Zach Klein: CollegeHumor's side project that became Vimeo

RAISED HERE FROM AGE ELEVEN · VIMEO 2004 · SOLD 2025

Raised here, and claimed by the hometown paper as its own: Zach Klein was born in Rochester, New York, on September 26, 1982, and moved to Fort Wayne at eleven, when his father started a business here. He was in the first sixth-grade class at Summit Middle School, graduated from Bishop Luers High School, and went on to Wake Forest — a Fort Wayne upbringing the Journal Gazette's Steve Penhollow has chronicled as a local story, and that Klein himself has described to Input Fort Wayne in a long interview about coming back. In New York, as a partner in Connected Ventures, he helped build CollegeHumor — the comedy site, founded in 1999 by Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen, that defined a first era of internet humor — and, with Jake Lodwick in late 2004, built a side project for sharing the staff's own videos. The side project was called Vimeo.

The documented exits came in stages. In August 2006, IAC acquired a fifty-one percent controlling stake in Connected Ventures for 21 million dollars (some secondary accounts round the wider transaction toward 30 million; the 21-million figure is the one carried for the stake itself). Vimeo grew into the professional's video platform — the filmmakers' alternative to YouTube — raised 300 million dollars in January 2021 at a valuation above five billion dollars, and was spun off from IAC as a standalone public company that May, trading on the Nasdaq as VMEO. The end of the arc, for now: the Italian software consolidator Bending Spoons acquired Vimeo in an all-cash transaction of about 1.38 billion dollars, announced September 10, 2025, and closed November 24, 2025. CollegeHumor's own fate belongs to the denominator entry below. Klein went on to co-found the children's creativity platform DIY.org and now serves as chief executive of the home-design company Dwell — the produced winner's second and third acts, carried at the size the record gives them.

Sources:

1. Input Fort Wayne — the long interview: the move to Fort Wayne at eleven, Summit Middle School and Bishop Luers, the Vimeo founding, DIY.org and Dwell. inputfortwayne.com
2. The Journal Gazette (Steve Penhollow) — Klein covered as a Fort Wayne story, on his returns to the city.
3. Vimeo, company record — the 2004 founding within Connected Ventures and IAC's August 2006 purchase of a fifty-one percent stake for 21 million dollars. en.wikipedia.org
4. Variety, January 2021 — Vimeo raises 300 million dollars at a valuation above five billion dollars, ahead of the IAC spin-off.
5. Bending Spoons / Vimeo, November 24, 2025 — completion of the approximately 1.38-billion-dollar all-cash acquisition of Vimeo. businesswire.com
6. the Founders & CEOs section of this history — the produced-CEO roster entry.