Russ Yusupov
Appearances
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Yeah, unfortunately, it became really difficult and tenuous because so much of the Vine team was focused on how do we make Vine a platform for all types of content, as opposed to just this like small collection of content categories, you know, 15 or 20 Viners. So I think internally there was that struggle. There was that tension. Some people thought that stop motion videos are more important.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Others thought that music on Vine was more important. Others thought that longer videos are going to be the key. And some thought, well, let's see what the Vine creators want. These 15 people like the Vine mafia, if you will. They're going to stop posting if we don't give them what they want and champion their voices and their ideas and the features they wanted.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Yeah, it just became just a whole bag of different opinions.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Yep, Dom left within the first year, Colin shortly after. I can't speak to the reasons why Dom and Colin left specifically, but it was a big hit to the company each time we lost a founder. And I think it certainly changed the trajectory.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Yeah, it felt surprising, you know, I felt a bit let down, but I knew they had their own personal reasons and they had their own plans for what they wanted to work on next. No hard feelings, but it did start to feel lonely after a while.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
No, not at all. I knew that this was my baby. Even as the usage number started to decline, I felt even more fired up to continue working on it. We kept that same culture of like, all right, let's develop the roadmap. Let's build features quickly. Let's put them out quickly and test them on the user base as quickly as possible.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
I had a blast. Now, all of a sudden, the work that I was doing had achieved greater scale, had more immediate impact, and I could see the results much more quickly.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
I did my full three-year contract before coming up with my next product idea. Ultimately, I felt like, okay, I have another idea that I'm really passionate and curious about that I want to explore. And it seems like there's a strong team here that can
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
How do we help people make a video on their phones easier and more enjoyable? Because at the time, around 2012, making a video on your phone involved holding your phone horizontally. You just had endless seconds to record. So a lot of videos ended up being minutes long. And then uploading those videos was really painful. Like, 3G cell networks were pretty slow.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
So it took half hour to upload a video that was a couple minutes long. And then downloading that video and watching it was just as painful of an experience. The video wasn't that interesting, right? And payoff just wasn't that great.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Yeah, we fell in love with the idea pretty much immediately after that spark.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
So, you know, we're also looking around at different creation tools. And we found one that one of our peers, Dan Savage, had created called Gift Shop. And it let you make a GIF on your phone in a really simple way. And we thought, well, what if we used some of these learnings and help people make a video, right?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
So let's help you capture more frames, include audio, and let that play back on a loop, just like a GIF.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
We had invited Colin shortly after founding Vine to help develop the back end and the technical infrastructure.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
We were pretty certain about Vine. We knew we had something special. We knew that all of the friends and people that we gave the prototype to enjoyed it just as much as we did and that there was something there, something with big potential.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
We started programming the prototype and we were introduced to a venture capitalist, Adam Ludwin. And he was very interested in what we were working on and said, whatever you guys do next, I want to support it.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
And he was in those early meetings when we came up with the idea for Vine. He was very quick to write us a check and he was very quick to introduce us to his other VC friends. The pitch, we never really had a pitch deck. We simply just invited them to the beta and they were able to just use the app and see if they liked it for themselves and see if they saw potential.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
The VC funding just allowed us to build without feeling like, oh, we're taking on so much risk spending all of our own money. We knew we were in good hands and we knew we had the runway to keep experimenting and keep working on the thing.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Yeah, Dom, Colin and I, we went out to San Francisco. We met with Twitter leadership over the course of, I think, a day or two. Back and forth with our attorneys and our accountants, but not with the VCs.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Yeah, well, we were wearing button downs tucked into jeans and nice shoes.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Nope. And our investors complained to us to this day that we sold too early. We should have said no to Twitter and grown it much bigger than we did at the time of sale. It felt right at the time. No regrets.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
It was a proud moment for us. We did celebrate.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
For a while in the Vine prototype, you had to tap on the video to load it before it played. And being inspired by GIFs, we... made the decision to just make them play automatically and load automatically. So we started loading a video before it entered the viewport to make the experience even faster. So while you're watching a video, the next video would already start loading.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
And we made it autoplay, which is another innovation that didn't exist on the internet before Vine. After launching Vine, YouTube started autoplaying videos and pretty much every other video platform started doing the same. And this endless feed of videos became part of the core experience of Vine.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
you know we were inspired by gifts but we also felt like these really short videos left a lot to be desired when you got to the end of them it was just like oh is that it um so adding the loop felt natural and it also unlocked quite a bit of creative potential for the art form and that people can now start playing with with that loop and many comedic formats on vine people used
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
the punchline as the beginning of the video, right? So, you know, we say that the videos are six seconds, but they're actually just a bit longer than six seconds. We found that people liked to record videos just up until this fraction of a second at the end of the progress indicator for how much video you've recorded.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
And people thought that they had a lot more time left in the video than they actually did. So we allowed people to overshoot to like 6.3 or six and a half seconds. And then in the video player within Vine, that's where the magic was really built in to make that video loop seamlessly.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Right. People always thought they had a lot more time left when there's just that little bit of space remaining in the progress indicator. They thought they had time for like a few more words or the punchline. So we let them overshoot.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Yes. Vibe, Bloom, Mood. Yeah, those are just a few of them, but we have a whole list of rejected names. Funny story, just before we launched Vine under Twitter, Twitter's trademark attorneys gave us a call and said, hey, there's a Vine.com, which is an e-commerce website that may have issue with Vine as a video app. And we had to scramble and rename the app. We renamed it Verse for a brief while.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
We created a whole new logo, changed every instance of Vine in the app to Verse. But just the day before we were due to launch, we changed it back to Vine and said, you know, screw it. We'll take the risk.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Excitement. A bit of unease. The engineering team was probably most on edge because they were concerned about keeping the service up and making sure that we can scale the service to meet the demand, this rush of downloads and users. But mostly excitement. We were happy to get it out. And we knew it was the beginning. Yeah, there was definitely champagne on launch day.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
If someone told me when I was five years old that, you know, the work that I would do in my 20s would go on to like influence internet media and culture in the way that I had, I probably would have... I said, oh, wow, cool. Amazing. America is great.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
It's great to kind of have that freedom and that opportunity to just like build and create companies and to do things that have never been done before and have that impact. I don't think I would have been able to do that if I was in communism.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
possible in communism was your family could they could they comprehend it at the time were they were they proud i mean like my parents they knew that what i was doing was interesting and special but not really in a detailed way it wasn't until people from their community you know gave them accolades and gave them praise that they understood it right i had sent them articles in the wall street journal and the new york times and cnn about the vine launch and what we were doing and
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
I remember my mom saying, oh, that's nice, son. Like, that's great. But then when we were on the cover of the local community newspaper in Russian, my mom called me. She's like, wow, I'm so proud of you, son. Amazing.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
So we get this question a lot. We experimented with all lengths up to 30 seconds, 10 seconds, even down to two seconds, six felt right. It also is easily subdivided into three, two second clips. So you can create a video with like a beginning, a middle and an end, which kind of felt right as like a narrative format. But we did experiment with many lengths.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Six ended up feeling long enough that you could make something of substance short enough that it was really quick to upload and really quick to download. Yes, on the internet, creativity is boundless, but some of these formats that do restrict what you can do really help inspire people, whether it's Twitter's 140 characters or
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Instagram's square photos or even Snapchat's disappearing photos were kind of a creative constraint. The difference between a boring video and something that's really captivating is like editing. Like you can cut from one shot to another and use that juxtaposition to tell a story and to create meaning. So that's what we focused on. But we knew it had to be more of an internet aesthetic.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
And on the internet, things are faster, things are snappier. And we made them square because we wanted to kind of remove as much decision making from the creator as possible.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
I started my career as an interaction designer. I designed the very first version of the Nike Plus iPhone app. I also designed the very first version of Hulu.com, as well as the Hulu logo in 2007. And in 2009, I started my own mobile app studio called BigHuman. I still design mobile apps and UI every single day, focused Pretty much on the interface layer, right?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Thinking about how to craft the best user experiences for people to do things in new ways.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
I am an immigrant from the USSR. I moved to New York in 1989 as a little kid. and grew up in Queens and Manhattan.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
I've always been interested in art and design. Especially being in New York, I was really influenced by people who, I guess, considered themselves to be artists. And, you know, being around people that sang and danced and played instruments and painted, you know...
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
That gave me the inspiration and that perspective to see the world through the eyes of people who were deeply inspired by creative tools and the creative act.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Yes, I think in design school at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, I was taught that designers are very entrepreneurial and self-starters. So the main foundational thing. principal in my education there was around designer as author. So how do you create your own design work from your own voice, right? And have that personal connection to your work.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
We had met on the internet, I think in the late 90s, early 2000s, as part of a community of digital creators, if you will. Before social media, people used to come together on the internet through message boards. That's how I met Dom. We were both interested in the same things, heavy metal music, video games, flash websites, web design, 3D modeling, and 3D art. And then in 2006, 2007, we...
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
started working at the same firm in New York and collaborated on the first version of Hulu.com. And we redesigned CNN.com and other projects together. It was, yeah, it was a really great collaborative relationship. We were close friends.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
At the time, Dom and I were working on different video technologies, right? We were thinking like, how do we make watching TV better? You know, what would a TV channel that was personalized to you look like? And we were constantly looking at other video experiences. And there was this one particular problem that we were interested in solving. It was like,