is interesting though because YouTube is generally, if you look at YouTube globally it's more about audience building and getting numbers and going viral. That's what YouTube is at its core but then video is about here's something I made or here's something that I saw or here's something that I feel. They are fundamentally different and it's just this weird coincidence maybe or just the power of language that forced that to happen. Yeah, I think it's everything. You can't look at one particular aspect of it and be like oh it was this rule or it was this piece of content that really defined Vimeo or YouTube for people. Yeah, it's everything. It's the aesthetic, it's the content on there as a whole, it's the way people talk to each other, it's great things. I think a lot of it too is being an early user of the site I just remember seeing videos that Andrew and Jake and Zach and all these people who were working there were making and that sort of taught me what it was like to be on this site. When I'm on this site I should act like this. This is how it's expected and this is what's appropriate and I think that was really helpful too in building that community. But like Payal said, you can't point to one thing, it's a lot of things. It's funny because I've been updating my profile in the last couple of days and I haven't seen some of the notes on the website that are there in the profile settings and stuff. And there's all these little hidden jokes that you kind of notice really browsing deeply and it's so refreshing to find things like that throughout the site. The way that things are worded or different prompts, it's very clear that there is a sense of humour there and that's valued. And I think that is so huge in being able to differentiate the feeling of both sides. It's so well done. Oh, thank you. We kind of have this saying that it's important to take people's work seriously and you should take your work seriously but you should never take yourself too seriously. And I think that comes through in the site too. You should talk about the fart thing. Do you go into the video? If you go into the video search field and you type in the word fart, you'll have a pleasant surprise. Everybody's doing it right now. It's doing it right now. It's doing it right now. It's the flag that works. Roll up and down. No, it's true. I mean, I think over the years we've been pretty consistent in, oh, the search is not working. I just got told our search is not working. Yeah, it's technical difficulties. Cool. That's because we're in an all team meeting. Awesome, yeah. Should I get in a minute, I guess. Yeah, no, I think we've been really consistent over the years with our kind of voice and our personality. We want to put the thing out in the world that makes us happy and that we want to use and I think that's why it's so closely aligned with what we're like personally. And getting 160 people's personality into a website is a weird thing to think about. But a lot of people that work here now came from the community or came to Vimeo because they got that from what was out there. Yeah, you identify. You kind of see the site and you're like, I like this. Yeah, it's a little bit of like a virtuous cycle of you put something out there that people enjoy using and they'll eventually come work with you. So as someone who is a casual video browser, I spend a lot of time on YouTube and my idea of Vimeo and a lot of my friends feel the same way is that Vimeo is just a website that has really great quality videos. What do you guys think Vimeo is and sort of stands for because YouTube is the biggest thing ever. But Vimeo exists and it's really strong and you guys mentioned this a little bit in the video or Alexis did but yeah, talk about what separates what makes Vimeo different than YouTube. I'll take one step and then you follow up. I'll add the color commentary real quick. I think that the thing that separates it truly is, I mean, yes, Vimeo is known for the highest quality videos on the internet. But the thing is because of staff picks, that's what you're immediately going to see. I wouldn't necessarily call my videos the highest quality videos on Vimeo but I do feel like Vimeo is the place for me because the main difference that when I look at videos on YouTube versus videos on Vimeo is that the people who are uploading to Vimeo care about their videos in a different way than they care like the people that upload to YouTube. I think we were talking about YouTube being this place to get all these views. It doesn't necessarily matter how good the video is as long as you get views. Whereas on Vimeo, you care about your video and you're not looking necessarily to get this massive viral hit. It's a place that you go to upload something that you actually care about. I think that to me is the heart of what separates it and I'm sure Pai will have a different thing to say. Yeah, well, I mean, I think, yeah, no, that's totally right. We usually say that it's like if you give a shit at all about how your video looks and about what people are going to say about it and what other videos are going to appear around it, it's better off being on Vimeo because those are the things we're better at. If you care about getting some kind of huge level of exposure or making money off through advertising, then that's what YouTube is for. That's kind of a weird delineation but it really stems from I think what is the more fundamental difference which is we've always built a product to really care towards people who make videos and YouTube as a product has really kind of veered down this path of being a viewing destination and being this kind of just massive repository of video, which is a very like Google thing. So look, our incentives are aligned differently. Vimeo makes money off of subscriptions and from creators who sell their work or who want their tools then pay us for it. Yes, did it work? Yes! You know, the entire business is incentivized around watching a lot more content and watching ads with that content. So it's like, it really I think fundamentally is like two sides of the same coin. I think we built our feature set around people who make video and therefore tend to care a lot more about how it looks. That's probably why you see that content reflected on there. Yeah. Well, Alexis, are you going to do a Vimeo account? Are you going to start making short films? You know, I actually have a Vimeo account from way back when. Let me see if it's still there. It's going to be really embarrassing if I tell you. That's the best part. We'll see how far you've come. Vimeo is like the only place on the internet that I use on a regular basis where it's like the other account holders and like some of the videos that are in my likes, hey like the time stamp is like eight years ago, nine years ago. It's like the whole world is going to be like that soon. Like everything you posted, it's just like, I mean I know it's out there but a lot of these companies and networks haven't been around long enough that you actually go back and you're like, shit that was a decade ago. It's almost a decade now. Yeah. I found you Alexis. Huh? I found you. I found you. Six years. Startup guy. Breadpig the band rocks at the San Francisco Pier 39. Yeah, this is not a terribly well produced video. Is this you playing music? Yeah, yeah I had a band for a little bit. It was called Breadpig. You look so earnest in your profile pic. That's before he got broken. Great. Wow. You're only following one person. Oh wow. I was not a good community member. Yeah, you step this up. One like and one following. Add it to the credits. Yeah, we got to add it to the credits. Drive some traffic. Yeah. He needs it. He doesn't need to go into all that. Because you just roll him in. So I have a question for you guys. I think like I said before, just casual video watcher. But the one blaring difference between Vimeo and YouTube is that you guys don't really push view count at all. It's kind of even hard to find that. Has that been a fundamental principle from the beginning that it wasn't about the views, it was about the quality of the video? Because obviously that's a pretty big design choice that you made. Yeah, I think there's a couple of aspects to that. Like when YouTube was, this is like 2007, 2008, it was like YouTube's one of their most popular pages was just like the most popular videos ever. And it was like the same basically dozen videos for like several years because it's just a giant feedback loop. And so when we were building Vimeo and building up the features, we didn't want to have this kind of like top ten or like most view type of ideas kind of floating around out there. Because we just viewed it as this kind of like that's how you get into this like weird death spiral of like a certain community kind of belongs on Vimeo and takes it over. We wanted the kind of experience that people had when they first came to Vimeo to be based around our curation and things like that. So for us kind of as like a product team, we didn't really think views mattered that much. I mean we've always understood that it obviously matters to the people that make the video. Me personally, I don't think like an ever increasing number that eventually is just getting rounded off is all that exciting. I know that that's not a super popular opinion amongst video creators. But yeah, it has kind of remained a little bit more downplayed. Like back in the day, it was like the total coin of the realm was like the number of plays you have on YouTube and people talk about that now. But now when you see YouTube advertising, they talk about subscribers. Yeah. So I do think the kind of value of a play, it's kind of like a page view. It's like I think the whole economy around video online is like evolving beyond that. Just another way Vimeo is ahead of the curve. Yeah. I mean we also pushed harder. It's much easier to see like how many likes that video has received and how many comments people have left on it. And again, to me, I can't remember who said it, but it was like Vimeo, we never considered it like the Vimeo community, you shouldn't approach it like a sea of eyeballs that you need to trick into watching a video of yours. You should be making something that you're proud of and you hope that people will also be into. And you shouldn't be trying to trick people into watching your video by putting some crazy, I don't know, thumbnail on it or like say like, oh, just because it's got a huge number of views, you should totally watch this. It's not based on that. Right. Yeah. I mean I don't think I can like talk explicitly about some of these numbers. But like it's funny because, you know, forever Vimeo has been compared to YouTube and like over the years, I don't know like how big we are compared to YouTube. I know how big we are and I get numbers about YouTube, but even comparing the numbers like the way we count metrics and things like that, it's hard to compare apples to apples on that. But we've always been like a percentage of YouTube, right? Whether that's players or traffic or uploaders or viewers or whatever it is. And I don't really know what the percentage is that run the numbers like over the years, but it's always been like any percentage of YouTube is a meaningful thing to me. You know, and like I think it's a meaningful thing for any website. Like we're top, I don't know, 50 website or something like that. It's pretty big. And, you know, five years ago it was like, oh, YouTube has, you know, X numbers of hundreds of millions of videos played per month. And I'm like, all right, well we do this many million. And then now it's like, but in the press it was always like, well, then there's a tiny part of what YouTube is. And now it's like, oh, YouTube does like several billion a month and we do like however many we do. And we're like, okay, well, we're still doing a huge amount of traffic. We're both like, it's crazy explosive. And like, you know, a thousand times bigger than we were a couple of years ago, but it's still kind of comparatively this small thing. It's weird how like you get bigger and bigger and bigger, but you're always smaller. Right. Biggest person in the room. So it's like, it's kind of neat. They've kind of run cover for us in that way where it's like we don't ever have to, you know, like run away from the idea of like we're too mass market or we're too popular or we're too anything. Like I think we've really done a good job of walking that line. So, yeah. And I think that you guys have the advantage of, you have, you know, most of your team is in one location, whereas I think like as soon as YouTube got bought, like, right, they became part of this huge behemoth that is then all of a sudden scattered across all different places and become much more corporate. So you guys are really being able to retain a lot of that culture and that style that wouldn't be possible otherwise. That's true. And I also have to say, like, throughout, you know, Andrew, what was your title when you came on to Bineo? Developer. Developer. And now he's CTO. I mean, and that's awesome. Like a lot of times, I don't know, I mean, Bineo is the best and like first technology company that I worked at. Me too. Me being hired on to do community work and then being able to create the video, in-house video production department for, you know, a site that is worshiped for its video is like beyond what I would have expected at any job. And so that's another thing that makes Bineo, I think, and again, I don't know about Google and how they like hire or promote or anything or YouTube at all, but I can say that the way that Bineo treats its employees with like respect and like trust to continue to run with what we already know is a good model is like super awesome. Yeah. Yeah, it's been a good place to work at. I think, you know, yeah, culture is important. I don't think you can keep the kind of like, you know, you're talking about like the voice of the, you know, like in the kind of like personality. It's like that's like the first thing you lose because, well, it just is. You can't recreate that. You cannot manufacture and scale that. Yeah. And like I guess like authenticity, I think, is the word people would probably use to describe that kind of vibe. But yeah, I don't know, I don't feel bad for YouTube like when they join Google. I mean, you see the things that they do from a technology basis and like the resources like Google has at its disposal, it's just it's freaking outrageous. I mean, it's awesome and it's scary and yeah. So Andrew, I have a quick question for you. What's like as CTO, what's kind of the biggest like fire that you have to put out on a regular basis like in regards to technology that goes into a video platform? It's stuff that he has broken. I break the website more than anybody. Don't blame me. The biggest fire I have to put out on a daily basis, you know, it's less technology stuff like every day. You know, I think as we become like more of a streamlined business and we like get smarter at things like doing stuff that we hadn't done before like marketing, you know, it becomes like the people that have been around for a while end up kind of making more strategic decisions than like the day to day fire stuff. You know, I mean, the worst like technical related thing that happened to us this year was we got like DDoS super bad in January. We were down for like most of the morning. Yeah. Was that North Korea? It was not North Korea. Although if you're watching, email me. We will definitely host the interview for you. Oh my God. Do it. Now we actually – I guess I'll tell the story. I've never told a story. This is a good story. Tell the story. I'll tell the story. So we were getting DDoSed and we got an email. Let me just order events here. I guess the DDoSer is watching. I hope he is. Listen to us. Because you should be scared. So we got DDoSed. The site was down. It was a big mess. We're trying to keep it up. We have like a failover site and we flip over that but like, you know, it takes them a couple of minutes to retarget that DDoS. So it's not a good situation. It's all hands on deck. A bunch of people are doing various things to try to get stuff working. What hour of the day is this? This is like morning. This is like 10 a.m. Yeah. I'm running around screaming. Yeah. A lot of people with their offices locked with like 10 people in it like all staring at a screen really closely like a lot of that that morning. But the site was down so even people like the designers, you know, the engineers were working on like technical solutions like okay, we're going to route all of our traffic through EC2 or we're going to like get this DDoS mitigator online. And, you know, we were calling up people like going to people's websites, calling up the 800 number and being like, hey, you do like DDoS mitigation? They're like, yeah. We're like, great, we're a top 50 website and we're down and we need to like point all of our traffic at you right now. That was a crazy morning for like that. But the funniest and the best thing that happened in that day was we got an email from this guy that claimed to be the one DDoSing us and he wanted $100. And we were like, $100? But we don't negotiate with terrorists. But we were like, what should we do? What should we say to this guy? First we made him prove it. So we were like, prove it to you. So we like stopped the DDoS and he said he was going to do it and we're like, oh, shit, it's actually him. And he was like, I want you to pay me $100. And we're like, all right, how would we pay you? And he's like, use like this website. And you go to this website and it's like some scammy like debit card fake thing that you plug in your information and it goes through like Germany and then the Cayman Islands and you get the money. So we're like, okay, we're going to like run this by our legal department and find out if we can pay you this way. And basically trying to string this guy along and kind of keep him on the line. And we're saying all this stuff over the course of the day like, we need your W-2 to pay you. This is not going to happen. So what we did was we set up a fake payment website. It was called like securepayment.us or something. Your team created one. Yeah, the site was down so the designers had nothing to do so they built a fake website. And it looked like it was like a bootstrap thing with like a big like clip art dollar bill and it was like the safest way to pay online. So we're like, all right, go to this website. What about this? We can't pay you through this German thing. So what if you go to this website? So we sent him this link. So he got his IP. No. And not only that, we had a pop-up that said, you know, click here to verify it works in your country which was just the HTML5 geolocation API. Got the guy's like street address. Got. Wow. And then what? But he was in North Africa. We couldn't get to him. He wasn't around the corner like we were hoping. We could just go and knock on the door. Excuse me. I'd like to ask you a few questions. He DDoSed you guys for $100. Well, presumably the $100 was just like a phishing scam so they didn't give you information. Yeah, it's $100 to be like – because once you're on that list of places that will negotiate or whatever, it's like – And if you go back to – I think it was January or was it – it was earlier in the year but there were like a string of data. I don't know if you guys remember. There was like a string of sites that were – Yeah, it was Dropbox also, right? Yeah, and like a couple of places published the email and it was the same email we got except he was asking for like different amounts of money like $50 or like $75. He was very clever. Yeah. Anyway – Great marketing team that guy has. Yeah, right. We learned a lot that day. Yeah, including even when you catch the guy, you can't do anything about it. Yeah. Amazing. But that – yeah, the fake site was just like – even though like – Is that fake site still fun? And it was like really bad and everybody's kind of bummed. It was still like this really kind of fun – It turned into a fun day. – hilarious thing. It was like, look at this site we just made. That's good. Yeah. That's awesome. So what does the next five years for Vimeo look like? Oh, man. You. Got it. Well, we're going to keep growing. I think Vimeo On Demand is like super promising. I think the user expectation – you guys talk about this a lot in the video – like the user expectation of like being able to pay for things online is definitely changing over time. People's capability to produce things to put online that are actually worth watching is increasing. So we're hoping to be like right in the middle of that combination of things that are happening of like giving the tool set and being the place that people want to put their stuff to sell directly to the consumer. From like a pure technology basis like obviously higher resolution video is – what's on the input side and the output side is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think what's happening – what happened basically a year and a half or what we saw basically two to basically like a year ago was people's expectation of how video and where video can be played like completely flat. So the idea that you can shoot something on your phone and watch it on your TV almost immediately is like a totally nuts idea like three or four years ago. Today it is completely standard issue. So you know like set top boxes, desktop, phone, this idea that you don't have flash installed or you don't have a TV that has the right codec or some shit like that. No, no, those days are over. Like compatibility for playing back video is like from a consumer perspective a solved problem. So there's like no going back from that expectation that whatever you're paying for something, wherever you're shooting something, you're going to be able to watch it and experience it anywhere. And I think what we're going to start seeing soon and this is happening with like cloud providers like – is like the kind of idea of like capturing creation. I feel like that's going to be coming more of a kind of flat process. So you know you shoot video over here and you watch it someplace else. Well now it's going to shift more into the realm of particularly in the pros but soon everywhere like you shoot here, you edit here, you can also edit here, you can you know collaborate with somebody over here. The kind of cloud aspect of actual video creation hasn't really come to fruition. So that's another area that I think we're like primed to kind of be involved in and I'm super excited about that. So are you guys going to make a cloud based editing and publishing solution? Is that what you're talking about? Is Cameo going to be for my desktop in two years? Well the interesting thing about Cameo is that particularly the 1.0 and there's still a lot of this in 2.0 although we've optimized it. That's actually a cloud based editing solution so it's like you capture on your phone but all the editing and all the effects and all that stuff, that's all being pushed up and rendered on the cloud and pulled back to your phone. Oh okay. You said it's why there is a delay in some of this stuff. And so we've optimized a lot of that out by doing more of these things locally but that engine that powers that whole kind of process is like modular. So we've actually taken a lot of what was going on in the cloud and moved that into the phone and we have this ability now to kind of move this video creation engine wherever we want. So I think it's a very natural extension to kind of bring that to other places. I mean the obvious one is Android and like tablets and stuff like that. But yeah, it's definitely not out of the realm of reason to bring it to the web and connect all these things so it becomes more of a contiguous process. Yeah, I mean, he's already taken steps in that direction that it would be awesome to provide that sort of same tool set for our pros especially. I mean, how many times do you get like a screener or a private link from a Vimeo link that is like here, take a look at this rough cut. It's got to be private and it's got to look awesome so I'm going to send it via Vimeo. Imagine being able to like collaborate with multiple people across the country, across the world on that same file, uploading other files and having that collaboration there directly on the place that you will end up watching. It's like perfect. So does a world exist where Vimeo does things like House of Cards where people are rushing to go to Vimeo to watch a new show? Well, I mean, it's kind of already happening with high maintenance. I mean, I think that we were lucky in that high maintenance had like a pretty fervent audience already and we promoted it a bunch. So the excitement around the original content, I mean, it's been proven on Netflix and stuff, but we're already starting to understand how you go about doing something like that. So I hope you see a lot more of it. Yeah, and I think the key element that will differentiate like what Netflix is doing from like what Vimeo is capable of is actually like… Money. They have way more. So Vimeo has this, you know, the most talented people. And the fact that we would be able to facilitate them making more of that awesome content and then selling it to their audience who are also Vimeo users and beyond, I think that's what's going to be the most important thing is like finding people like the high maintenance folks who are already making awesome stuff and being like we want to do, I mean, we want you to do more of that and we want to give you money to do more of that. And I think that there's so many people making awesome, awesome stuff on Vimeo. We just need to like continue to find them, fund them, and promote them. And I mean, that's the thing is if we're making things, tools, the website, decisions based on is this going to be good for our community, for our users, then we're doing the right thing because that ultimately feeds back into what makes the website great and what makes working here great and what makes everybody who comes to the site think that this is awesome and want to do the same thing. Exactly. Awesome, awesome guy. Alright, I think we should wrap up. We've gone. Yeah. We had a solid conversation. This was great. Thank you guys so much for hanging out. And for the people watching, go to youtube.com slash the verge and search for this episode of Small Empires or you can watch it on the verge.com. Or Vimeo. Or Vimeo. Or Vimeo. Or Vimeo. I was saving the best for last. Yeah, thank you. But yeah, so that actually concludes this season of Small Empires as well as these Small Empires Hangouts. But luckily for you, they are on the internet so you can watch them over and over and over again. And that's it. We won't be back next week. We might be back for season three. I don't know. Season three on Vimeo. Yeah, maybe. Stella. And an awesome future. But yeah, thanks you guys for watching and tuning in and we will see you in the future.
 Hello, Internet. Welcome to the final Google Hangout of Small Empires. This episode was
 about Vimeo and we are wonderfully joined by some of the Vimeo team here and obviously
 as well as Stephen and Kirk and Alexis who you guys know very well by this point. So
 we have Andrew and Andrea from the Vimeo team and you guys can introduce yourselves and
 obviously talk about Vimeo and what you guys do for the company. Yeah, sure. So I'm Andrew
 Pyle. I'm the CTO here at Vimeo. And I'm Andrea Allen. I'm the Director of Video Production
 at Vimeo. So why don't you talk about Vimeo a little? Sure. Yeah, so Vimeo is a big-ish
 video sharing website. We've been doing this for about ten years. It's changed quite a
 bit over that time and I think at the time of this video when the Small Empire Sigma
 shot, we're a little over 160 people. We're here in New York. It's 2014 and we're just
 about to go into the holidays. Yeah. So everybody's taking a big side relief? Well, today's kind
 of a, people are pretty psyched today because it's our holiday party tonight and we showed
 the video in front of the whole company and people are pretty into it. So there's a lot
 of like Vimeo nationalism going around the office. We're ready to get turnt. And Vimeo
 knows how to get turnt for sure. Okay, wait, speaking of Vimeo nationalism, what is the
 story behind the pizza flag and the
 pizza culture? For a while there was this big joke every time we would go out for pizza
 or people would be like, oh, you want pizza? And it just got to be this running joke in
 the office that pizza is the best thing ever and we started doing things like drinking,
 there was a pizza beer I think that was passed around at one point. Is that a Mark thing?
 Pizza culture is alive and well here at Vimeo and we decided that, I think Chris decided
 we needed to have a pledge to the pizza flag and he wrote it up and it's beautiful. Yeah,
 we should give Mark a shout out. Yeah, Mark, for, Mark, don't put that in your mouth. We've
 got this guy who works here on the community team and he brings in special guests. This
 could be people who work at Vimeo or just people who are from the Vimeo community and
 he finds the craziest stuff online, buys it and then they eat it together and he films
 it and it's insane. It's like the weird stuff. He puts it up on Vimeo. You find it
 in the back of the Chinese bakery that have cartoon rabbits on them and you're like,
 what is this? And then you eat it and it's like, I don't know, some fruit that you've
 never heard of. Yeah, he had like pizza flavored beer once. Yeah, octopus chips. There's,
 I mean, there's one, damn it. Wait, one of them is called eating meat in a bag from the
 garbage. Did you just add that? Are you serious? I missed that. Are you making that up right
 now? Where is this? I'm going to link it to you guys. Right there. It's, the thumbnail
 is just him pulling a piece of meat out of a bag that looks like it came from the garbage.
 Oh, Mark, you're getting, this looks accurate. Oh, Mark. That's our designer Justin on the
 right, our designer. So yeah, a lot of these are shot in the office. Oh, I'm scared to
 watch it. I would not want to take meat out of the garbage from here. Yeah, I don't really
 understand. This episode's product, meat in a bag from the garbage. Wow, yeah, accurate.
 So cool. So before we get too sidetracked by that, I think that that's a pretty good
 example of what we noticed when we were there and just about like the company culture that
 you guys have at the Mio. It seems like it's very vibrant and people are very happy there.
 Yeah, it's something that I sort of take, I mean, it's weird to take that seriously
 to use those words to take something that, but I really do. Working with people that
 are so talented and so good at their jobs can be very intimidating, but what's great
 is that everybody, the thing that everybody has in common, whether it's a developer, an
 engineer on the back end, or someone who's a designer, or someone who works in marketing
 or PR, we all are like really into having fun. And although that sounds like, yeah,
 okay, everybody likes to have fun, Vimeo takes it to a level that I've never worked at a
 company where we've been at the level of fun. It's almost like this requirement. We outdo
 each other. We try to see how much fun. Let me just give one example. Every year we go
 to, we call it the summer retreat, and we go somewhere outside of the city. It would
 be best if it was in international waters. We're working on that. But we go outside of
 the city and we take over basically like a campsite that is usually for kids.
 It's like a summer camp.
 It's a summer camp. And we take it over for a whole weekend, and we just kind of like
 rage and go nuts. And it's one of my, it will continually be a new favorite memory every
 year.
 There's nothing quite as therapeutic as like going into the woods with 150-year co-workers
 and just like having it out for a weekend.
 Yes. Getting turned in the woods.
 Getting turned in the woods. It's the best way. You really get to know people that you,
 you know, not everybody works with everyone else. But all those barriers are down when,
 you know, you're out in nature having a train, going on a canoe ride, having a drone around
 the camp. You know, there's just like anything.
 Yeah. And it's, you know, work is a place you spend like most of your life for better
 or for worse. So it's like you really need to like the people you spend that time with.
 And, you know, I think Vimeo, it's a lot of people who work here are like relatively
 young but they've also worked here for a long time. So they're like pretty close friends
 through actually like a big chunk of their lives which is kind of, kind of weird to think
 about. But so yeah.
 Is most of your team based in New York or do you have international offices as well?
 Yeah. Almost everyone's in New York right now except for I think there's like two or
 three people in London.
 Oh wow.
 And a couple in LA.
 And a couple in LA. Sorry. So, you know, my parents had, you know, had people around
 the world like who work remotely. A lot of that is while we wait for their visa stuff
 to clear.
 Yeah.
 And Andrew, you've been with Vimeo since like day zero, right?
 Well, I've been, yeah, I've been here since late 05 which is basically like, you know,
 Vimeo launched in like earlier that year but it wasn't like what it is today. Back then
 it was basically a personal site of our founders and it was only his videos. So I actually
 came to work at College Humor way back in the day and kind of grew up with the company
 and as Vimeo became more and more of a primary thing I moved on to doing that.
 Yeah. And I joined up in, well I joined Vimeo and started posting my own videos in 2006
 and then came to work at Vimeo in 2008. So I've also been here a little bit. Not as long
 as Pyle obviously but.
 I mean you're the longest.
 Yes, he's grandma. He's grandma Pyle.
 What is Vimeo, the name? Is that just a name that someone came up with?
 Jake.
 Yeah, our founder came up with that Jake Ladwick. It has two meanings. One is video with me
 in it and the other is it's an anagram of movie.
 Oh.
 And the me part of that is pretty integral actually because on Vimeo you're only allowed
 to upload videos that you create or had a big hand in creating and I think that really
 lends itself to back at the beginning you could watch a video and when you left a comment
 you knew that you were speaking directly to that creator and I think this is mentioned
 by Alexis in the video but that is actually part of the reason that I think the community
 grew in the way that it did rather than how it does on other sites like YouTube where
 it can be a little caustic because you don't, if you're just kind of throwing that comment
 out into the ether it doesn't matter what you say but when you're talking directly to
 the person that made that thing you're going to be a little bit more careful and nice.
 Yeah, it's kind of an alien person. It grew out of this place where people put their own,
 I won't say exactly private but personal videos and that's really what the me was about. Ironically
 there's YouTube which launched pretty much in the same month but we didn't really know
 about each other so it's funny that the two big video sharing sites are me and you.
 Yeah, it is interesting though because YouTube is generally, if you look at YouTube globally
 it's more about audience building and getting numbers and going viral. That's what YouTube
 is at its core but then video is about here's something I made or here's something that
 I saw or here's something that I feel. They are fundamentally different and it's just
 this weird coincidence maybe or just the power of language that forced that to happen.
 Yeah, I think it's everything. You can't look at one particular aspect of it and be like
 oh it was this rule or it was this piece of content that really defined Vimeo or YouTube
 for people. Yeah, it's everything. It's the aesthetic, it's the content on there as a
 whole, it's the way people talk to each other, it's great things.
 I think a lot of it too is being an early user of the site I just remember seeing videos
 that Andrew and Jake and Zach and all these people who were working there were making
 and that sort of taught me what it was like to be on this site. When I'm on this site
 I should act like this. This is how it's expected and this is what's appropriate and I think
 that was really helpful too in building that community. But like Payal said, you can't
 point to one thing, it's a lot of things.
 It's funny because I've been updating my profile in the last couple of days and I haven't
 seen some of the notes on the website that are there in the profile settings and stuff.
 And there's all these little hidden jokes that you kind of notice really browsing deeply
 and it's so refreshing to find things like that throughout the site. The way that things
 are worded or different prompts, it's very clear that there is a sense of humour there
 and that's valued. And I think that is so huge in being able to differentiate the feeling
 of both sides. It's so well done.
 Oh, thank you.
 We kind of have this saying that it's important to take people's work seriously and you should
 take your work seriously but you should never take yourself too seriously. And I think that
 comes through in the site too. You should talk about the fart thing.
 Do you go into the video?
 If you go into the video search field and you type in the word fart, you'll have a pleasant
 surprise.
 Everybody's doing it right now.
 It's doing it right now.
 It's doing it right now.
 It's the flag that works.
 Roll up and down.
 No, it's true. I mean, I think over the years we've been pretty consistent in, oh, the search
 is not working. I just got told our search is not working.
 Yeah, it's technical difficulties.
 Cool.
 That's because we're in an all team meeting.
 Awesome, yeah.
 Should I get in a minute, I guess. Yeah, no, I think we've been really consistent over
 the years with our kind of voice and our personality. We want to put the thing out in the world
 that makes us happy and that we want to use and I think that's why it's so closely aligned
 with what we're like personally. And getting 160 people's personality into a website is
 a weird thing to think about. But a lot of people that work here now came from the community
 or came to Vimeo because they got that from what was out there.
 Yeah, you identify. You kind of see the site and you're like, I like this.
 Yeah, it's a little bit of like a virtuous cycle of you put something out there that
 people enjoy using and they'll eventually come work with you.
 So as someone who is a casual video browser, I spend a lot of time on YouTube and my idea
 of Vimeo and a lot of my friends feel the same way is that Vimeo is just a website that
 has really great quality videos. What do you guys think Vimeo is and sort of stands for
 because YouTube is the biggest thing ever. But Vimeo exists and it's really strong and
 you guys mentioned this a little bit in the video or Alexis did but yeah, talk about what
 separates what makes Vimeo different than YouTube.
 I'll take one step and then you follow up. I'll add the color commentary real quick.
 I think that the thing that separates it truly is, I mean, yes, Vimeo is known for the highest
 quality videos on the internet. But the thing is because of staff picks, that's what you're
 immediately going to see. I wouldn't necessarily call my videos the highest quality videos
 on Vimeo but I do feel like Vimeo is the place for me because the main difference that when
 I look at videos on YouTube versus videos on Vimeo is that the people who are uploading
 to Vimeo care about their videos in a different way than they care like the people that upload
 to YouTube. I think we were talking about YouTube being this place to get all these
 views. It doesn't necessarily matter how good the video is as long as you get views. Whereas
 on Vimeo, you care about your video and you're not looking necessarily to get this massive
 viral hit. It's a place that you go to upload something that you actually care about. I
 think that to me is the heart of what separates it and I'm sure Pai will have a different
 thing to say.
 Yeah, well, I mean, I think, yeah, no, that's totally right. We usually say that it's like
 if you give a shit at all about how your video looks and about what people are going to say
 about it and what other videos are going to appear around it, it's better off being on
 Vimeo because those are the things we're better at. If you care about getting some kind of
 huge level of exposure or making money off through advertising, then that's what YouTube
 is for. That's kind of a weird delineation but it really stems from I think what is the
 more fundamental difference which is we've always built a product to really care towards
 people who make videos and YouTube as a product has really kind of veered down this path of
 being a viewing destination and being this kind of just massive repository of video,
 which is a very like Google thing.
 So look, our incentives are aligned differently. Vimeo makes money off of subscriptions and
 from creators who sell their work or who want their tools then pay us for it. Yes, did it
 work?
 Yes!
 You know, the entire business is incentivized around watching a lot more content and watching
 ads with that content. So it's like, it really I think fundamentally is like two sides of
 the same coin. I think we built our feature set around people who make video and therefore
 tend to care a lot more about how it looks. That's probably why you see that content reflected
 on there.
 Yeah.
 Well, Alexis, are you going to do a Vimeo account? Are you going to start making short
 films?
 You know, I actually have a Vimeo account from way back when. Let me see if it's still
 there. It's going to be really embarrassing if I tell you.
 That's the best part. We'll see how far you've come.
 Vimeo is like the only place on the internet that I use on a regular basis where it's like
 the other account holders and like some of the videos that are in my likes, hey like
 the time stamp is like eight years ago, nine years ago. It's like the whole world is going
 to be like that soon. Like everything you posted, it's just like, I mean I know it's
 out there but a lot of these companies and networks haven't been around long enough
 that you actually go back and you're like, shit that was a decade ago.
 It's almost a decade now.
 Yeah.
 I found you Alexis.
 Huh?
 I found you.
 I found you.
 Six years. Startup guy.
 Breadpig the band rocks at the San Francisco Pier 39.
 Yeah, this is not a terribly well produced video.
 Is this you playing music?
 Yeah, yeah I had a band for a little bit. It was called Breadpig.
 You look so earnest in your profile pic.
 That's before he got broken.
 Great.
 Wow.
 You're only following one person.
 Oh wow.
 I was not a good community member.
 Yeah, you step this up. One like and one following.
 Add it to the credits.
 Yeah, we got to add it to the credits. Drive some traffic.
 Yeah.
 He needs it.
 He doesn't need to go into all that.
 Because you just roll him in.
 So I have a question for you guys.
 I think like I said before, just casual video watcher.
 But the one blaring difference between Vimeo and YouTube is that you guys don't really push view count at all.
 It's kind of even hard to find that.
 Has that been a fundamental principle from the beginning that it wasn't about the views, it was about the quality of the video?
 Because obviously that's a pretty big design choice that you made.
 Yeah, I think there's a couple of aspects to that.
 Like when YouTube was, this is like 2007, 2008, it was like YouTube's one of their most popular pages was just like the most popular videos ever.
 And it was like the same basically dozen videos for like several years because it's just a giant feedback loop.
 And so when we were building Vimeo and building up the features, we didn't want to have this kind of like top ten or like most view type of ideas kind of floating around out there.
 Because we just viewed it as this kind of like that's how you get into this like weird death spiral of like a certain community kind of belongs on Vimeo and takes it over.
 We wanted the kind of experience that people had when they first came to Vimeo to be based around our curation and things like that.
 So for us kind of as like a product team, we didn't really think views mattered that much.
 I mean we've always understood that it obviously matters to the people that make the video.
 Me personally, I don't think like an ever increasing number that eventually is just getting rounded off is all that exciting.
 I know that that's not a super popular opinion amongst video creators.
 But yeah, it has kind of remained a little bit more downplayed.
 Like back in the day, it was like the total coin of the realm was like the number of plays you have on YouTube and people talk about that now.
 But now when you see YouTube advertising, they talk about subscribers.
 Yeah.
 So I do think the kind of value of a play, it's kind of like a page view.
 It's like I think the whole economy around video online is like evolving beyond that.
 Just another way Vimeo is ahead of the curve.
 Yeah.
 I mean we also pushed harder.
 It's much easier to see like how many likes that video has received and how many comments people have left on it.
 And again, to me, I can't remember who said it, but it was like Vimeo, we never considered it like the Vimeo community, you shouldn't approach it like a sea of eyeballs that you need to trick into watching a video of yours.
 You should be making something that you're proud of and you hope that people will also be into.
 And you shouldn't be trying to trick people into watching your video by putting some crazy, I don't know, thumbnail on it or like say like,
 oh, just because it's got a huge number of views, you should totally watch this.
 It's not based on that.
 Right.
 Yeah.
 I mean I don't think I can like talk explicitly about some of these numbers.
 But like it's funny because, you know, forever Vimeo has been compared to YouTube and like over the years, I don't know like how big we are compared to YouTube.
 I know how big we are and I get numbers about YouTube, but even comparing the numbers like the way we count metrics and things like that, it's hard to compare apples to apples on that.
 But we've always been like a percentage of YouTube, right?
 Whether that's players or traffic or uploaders or viewers or whatever it is.
 And I don't really know what the percentage is that run the numbers like over the years, but it's always been like any percentage of YouTube is a meaningful thing to me.
 You know, and like I think it's a meaningful thing for any website.
 Like we're top, I don't know, 50 website or something like that.
 It's pretty big.
 And, you know, five years ago it was like, oh, YouTube has, you know, X numbers of hundreds of millions of videos played per month.
 And I'm like, all right, well we do this many million.
 And then now it's like, but in the press it was always like, well, then there's a tiny part of what YouTube is.
 And now it's like, oh, YouTube does like several billion a month and we do like however many we do.
 And we're like, okay, well, we're still doing a huge amount of traffic.
 We're both like, it's crazy explosive.
 And like, you know, a thousand times bigger than we were a couple of years ago, but it's still kind of comparatively this small thing.
 It's weird how like you get bigger and bigger and bigger, but you're always smaller.
 Right.
 Biggest person in the room.
 So it's like, it's kind of neat.
 They've kind of run cover for us in that way where it's like we don't ever have to, you know, like run away from the idea of like we're too mass market or we're too popular or we're too anything.
 Like I think we've really done a good job of walking that line.
 So, yeah.
 And I think that you guys have the advantage of, you have, you know, most of your team is in one location,
 whereas I think like as soon as YouTube got bought, like, right, they became part of this huge behemoth that is then all of a sudden scattered across all different places and become much more corporate.
 So you guys are really being able to retain a lot of that culture and that style that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
 That's true.
 And I also have to say, like, throughout, you know, Andrew, what was your title when you came on to Bineo?
 Developer.
 Developer.
 And now he's CTO.
 I mean, and that's awesome.
 Like a lot of times, I don't know, I mean, Bineo is the best and like first technology company that I worked at.
 Me too.
 Me being hired on to do community work and then being able to create the video, in-house video production department for, you know,
 a site that is worshiped for its video is like beyond what I would have expected at any job.
 And so that's another thing that makes Bineo, I think, and again, I don't know about Google and how they like hire or promote or anything or YouTube at all,
 but I can say that the way that Bineo treats its employees with like respect and like trust to continue to run with what we already know is a good model is like super awesome.
 Yeah.
 Yeah, it's been a good place to work at.
 I think, you know, yeah, culture is important.
 I don't think you can keep the kind of like, you know, you're talking about like the voice of the, you know, like in the kind of like personality.
 It's like that's like the first thing you lose because, well, it just is.
 You can't recreate that.
 You cannot manufacture and scale that.
 Yeah.
 And like I guess like authenticity, I think, is the word people would probably use to describe that kind of vibe.
 But yeah, I don't know, I don't feel bad for YouTube like when they join Google.
 I mean, you see the things that they do from a technology basis and like the resources like Google has at its disposal, it's just it's freaking outrageous.
 I mean, it's awesome and it's scary and yeah.
 So Andrew, I have a quick question for you.
 What's like as CTO, what's kind of the biggest like fire that you have to put out on a regular basis like in regards to technology that goes into a video platform?
 It's stuff that he has broken.
 I break the website more than anybody.
 Don't blame me.
 The biggest fire I have to put out on a daily basis, you know, it's less technology stuff like every day.
 You know, I think as we become like more of a streamlined business and we like get smarter at things like doing stuff that we hadn't done before like marketing, you know, it becomes like the people that have been around for a while end up kind of making more strategic decisions than like the day to day fire stuff.
 You know, I mean, the worst like technical related thing that happened to us this year was we got like DDoS super bad in January.
 We were down for like most of the morning.
 Yeah.
 Was that North Korea?
 It was not North Korea.
 Although if you're watching, email me.
 We will definitely host the interview for you.
 Oh my God.
 Do it.
 Now we actually – I guess I'll tell the story.
 I've never told a story.
 This is a good story.
 Tell the story.
 I'll tell the story.
 So we were getting DDoSed and we got an email.
 Let me just order events here.
 I guess the DDoSer is watching.
 I hope he is.
 Listen to us.
 Because you should be scared.
 So we got DDoSed.
 The site was down.
 It was a big mess.
 We're trying to keep it up.
 We have like a failover site and we flip over that but like, you know, it takes them a couple of minutes to retarget that DDoS.
 So it's not a good situation.
 It's all hands on deck.
 A bunch of people are doing various things to try to get stuff working.
 What hour of the day is this?
 This is like morning.
 This is like 10 a.m.
 Yeah.
 I'm running around screaming.
 Yeah.
 A lot of people with their offices locked with like 10 people in it like all staring at a screen really closely like a lot of that that morning.
 But the site was down so even people like the designers, you know, the engineers were working on like technical solutions like okay, we're going to route all of our traffic through EC2 or we're going to like get this DDoS mitigator online.
 And, you know, we were calling up people like going to people's websites, calling up the 800 number and being like, hey, you do like DDoS mitigation?
 They're like, yeah.
 We're like, great, we're a top 50 website and we're down and we need to like point all of our traffic at you right now.
 That was a crazy morning for like that.
 But the funniest and the best thing that happened in that day was we got an email from this guy that claimed to be the one DDoSing us and he wanted $100.
 And we were like, $100?
 But we don't negotiate with terrorists.
 But we were like, what should we do?
 What should we say to this guy?
 First we made him prove it.
 So we were like, prove it to you.
 So we like stopped the DDoS and he said he was going to do it and we're like, oh, shit, it's actually him.
 And he was like, I want you to pay me $100.
 And we're like, all right, how would we pay you?
 And he's like, use like this website.
 And you go to this website and it's like some scammy like debit card fake thing that you plug in your information and it goes through like Germany and then the Cayman Islands and you get the money.
 So we're like, okay, we're going to like run this by our legal department and find out if we can pay you this way.
 And basically trying to string this guy along and kind of keep him on the line.
 And we're saying all this stuff over the course of the day like, we need your W-2 to pay you.
 This is not going to happen.
 So what we did was we set up a fake payment website.
 It was called like securepayment.us or something.
 Your team created one.
 Yeah, the site was down so the designers had nothing to do so they built a fake website.
 And it looked like it was like a bootstrap thing with like a big like clip art dollar bill and it was like the safest way to pay online.
 So we're like, all right, go to this website.
 What about this?
 We can't pay you through this German thing.
 So what if you go to this website?
 So we sent him this link.
 So he got his IP.
 No.
 And not only that, we had a pop-up that said, you know, click here to verify it works in your country which was just the HTML5 geolocation API.
 Got the guy's like street address.
 Got.
 Wow.
 And then what?
 But he was in North Africa.
 We couldn't get to him.
 He wasn't around the corner like we were hoping.
 We could just go and knock on the door.
 Excuse me.
 I'd like to ask you a few questions.
 He DDoSed you guys for $100.
 Well, presumably the $100 was just like a phishing scam so they didn't give you information.
 Yeah, it's $100 to be like – because once you're on that list of places that will negotiate or whatever, it's like –
 And if you go back to – I think it was January or was it – it was earlier in the year but there were like a string of data.
 I don't know if you guys remember.
 There was like a string of sites that were –
 Yeah, it was Dropbox also, right?
 Yeah, and like a couple of places published the email and it was the same email we got except he was asking for like different amounts of money like $50 or like $75.
 He was very clever.
 Yeah.
 Anyway –
 Great marketing team that guy has.
 Yeah, right. We learned a lot that day.
 Yeah, including even when you catch the guy, you can't do anything about it.
 Yeah.
 Amazing.
 But that – yeah, the fake site was just like – even though like –
 Is that fake site still fun?
 And it was like really bad and everybody's kind of bummed.
 It was still like this really kind of fun –
 It turned into a fun day.
 – hilarious thing.
 It was like, look at this site we just made.
 That's good.
 Yeah.
 That's awesome.
 So what does the next five years for Vimeo look like?
 Oh, man.
 You.
 Got it.
 Well, we're going to keep growing.
 I think Vimeo On Demand is like super promising.
 I think the user expectation – you guys talk about this a lot in the video – like the user expectation of like being able to pay for things online is definitely changing over time.
 People's capability to produce things to put online that are actually worth watching is increasing.
 So we're hoping to be like right in the middle of that combination of things that are happening of like giving the tool set and being the place that people want to put their stuff to sell directly to the consumer.
 From like a pure technology basis like obviously higher resolution video is – what's on the input side and the output side is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
 And I think what's happening – what happened basically a year and a half or what we saw basically two to basically like a year ago was people's expectation of how video and where video can be played like completely flat.
 So the idea that you can shoot something on your phone and watch it on your TV almost immediately is like a totally nuts idea like three or four years ago.
 Today it is completely standard issue.
 So you know like set top boxes, desktop, phone, this idea that you don't have flash installed or you don't have a TV that has the right codec or some shit like that.
 No, no, those days are over.
 Like compatibility for playing back video is like from a consumer perspective a solved problem.
 So there's like no going back from that expectation that whatever you're paying for something, wherever you're shooting something, you're going to be able to watch it and experience it anywhere.
 And I think what we're going to start seeing soon and this is happening with like cloud providers like – is like the kind of idea of like capturing creation.
 I feel like that's going to be coming more of a kind of flat process.
 So you know you shoot video over here and you watch it someplace else.
 Well now it's going to shift more into the realm of particularly in the pros but soon everywhere like you shoot here, you edit here, you can also edit here, you can you know collaborate with somebody over here.
 The kind of cloud aspect of actual video creation hasn't really come to fruition.
 So that's another area that I think we're like primed to kind of be involved in and I'm super excited about that.
 So are you guys going to make a cloud based editing and publishing solution?
 Is that what you're talking about?
 Is Cameo going to be for my desktop in two years?
 Well the interesting thing about Cameo is that particularly the 1.0 and there's still a lot of this in 2.0 although we've optimized it.
 That's actually a cloud based editing solution so it's like you capture on your phone but all the editing and all the effects and all that stuff, that's all being pushed up and rendered on the cloud and pulled back to your phone.
 Oh okay.
 You said it's why there is a delay in some of this stuff.
 And so we've optimized a lot of that out by doing more of these things locally but that engine that powers that whole kind of process is like modular.
 So we've actually taken a lot of what was going on in the cloud and moved that into the phone and we have this ability now to kind of move this video creation engine wherever we want.
 So I think it's a very natural extension to kind of bring that to other places.
 I mean the obvious one is Android and like tablets and stuff like that.
 But yeah, it's definitely not out of the realm of reason to bring it to the web and connect all these things so it becomes more of a contiguous process.
 Yeah, I mean, he's already taken steps in that direction that it would be awesome to provide that sort of same tool set for our pros especially.
 I mean, how many times do you get like a screener or a private link from a Vimeo link that is like here, take a look at this rough cut.
 It's got to be private and it's got to look awesome so I'm going to send it via Vimeo.
 Imagine being able to like collaborate with multiple people across the country, across the world on that same file,
 uploading other files and having that collaboration there directly on the place that you will end up watching.
 It's like perfect.
 So does a world exist where Vimeo does things like House of Cards where people are rushing to go to Vimeo to watch a new show?
 Well, I mean, it's kind of already happening with high maintenance.
 I mean, I think that we were lucky in that high maintenance had like a pretty fervent audience already and we promoted it a bunch.
 So the excitement around the original content, I mean, it's been proven on Netflix and stuff,
 but we're already starting to understand how you go about doing something like that.
 So I hope you see a lot more of it.
 Yeah, and I think the key element that will differentiate like what Netflix is doing from like what Vimeo is capable of is actually like…
 Money. They have way more.
 So Vimeo has this, you know, the most talented people.
 And the fact that we would be able to facilitate them making more of that awesome content
 and then selling it to their audience who are also Vimeo users and beyond,
 I think that's what's going to be the most important thing is like finding people like the high maintenance folks who are already making awesome stuff
 and being like we want to do, I mean, we want you to do more of that and we want to give you money to do more of that.
 And I think that there's so many people making awesome, awesome stuff on Vimeo.
 We just need to like continue to find them, fund them, and promote them.
 And I mean, that's the thing is if we're making things, tools, the website, decisions based on
 is this going to be good for our community, for our users, then we're doing the right thing
 because that ultimately feeds back into what makes the website great and what makes working here great
 and what makes everybody who comes to the site think that this is awesome and want to do the same thing.
 Exactly.
 Awesome, awesome guy.
 Alright, I think we should wrap up. We've gone.
 Yeah.
 We had a solid conversation. This was great. Thank you guys so much for hanging out.
 And for the people watching, go to youtube.com slash the verge and search for this episode of Small Empires
 or you can watch it on the verge.com.
 Or Vimeo.
 Or Vimeo.
 Or Vimeo.
 Or Vimeo. I was saving the best for last.
 Yeah, thank you.
 But yeah, so that actually concludes this season of Small Empires as well as these Small Empires Hangouts.
 But luckily for you, they are on the internet so you can watch them over and over and over again.
 And that's it. We won't be back next week. We might be back for season three. I don't know.
 Season three on Vimeo.
 Yeah, maybe.
 Stella.
 And an awesome future.
 But yeah, thanks you guys for watching and tuning in and we will see you in the future.