Colin Kroll, co-founder of the popular mobile apps Vine and HQ Trivia, was found dead late Saturday night in his New York apartment, local police confirmed. He was 34.
Police responded to a call from Kroll’s girlfriend shortly after midnight asking officials to check on him. He was found unresponsive in his SoHo apartment and was pronounced dead at the scene. The official cause of death has not yet been determined by the medical examiner, but TMZ reports that Kroll’s body was found with drug paraphernalia nearby.
Along with Rus Yusupov, Kroll was the co-founder of Vine, a viral video website where users could share six-second videos. The website launched the careers of online stars like Andrew “King Bach” Bachelor and Lele Pons, but was shuttered in 2016 after being purchased by Twitter four years prior.
After Vine, Kroll and Yusupov created HQ Trivia, a live game show in which users had to answer 10 rapid-fire trivia questions, and those who answered all of them correctly could split a cash prize. At its peak in January 2018, the app was one of the top 10 downloaded iPhone games on the app store.
Kroll was also the subject of investigative reports in technology trades, with a ReCode report that spoke with Twitter employees who worked under Kroll while he was the site’s general manager and anonymous sources accusing him of “‘creepy’ behavior toward women that made them uncomfortable. Twitter fired Kroll from that position in 2014, with ReCode reporting that the reports of his behavior dissuaded multiple venture capitalist from investing in HQ Trivia a year later.
