pitch. you know, here s why rus needs to go. here s why i don t think colin is the right fit as well. rus came to me with this idea. i thought it was crazy at first. but now it might just be our last hope here. jeremy thoughtfully considered it, and he he said, thank you for coming out here. thank you for meeting with me. rus wanted me in. i kind of left thinking, okay, this might happen. this might happen. and then about a week later, they had the vote, and and they named colin ceo. and to me t was like, well, you know, again, i tried. you know, colin, we ll see what he can do. look, he s a co-founder. let s let s anything s better than rus, right?
the board, which is small there s only four people including both co-founders starts talking. hey, should colin be the ceo instead of rus? colin as ceo. and for rus, it was anyone but colin. shortly, if not immediately after the conversation, i got a tip that there had been a formal complaint filed by an hq employee. this woman had a complaint against colin. i don t believe it was sexual in nature. it was more just like a sort of like the way she was being treated. and she brought that up to rus, and from what i understand, the general sentiment is that rus kind of used that against colin as ammo to kind of push away the whole colin as ceo notion.
rappers, football players, even hillary clinton dabbed. things were really breaking down behind the scenes and a lot of it stemmed from this divide between rus and colin in terms of what kind of company this was. rus and colin did have different visions for the company. rus was all about blowing up hq trivia into this massive thing, right? like let s get bigger prizes. let s get bigger celebrities to host, and that s the future of hq. we re going to build this into a massive show. if we could get millions of people to engage for 15 minutes, 7 days a week, that that s that s incredibly powerful. my understanding from colin was we need to build a platform with a number of different game shows going. we re not going to put all of our eggs in one basket. and that was a pretty dramatic difference of opinion at that stage of the company because you only have so much money. you can choose to try and support the main game, or you
and russ became the coo, chief operating officer. but the problem was they were both competing to be the ceo, the one in control of the . colin had very clear ideas about what he wanted to create in the world. and his ambition was to appreciate culture, right? to build the next version of television. that s a gargantuan undertaking. so i think he felt the pressure to try to live up to that. he was an awesome collaborator. he was also really challenging. i mean, it was not a picnic to work with colin. he had strong ideas. he was not shy about sharing his ideas. he drove the people who worked for him incredibly hard, and you know, he didn t suffer fools. he was a total pain in the ass .
colin is not one of those people. we were married in many ways, and i lost a i lost a partner. obviously colin struggled with his issues as we all do. maybe for colin, it was too much, too soon. i can t say we always agreed or that we were always happy with each other, but it was during these challenging times that colin s kind soul and big heart would truly shine. i hope he left each and every one of you with that sense of feeling special as he did with me. thank you. a feeling this powerful is invite only.