Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor steps down, IAC’s Joey Levin takes over in the interim

Kerry Trainor, CEO of IAC-owned video streaming service Vimeo and formerly an executive at Yahoo and AOL, has stepped down, four years after IAC installed him in that position. IAC chief executive Joey Levin has been named interim CEO as IAC searches for a new person to head Vimeo.

Vimeo has provided VentureBeat with the email Trainor sent to employees:

From: Kerry Trainor
Date: Tuesday, June 7, 2016 at 11:23 AM
To: All Vimeo
Subject: It is time

Team,

After more than four awesome years of growth and evolution, I’ve decided it’s time to step back from Vimeo. This wasn’t an easy choice as I love Vimeo to its core – to its creative, inspiring, insanely wonderful (and sometimes just wonderfully insane) core. I’m so proud to have been part of this incredible team and I know Vimeo’s best times are yet ahead.

Ultimately we’re all just caretakers of the talented world of Vimeo creators, and as with any great thing, the idea is to leave it a bit better than how you found it. Not only have we grown tremendously as a company, this has been an incredible chapter for me personally. My plan now is to live life for a bit while working with a few companies as a board member until I’m ready to announce my next full time project. In the meantime, I’ll remain an advisor to Vimeo to ensure a smooth transition and help IAC in the search for Vimeo’s next CEO.

During this transition, IAC CEO Joey Levin will assume the role of interim CEO of Vimeo, working directly with members of my team. I’ve worked closely with Joey for the past year, and can tell you that his passion and ambition for Vimeo are unbounded. And as our seasoned General Manager of two-and-a-half years, Mike Weissman has done an exceptional job overseeing all business operations for the Vimeo platform and will continue in that capacity working directly with Joey.

Looking back at what we’ve accomplished together, it’s pretty staggering: we’ve more than tripled our monthly users to over 280M and our paying subscribers to over 710,000, and grown our revenue fivefold as we pioneer a new world for video creators to be compensated for their work directly instead of relying on intrusive ads.

As the video world continues to unbundle for consumers, Vimeo is poised to take its next major leap as the largest, open destination for premium, ad-free video, direct from creators worldwide. Our early programming bets with Vimeo Originals have shown that creators—empowered with total artistic freedom– can reach a global paying audience through Vimeo. And it’s just the beginning.

While we’ve been putting power back in the hands of creators all over the world, we’ve also built significant value as a business – Vimeo is now one of the most valuable companies within IAC, and behind only Youtube as the largest video sharing marketplace worldwide. Not bad for a still scrappy team of 200 going up against—and never fearing—the biggest players on the web.

You should all feel extremely proud. I know Vimeo will continue to accomplish great things with you exceptional people behind it.

So, before we get together today, I’ll issue you all this challenge: keep showing the world what it means to be ‘made with love in NYC’- a phrase Vimeo pioneered long before I got here, and one I hope will continue to inspire all of you as it has me from the day I joined. Go out and get it done!

See you all shortly.

Kerry

Vimeo started in 2004 and is headquartered in New York. The company has nearly 300 million users and recently bought video subscription service VHX. Competitors include YouTube, a subsidiary of Alphabet’s Google. Last year, HBO acquired Vimeo’s first original series, “High Maintenance.”