Brendan McNerney
Appearances
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
I'm going to say 60 people. Comparatively, you know, when we would travel literally around the globe to different Twitter offices, we saw the entirety of the Twitter staff, which was in the thousands, and compared to that... We didn't feel very big at all. The Vine offices when I joined were on the top floor of the New York Twitter offices.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
You know, we just had desks, no walls, so we could see everybody in one glance. And when I interviewed for the company as someone who had been working externally at an influencer agency, I just thought like, wow. OK, so Vine is in the Twitter office and then Niche, which was the Twitter owned and acquired influencer agency, was also in that office.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
And I just thought the powerhouse of this trio of companies like, wow, we can really dominate when we all work together. And it became really obvious as soon as I joined that Vine was essentially the redheaded stepchild of Twitter. And very few people who worked at Twitter used Vine, understood Vine, were fluent in Vine.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
The stories that were passed down to me were that before Vine, every social media platform was trying to buy Instagram. And the founders of Instagram had a very specific request in that they not be integrated fully into whatever company bought them. They wanted to operate externally and independently. And the founders wanted to still be sort of the final word of leadership decisions.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
And what I have been told is that Twitter... decided to tell them that that was not going to be possible if they joined Twitter. And so that's what made Instagram go with Facebook because Facebook allowed them that freedom. So then Twitter felt so burned by that acquisition that when Vine came along, the founders also asked for the same autonomy and Twitter granted it to them.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
And I think there was just a real tension from the fact that the founders had come in kind of saying like, We want your money, but we don't want to be on your team. And because the founders had that philosophy, it trickled down. And whether or not the employees at Vine felt the same way, there was just this quite large and difficult tension. The political landscape was hard to navigate.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
And any time we like went and had a meeting with people at Twitter and asked them, how can we better integrate? We were told you need to play for the front of the jersey, meaning you ultimately work for Twitter. So stop thinking about what's best for mine, which, of course, is like impossible to do when you're working online. I actually asked Russ about the deal they made back in 2012.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
We weren't really pushing to sell the company in the near term, especially not before launching the thing.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
You know, everybody just waves them off like, oh, how great and easy it must be to just take a video of yourself in an outfit and make millions of dollars. There's so much that goes into understanding how to be on top. They not only have to have a good grasp of the art of content creation, but most of them are very fluent in the science.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
of algorithms and this is why i find it laughable that influencers are so dismissed in entertainment and captivating eyeballs and audiences it's not an easy thing to not only excel at but then to stay at the top of the game because algorithms are constantly changing apps are constantly changing the way they do things in ways that the staff didn't really even understand but the creators
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
So I took a page from my celebrity days because I remembered when I worked for Ashton and he was married to Demi Moore at the time. Demi would always get these invites to come to this like luncheon event where she was being given an award. Right. And I realized this is actually just a scheme. You as a top celebrity are probably not going to go to an award show unless you're being given an award.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
So like, how do you make sure you get at least one celebrity to an event you want? come up with some award to give them, right? So I reached out to King Batch's people and said, like, listen, he's never been acknowledged by Vine before. Like, Vine had never even congratulated him. So I said, I'm new. We're turning over a new leaf.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
What I want to do is throw a huge party to celebrate King Batch, and I'm going to throw it on behalf of Vine. It's a celebration for his success. And also I would love for him to run the guest list. So I thought this is a great way to get everybody in one place. I'll turn the whole control of the event over to King Batch, have him invite everybody because nobody was responding to me.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
We all worked together and we had the first ever Vine hosted party for Viners.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
An amazing night. It was so great to see people who had been friends on the Internet in private messages only all of a sudden meet for the first time in person. It was really like beautiful and heartwarming. And the whole party in general was a success. And we were, you know, kind of sharing as a content team. We're the new people and it's going to be a friendlier place for you now.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
But at the end of the night, Marcus Johns came over to me and said, hey, everybody from 1600 Vine would like to meet with you.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
They knew what their top looped vine was. They knew what their average loops were. They had all of the statistics down. And there was also an app called RankZoo, which was like their Bible. And they would go every day to see where they ranked in the system.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
And so we were in this apartment conference room and it was like Jake Paul and Marcus Johns and, you know, every kind of top Viner at the time.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
There was some talk about how they all knew that if they ganged up and all decided to stop posting on Vine, like immediately, that the whole app would cease to exist.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
And then the tone changed and it started to get kind of aggressive and ugly in the room.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
None of these creators were even getting the most basic of technical support. And the Vine app in the beginning before I joined was like crashing constantly. They would spend all this time making a video and then they would have nothing to show for like a full day of content creation. They were getting no support.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
And so it really created this animosity for the app, which is why when Vine stars started being called Viners, they absolutely did not want that label because they didn't feel associated with the company that they had become famous for.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
It was, you know, definitely a bunch of weird tension and weird energy that I was trying to sort out and figure out, like, who am I here and what is my place and what is my goal? In the first couple of months of my employment there, no one would respond to me because no Vine creator believed that someone from Vine would ever be reaching out to them because they
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
they had gotten nothing but closed doors and silence before. So I had to go through all of these hoops and like I was, you know, trying to send people messages and then they would answer me.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
And so then I would send them my LinkedIn link and my Twitter link and try to verify my identity with them and explain to them like, yes, I know no one has talked to you before, but here I am and we're going to turn over a new leaf.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
We called those guys in the room the VIVs, the very important Viners. We called the second tier of Viners the people in the mid-range who made content that we all liked more, who were people that were much easier to deal with, and people who we thought were going to be the next wave of top creators. We called those the Ivy Leagues.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
And then we called the very young Viners, people who were just starting out, but were already gaining some traction and were like making jokes in smarter, more clever ways that we thought would probably be the generation after the Ivy Leaguers. We called those sprouts. So we had creator people at that point that were awesome. really doing well with the sprouts.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
And then I was working with the Ivy leagues. And then, you know, it was just the VIVs that we felt like we were never going to be able to turn our way. They were already too rich and too famous and too pissed off. So we knew that eventually they were going to retire or graduate to a different platform or something, but we just needed more time.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
I know what 420 means. You're having sex. Okay, you got a medium pizza, three Big Macs and a side of fried pickles. That's my dog's shit.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
I mean, this is the thing is that the kind of the sticking point was Vine didn't have the resources available. But the question of whether what they were producing had the value that they were assigning to it is a different question. And yeah, it sounds ridiculous. But actually, I mean, according to Brendan, maybe they were kind of spot on with their calculations.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Yeah. Yeah. Rich has sent it. It is as he remembers. And we've checked with another employee because we want to be sure. And they agree that this is what they sent.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
And I've sent it to you now. I mean, I've got to say, it's a little bit of comic likeness in the darkness of the end of Vine. But let's just bear in mind...
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
context you are a major organization sort of worst situation a company can be in where you realize you are no longer surviving and that means that all these people who depend on you for their livelihood and this is you inviting them to the meeting where you are very sadly going to tell them that despite all of your best efforts you can no longer employ them and i'm sending it to you now because um yes you've been keeping this from me strategically so i could read it live
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
The most solemn moment of the entire message is the full stop after thanks.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Yeah, I would think that I can miss that.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
I did reach out to her. She did reply. She was the GM at the time. She said, sorry, I'm not doing these types of requests, which is fair enough.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
It's kind of beautiful in its inappropriateness. It's just cringy.