Six seconds was not a limitation. It was a creative constraint. The best Vines were brilliant because they had to be short, not in spite of it.
We had 200 million monthly active users and Twitter still could not figure out how to make money from it. That is the saddest sentence in startup history.
Vine created an entire generation of creators — Logan Paul, Lele Pons, King Bach. They all left for YouTube and Instagram because we could not pay them. We had the talent and no business model.
I built the prototype in a weekend. The idea was simple — what if video had a character limit like Twitter had for text?
Twitter bought us before we even launched. In hindsight, that was both the best and worst thing that happened to Vine. Best because we got distribution. Worst because we lost control.
TikTok proved the format worked. They just did what we should have done — paid creators, added music, and actually built a business around it.