HQ Trivia CEO who ‘died of heroin overdose’ was ‘overwhelmed by success’

On Sunday, the developers behind HQ Trivia — the game show where hundreds of thousands of users compete for cash on their smartphones — launches a new game: HQ Words, a “Wheel of Fortune”-inspired app.

It should be a time of celebration and optimism for the young start-up. Instead, HQ is facing a crisis.

One week ago, CEO Colin Kroll, 34, was found dead of a suspected drug overdose in his $7,450-a-month Nolita apartment.

“I think that, probably, being continually catapulted into these high visibility, successful roles — in a very fast-moving city where there’s a lot of accessibility [to illicit substances] — made it difficult for him to stay grounded,” said Maggie Neuwald, who was engaged to Kroll from 2012 to 2013.

Kroll — who launched HQ Trivia with Rus Yusupov in August 2017 — presided over a business valued at $100 million. HQ was just the pair’s latest huge success. In 2012, they sold Vine, the once wildly popular video app they created, to Twitter for $30 million.

Kroll was a start-up golden boy, but with a dark side that was exacerbated by the roller-coaster highs and lows of the fast-paced tech industry.

“It’s not like anyone hands you … a manual of how to deal with [whirlwind success],” said Neuwald. “That probably, unfortunately, got the best of him, although I had hoped he’d be able to fight those demons.”

According to sources, Kroll had struggled with addiction for years. His father, Alan Kroll, told The New York Times last week that his son, who worked 100-hour weeks, had recently given up drinking, though used drugs recreationally.

“He worked too many hours and too hard,” the senior Kroll said. “I think New York City got to him a little bit.”

Colin Kroll was found face-down in bed on Dec. 16 after his 27-year-old girlfriend, Julie Antonio, called police to conduct a wellness check.

The night before, Kroll had attended HQ’s holiday party at Gran Morsi, an Italian restaurant in Tribeca. A company insider told The Post he seemed “especially off” that evening.

Afterward, according to police sources, Kroll and Antonio went to his two-bedroom apartment where he did heroin and cocaine. (Antonio departed early Saturday morning.) Heroin and marijuana were found near Kroll’s body when officers arrived just after midnight, and there was also an envelope containing white powder and drug paraphernalia nearby.

Kroll had stepped into the CEO role only in September, and he had his work cut out for him.

‘It’s not like anyone hands you … a manual of how to deal with [whirlwind success]. That probably, unfortunately, got the best of him.’

At the beginning of the year, HQ Trivia was consistently in the Top 10 most-downloaded free iPhone games. More recently, it has hovered between 250 and 500 in popularity.

The pressure was on for the developers’ next big hit.

“Fans have been waiting to see what the next trick is,” said one current employee.

“There’s so much pressure on [start-up] founders because they need to deliver to investors,” said the company insider. “There’s a disproportionately younger set of founders in this space … They are brilliant and creative and innovative, but they are also young and inexperienced and naïve. All of a sudden, you’re going from a fun, creative time of building something into pressure from the investor side.”

The spotlight thrust upon Kroll, who grew up in Bloomfield, Mich., was worlds away from his upbringing.

“He had this hard Midwest drive about him,” his father told the Times.

“He worked really hard,” recalled childhood friend Michelle Micallef. “He was a server at Steve’s Deli before any of us had jobs.”

Kroll studied computer science at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich. But to pursue his tech dreams, he had to enter a high-stakes world.

After graduation, he landed a job as a software engineer at Right Media, which bought and sold advertising space, in New York City. When that company was acquired by Yahoo, Kroll continued on as an engineering manager at the Internet mammoth.

He left Yahoo in 2011 to work at travel Web site Jet­Setter, where he became chief technology officer at 27.

According to former fiancée Neuwald, Kroll had first struggled with addiction while still in Michigan. (Prior to Neuwald, Kroll had been engaged once before, to Leslie Theron, who is now a minister at a church in South Africa.) Before they got together in 2009, Kroll had sobered up. He did drink with Neuwald, but not excessively, she said.

That all changed in 2012, when Kroll’s career took a steep — and high-pressure — climb.

In June of that year, Kroll joined forces with developers Rus Yusupov and Dom Hofmann to start Vine. Four months later, before it even launched, Twitter acquired the app, making the young men instant millionaires. Vine debuted in January 2013; by December 2015 it had 200 million users.

“I think toward the end of our relationship, as he got more successful, he started to want to dabble in drinking and those types of things a little bit more,” said Neuwald. The couple split in 2013, in part because of his fast-paced lifestyle.

Vine should have launched Kroll as a power player. Instead, he was fired from the company he co-founded after 18 months over allegations of being a “bad manager,” according to a December 2017 Recode article.

The article, which came out four months after Kroll and his partners launched HQ, also stated that Kroll had gotten a reputation for “creepy” behavior toward his ­female colleagues at Twitter.

A second HQ source told The Post that the bad press was deeply upsetting to Kroll.

In March of this year, he publicly apologized — after HQ investors, having uncovered the old accusations during due diligence, were hedging whether or not to give the company a new round of funding.

“I now realize that there are things I said and did that made some feel unappreciated or uncomfortable. I apologize to those people,” he told Axios in a statement. “Today, I’m committed to building HQ Trivia into a culture-defining product and supporting the dedicated team that makes it all possible.”

One former Twitter employee told The Post Kroll was also known for being “sketchy” with female Vine users, exploiting his position at the company to proposition women and ask them out on dates.

“When he was at Vine, he used it as a personal platform to hook up,” added the company insider.

In fact, Kroll and Julie Antonio first connected during Vine’s early days, when Antonio was a user of the app, according to the company insider. The two are said to have dated on and off for years and had recently started spending more time together.

Antonio, who lives in Jersey City, has a drug history of her own.

In April 2015, she was arrested for possession of seven bags of heroin and 50 used bags, as well as nine hypodermic syringes, according to a police report. (She could not be reached for comment.)

“People were worried about [Kroll],” said the company insider, who added that, in the past few months, Kroll would show up at HQ headquarters “nervous and jittery and sort of wired.

“People were pretty sure it was cocaine. He’d yell at people and would have episodes where he would get especially vocal and push things around.”

Around the time he was named CEO, Kroll swore off alcohol once again — but he also began skipping work for days at a time, calling out sick.

There were, sources say, good days and bad days, fueling suspicions of drug abuse.

“His behavior was volatile,” said the company insider.

Some HQ employees said they were completely in the dark regarding Kroll’s issues.

“He was such a meticulous guy and planned out so far in advance, it blows your mind that he f–ked [up his life],” said the current employee.

Kroll recently cooked a turkey for the staff’s Thanksgiving potluck and brought in Christmas cookies that his mother had sent him.

He would regularly bring his pug, Tater Tot, to work.

But the company insider said that multiple complaints were filed with HQ’s human-resources department against Kroll, including one for him using a swear word on a company chat portal.

“It almost seemed like the complaints were people’s way of trying to help him,” said the company insider.

But that help never came.

“His aspirations were to really change the world through the ­Internet,” said Neuwald.

“He had every reason in the world to be happy and excited about everything he was accomplishing, but even in spite of that, he still struggled with his demons and, unfortunately, just wasn’t able to battle them off in the end.”