Pour one out: it looks like Vine has lost another one of its co-founders.
It was only a few months ago that Dom Hofmann, one of the co-founders, and the former CEO, of the social video-sharing service, gave up his day to day duties at the company to take on an advisory role instead.
Now, his fellow co-founder Colin Kroll, who is also the General Manager of Vine, announced via a tweet that he is doing the same thing.
I’m so proud of Vine – the team + the product. I’ll no longer be working there day-to-day as of today but will remain involved as an advisor
— colin kroll (@ckb) April 4, 2014
From his tone it definitely does not sound like there is any bad blood, but simply that Kroll has, as you’d expect, other ideas and ambitions that he wants to pursue.
Obviously, though, his announcement is light on specifics, as in what exactly he is going to do next. It also not clear when Kroll will he leaving, and who his replacement might be.
VatorNews has reached out to Twitter for a comment, and to find out more, but the company had nothing more to share at this time.
Now that both Hofmann and Kroll are no longer working at Vine day to day, that leaves Rus Yusupov, the company’s creative director, as the only original member of the team left.
The Vine co-founders must feel as though they are leaving their company in good hands, considering how well it has done since becoming part of Twitter.
Twitter bought Vine back in October of 2012, before debuting the service in January of 2013. Vine, as everyone knows, allows users to create and share six second long looping videos that can be embedded into tweets, or uploaded onto a separate Vine web page.
The purchase was a smart one for both Vine and Twitter, as the app surged in popularity, rising to become the top free app on iOS in April, and then getting up to 13 million users by June, right at the time it debuted on Android.
By August, Vine had more than tripled its user base to 40 million, which was enough for it to be able to fend off a direct threat from Instagram, which debuted its own video feature in June, allowing users to make videos that are between 3 and 15 seconds long.
Vine is currently listed as the #26 free app on iOS, and #39 on Android, according to AppAnnie.
(Image source: brunchnews.com)
