she was known for being an incredible friend to founders and actually working with them in the trenches. and founders fund whole managing principle is we don t get in the way of founders. rus knows he s going to have free rein with founders fund s money. colin, you just go back and keep coding and engineering and keep this game up and running. and rus will be the ceo and take all the glory. that s the way i read it. you can go back to every article, every interview of rus. what s the future of hq? rus whole thing is i m going to give away a million dollars. we d love to give away a million dollars. can we give away a million dollars one day? i think so. i think rus is, in the best sense of the world, a showman. i m rus yusupov, the ceo and co-founder of hq trivia. interested in creating a spectacle. with viewers in more than 80 countries. the bigger the spectacle, the better. i m joined by the man at the
with something, hq trivia founder, if you run this article, i ll fire the host. on twitter, glued for like hours. like, refreshing and other journalists were like, holy shit. this whole became a whole scandal of its own. all this media coverage laughing about how sensitive this founder was. hashtag free scott was trending. people thought that i was being held captive. that i couldn t eat at certain places without permission. it kind of the internet went wild with it. when the sweet green article dropped, rus was on the phone in the middle of the office, kind of like a pr crisis control situation. rus called me that night and he said, this is what we re going to do. after the story came out, rus took scott on like a date to sweet green, to like ease things
so the founders of vine were colin kroll and rus yusupov. colin kroll, the engineer, was the big visionary, the one that saw the opportunity for this app and this long-term vision for how social media could change. we run we re written in python and we use a slew of open source technology. and rus was product designer and kind of the manager. i was just writing a bit of a bio. he was the one who could actually make it all happen, get all the pieces moving in the right direction, and make sure the infrastructure was ready so people could share their creativity. if you see me now, tap on your screen, let me know that you guys are here. from may of 2012, we set out to make creating and sharing videos on mobile really fun and really easy. because at the time, it was dreadful. and we knew there was a better way. twitter bought vine for a reported $30 million.
nasa astronaut reid wiseman sent the first vine from earth orbit out to his twitter followers. it looks like you re well on your way now. but when you get acquired, you give up control. s happy birthday to you happy birthday unfortunately, when vine wasn t quite growing fast enough and twitter, its parent company was in a cash crunch, it shut down vine. twitter is shutting down the vine video app and laying off 350 people. which shocked the internet and stranded tons of creators who had built their livelihood on the app. hey, bud. heard about vine. vine s shutting down. thank you guys for following me for the last few years. after twitter shut down vine, founder rus yusupov famously tweeted, don t sell your company. i think rus tweet, it showed instant regret.
colin kroll and rus yusupov sold vine to twitter for $30 million. they actually sold vine before it even launched, it was a very big surprise, because most start-ups want to get big first and then get acquired. the video sharing app vine was launched just in january by twitter. when rus and colin sold vine to twitter, they went to work for twitter building out and popularizing this product, and they helped it go from zero to 60 million plus users. girl, he s so vine. he s not yours, he s vine. you should follow me on vine. whoo! perhaps when they were in the quiet before, now being a part of twitter, everyone was like, whoa, who are these guys? and they were accepting awards and at like every industry event. and really being celebrated as founders. i mean, you guys have grown so much and so many people are using it in creative ways. where do you see it going? i think we had no idea when we started.