HQ Trivia and Vine Co-Founder Colin Kroll Dies at 34

Colin Kroll, a co-founder of Vine and CEO of HQ Trivia, was found dead on Sunday morning in his Manhattan apartment after the police who were performing a welfare check were informed of the death.

Police officers found his body facedown on his bed after a concerned woman called 911 and asked the police to check up on him in his apartment. The woman’s relationship to Mr. Kroll was unclear, but the police said she had grown worried about his well-being. The police said they found what appeared to be cocaine and heroin in the apartment.

Kroll 34, who co-founded the popular 6-second video app Vine, was named chief executive of HQ Trivia, the trivia game app he founded with Rus Yusupov after the company raised $15 million in March.

A HQ Trivia spokesperson said that the company became aware of Mr. Kroll’s death on Sunday. “We learned of the passing of our friend and founder, Colin Kroll, and it’s with deep sadness that we say goodbye,” she said in an email. “Our thoughts go out to his family, friends and loved ones during this incredibly difficult time.”

Before creating HQ Trivia, which live-streams 15-minute trivia shows typically twice a day to tens of thousands of mobile users, Mr. Kroll was among those who founded the six-second video app Vine, which was sold to Twitter in 2012 and closed down last year. Mr. Kroll went on to work briefly for Twitter, and later acknowledged being fired for “poor management” amid allegations of inappropriate workplace behavior toward women.

With only a couple of times per day to play the game, HQ flipped the script on how consumers use apps by dictating when people could use the app, instead of how we use every other app: whenever we want. While the app was a consistent top 10 download in the Apple app store for several months after it initially caught the internet by storm in late fall 2017, the last several months of 2018 saw the trivia game slide out of the top 200 as interest waned.