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Vine, HQ Trivia Co-Founder Colin Kroll Found Dead of Suspected Overdose (techcrunch.com) 98

TechCrunch has confirmed with TMZ that Colin Kroll, the 35-year-old co-founder and CEO of the HQ Trivia app and co-founder of Vine, has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose in his apartment. TMZ cites a police source saying cocaine and heroin were believed to be involved. From the report: Kroll was only named CEO of the HQ Trivia mobile game show app three months ago, replacing fellow co-founder Rus Yusupov who moved over to serve as chief creative officer. Prior to taking the CEO role Kroll served as HQ's CTO. He co-founded the startup in 2015, a few months after moving on from Vine -- the Twitter-owned short video format startup which got closed down in 2017. It's not clear who will take over the CEO role for HQ Trivia at this stage but Yusupov looks a likely candidate, at least in the interim.

Kroll started his career as a software engineer at Right Media, which went on to be acquired by Yahoo in 2006. From then until 2011, he led the engineering team in Yahoo's search and advertising tech group before joining luxury travel site Jetsetter as VP of Product -- where he went on to be promoted to CTO. In 2012 he left to start Vine with co-founders Dominik Hofmann and Yusopov.

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Vine, HQ Trivia Co-Founder Colin Kroll Found Dead of Suspected Overdose

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  • Were the CEOs of the 18th and 19th centuries as careless with their coke and opium as they are today? Or... was it murder?? What did he know? And when did he know it? Where were YOU last night?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Before it was illegal, you could rely on known good sources of coke and opium. That way you could reliably control dosage and time of intake. Not being a criminal also meant you could go ahead with the rest of your life -- like being a CEO.

      Today, you never know what the hell is in the stuff you get. Any heroin should be assumed to have fentanyl in it, and that stuff will almost always kill you.

    • Re:I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)

      by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Sunday December 16, 2018 @02:19PM (#57813184)
      If they found traces of both cocaine and heroin, he might have been mixing them, which is particularly more dangerous than either drug when taken alone. There're a large number of well known movie stars and other celebrities [wikipedia.org] that have died from the combination.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        Speedballing.

        Heroin brings you down, coke brings you up, wanna go back down again shoot some H. Too low, smoke some crack or freebase some coke.

      • Yeah, I think those people are weird. I'm scared to even mix beer and chocolate.

  • I don't know...if I had as much money as this guy had after being anointed a Twitter billionaire, the last thing I'd be doing is overdosing on drugs. If you're that rich you can pay for a non-contaminated known-good supply...and probably have a crew of people managing your intake.

    That, and why is it that celebrities and rich people feel the need to do destructive things? Especially suicides...it just boggles my mind. You get these rockstars who have millions of fans, people of the opposite gender throwing t

    • Depression doesn't work that way, it is a mental illness. Most people who haven't experienced an actual depression don't understand how it feels.

      Doesn't make the guy less stupid since there is a lot of decent medication and psychotherapy that is proven to help with a depression.

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