CEO at 33, Tubi's Anjali Sud on success hacks she learned at Amazon, IAC on way to top of Fox streaming

• Anjali Sud rose as a young executive at Amazon and then Barry Diller's conglomerate IAC, ultimately overseeing the spinoff IPO of Vimeo.
• Today, Sud is CEO of Fox free ad-supported streaming app Tubi, which is nearing 100 million monthly active users.
• Named to the 2025 C온라인카지노사이트 Changemakers list, she says younger generations are consuming free content that meets their unique storytelling needs and that is her strategic focus rather than chasing any competition like Netflix.

During her childhood, Anjali Sud's father would put clips from Wall Street Journal articles about chief executive officers on her pillow for her to find when she went to sleep. The move might have been a bit presumptuous, Sud says, but the message that her father, an entrepreneur himself, was sending stayed with her: "I grew up with parents who believed I could be the person in that clip," she now says.

Sud rose to the role of CEO at video streaming platform Vimeo, part of Barry Diller's media conglomerate IAC, at the age of 33, and took the company public in 2021. Now, she is the CEO of 's free ad-supported streaming app Tubi, where she has overseen rapid growth. In her first full year as CEO (2024), monthly active users hit 80 million; it's now nearing 100 million. In February, it hosted the biggest streaming event of all, the Super Bowl.

Sud's time at Vimeo was focused on helping creators get their stories out and that continues to inform her view of where streaming content and viewership is headed. "I really believe the future of entertainment is going to be free for consumers," , who was named to the 2025 list, tells C온라인카지노사이트. "The future of the internet is a lot more diversity in storytelling and audience tastes than reflected in the traditional Hollywood system today," she said.

Below are highlights from an extended video interview that C온라인카지노사이트's Julia Boorstin conducted with Sud, in which the CEO weighed in on becoming a chief executive at 33, the competition across the disrupted media landscape, and her approach to getting things done as her responsibilities have grown and the stakes have gotten bigger. And her biggest life hack of all: getting enough sleep.

Chasing Netflix, or any competition, is no way to succeed

If you are trying to compete with Netflix or YouTube directly, you may be setting yourself up for failure. That was Sud's view when she was leading Vimeo and attempting to position it for success in the media marketplace. "You have to know your strengths and believe you are embarking on a strategy where you have the right to win," she said.

For Vimeo, the need to provide more space to more creators, and creators' need for more tools, drove the business. "I remember trying to convince people before the pandemic that companies would livestream town halls, and I would be told no over and over again," she recalled. "It's really important to not let the competition drive your strategy," she said.

While she says YouTube has, to date, probably taken the idea of enabling creators outside of the traditional Hollywood system the farthest, she doesn't think any company has fully succeeded in building the business model of taking content from a diverse slate of creators that does really well on social and enabling those creators to produce Hollywood-level content. And what Tubi is hearing from audiences is that they want to see this talent on bigger screens.

What is fundamental to developing the conviction for success is listening to and understanding customers — their needs and the problems they are trying to solve.

"Every strategy that wins in business has some element of that," she said.

This doesn't mean you can ignore the competition. "Your competition is your mirror," she said. "It helps you assess where to lean into strength, or where to differentiate ... what you are not going to do. ... But don't do things because others are doing them. That's never a good reason," she added.

How Amazon gets product out to market before it's even built

Sud was at Amazon back when e-commerce could be described as still in scaling mode as opposed to dominant mode. It's well known that Amazon hammers home the concept of customers coming first, and Sud said the company built many management principles around this core belief. One small practice related to this which Sud has taken with her is Amazon's approach to launching a new product.

The company starts with a practice that seems counter-intuitive: it writes a press release explaining the new product to the customer before the product exists. And then it "works backwards" from that moment, she said.

Amazon is also well known for a corporate culture that prioritizes internal debate, and Sud says that encouraging dissenting views and opinions in the pursuit of getting to the right answer is another key to innovation. In any area where the goal is innovation, there is "no playbook, no obvious answer," she says. As a result, if the internal culture isn't "really fighting it out a little bit to get to at a right answer, then your track record won't be as strong," she said.

"Build the culture where people see you won't get punished for speaking your mind," she says.

Being 'impatient' always worked at Barry Diller's IAC

While at IAC and on the way up to Vimeo CEO, she says the corporate management experience was somewhat like being thrown into the deep end of the pool as a method of learning to swim — in the most positive sense of that analogy, she quickly added.

IAC acted on a core belief that if you bet on talent over experience and give people opportunities but also "leave it to them to figure it out," then success will follow for individuals and their organizations.

That deep-end of the pool analogy was also enacted in another way at IAC: through a philosophy of being "impatient on execution and patient on vision," says Sud.

She learned both are possible at the same time. Leaders need a sense of urgency, to be constantly striving forward day-to-day on how to execute, but when it comes to vision never forget that great businesses are built over a long time.

"You can't give up when something doesn't go well. You can't hedge when it comes to the actual vision," she said.

Imposter syndrome is an 'every day' reality for CEOs

Leaders are often asked what they wish they had known earlier in their paths to success. For Sud, accepting that "imposter syndrome" will always be a part of the experience would have saved some time and effort.

"I spent so much time when I was younger; so much energy was wasted trying to show up as a certain kind of leader or trying to contort myself to be what I thought everyone would want me to be, and I wish I had just taken all that energy and just focused it on my job and myself," she said.

In fact, she said that did not happen until she became a CEO, and "had the privilege to be myself."

She also thinks it's not only important for the individual but is contagious for the organization. "People don't want to follow and don't rally behind leaders who aren't authentic," she said. 

But the "imposter" feeling never goes away.

"I feel it every day, right now," she said. "I have always felt it and reframed it. ... Nobody's got it figured out. Nobody," she said.

Make the tradeoffs needed to get enough sleep

As a working mother, Sud says managing life and work is a constant struggle — and she concedes that she has a lot more help than many working moms — but she adds that there is "no better capital allocator, no one better equipped to manage scare resources," than a working mom.

"My bar for what is worth doing in every aspect of life gets higher and higher," she said.

One big part of life that Sud says contributes to all of her success is eight to nine hours of sleep every night.

"My big life hack is sleep," she said. "I have been doing it [8-9 hours per night] for a decade, and including through having kids and a career, and many people will say how on earth do you do that?"

In addition to the help Sud gets at home, she also makes some big daily sacrifices. "If I have to choose between working out or watching a show, I choose sleep. I take the tradeoffs. ... I choose sleep every single time and definitely took a hit to my social life," she said.

Having been a female CEO at a young age, Sud is intent on recreating the environment in which she was able to grow. "It made me want to reach out and have people on my team given that opportunity," she said, and she added there are examples of women on her team that have become two-time CEOs on their own now.

"It does cascade. When you are young and ambitious, pay attention to the people above you and their journeys and try to put yourself in the position of working at a company that has that philosophy. It will make things so much easier," she said.

Watch the video above to learn more about Sud's life and career and how she thinks about leadership and reaching successful outcomes.