Vero co-founder Ayman Hariri tried to clear the air with Entrepreneur about some of the backlash Vero has received.
For a while, it’s seemed that Instagram and Snapchat are unimpeachable. They’ve been the two preferred mobile-first social networks for years, and little has gotten in their way.
Any apps that have sprung up as challengers have faded into oblivion. Remember when people talked about Ello for a hot second in 2014? Or Google Plus back in 2011?
This week, a new (well, almost three-year-old) platform called Vero has come out of the woodwork, and some people over the age of 18 are asking themselves, “Is this just a typo of Vevo, the video company?” But it’s not. Vero means “truth” in Latin (and Esperanto and Italian.) It’s now the number-one free app in Google Play and ranks eighth in the iOS App Store.
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Vero has positioned itself as a different kind of social network, one designed in response to the ways in which existing networks have counterintuitively made people unsociable. It’s grown from less than 1 million registered users to nearly 3 million, according to the company, over the past several days.
“Our intention is really to create an online social network that mimics the greatest social network that exists, which is the one that exists between people,” Vero co-founder Ayman Hariri told Entrepreneur. “Our responsibility as designers and developers is to have technology be a tool for people — to have it enhance their life experiences and not to detract from them.”
Read on to learn how Vero differs from the other social platforms and get a sense of why it’s attracting so much attention now.
How is Vero different than existing platforms?
Photos, videos and text content shared by users on Vero doesn’t just blast out to a mix of their friends and followers. You can specify which fellow users are your close friends, acquaintances or mere followers and post to each group separately.
Another big draw of Vero is that its feed isn’t manipulated by an algorithm. Posts from accounts users appear in chronological order (like they used to on Instagram).
There are no ads on Vero, either. The business model is subscription-based. To sign up, users must provide their name, email address and mobile phone number, but for now, Vero’s not charging anyone.
Where did it come from?
Vero was founded in 2013 and launched in 2015. It was co-founded by Ayman Hariri. He’s a billionaire and the son of former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafic Hariri, who resigned in 2004 and was assassinated in 2005. He’s also the half-brother of Lebanon’s current prime minister, Saad Hariri, who’s been in office since 2016.
Ayman Hariri told Entrepreneur he served as deputy general manager of Saudi Oger, a now-defunct construction company founded by his father, from 2005 until 2013. During that time, his brother served as general manager. In 2013, Hariri said he sold his shares and exited the company to co-found Vero.
“I really felt like it was time to pursue my dreams in the world of tech,” he said, claiming that he had no role in the company after 2013.
Saudi Oger shut down in July 2017. The company was unable to pay thousands of workers for months after the Saudi Arabian government delayed payments to builders in 2015, prompting riots, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. The Saudi Labour Ministry government provided food and basic necessities to Saudi Oger workers, many of whom…
