- Unheard Roots
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- Unheard Roots of Youtube (PT.1)📱
Youtube - the company we all use but barely know anything about.
You might know it was acquired by Google, you might know it was founded in mid 2000s but you probably don’t know anything else about it.
I’ll tell you what - the video giant has an interesting past you will want to hear about.
Without further ado, here is the Unheard Roots of Youtube 📱
Steve Chen on the left, Chad Hurley in the middle, and Jawad Karim on the right
Conception ✨
The video streaming giant we all know and love today was created by three gentleman in San Fransisco.
The three gentlemen were Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim.
All of the three names above had one big thing in common - having been early employees at Paypal.
The Paypal Days 💻
Let’s go back all the way to 1999 when Chad Hurley graduated from The Indiana University of Pennsylvania with a degree in fine arts.
Chad had no idea what to do with his life after college, he literally sat around doing nothing for a several months after graduation until his parents told him to get a job.
What did Chad do? He found a magazine and started reading about companies he could get a job at.
A particular startup caught his eyes. That startup was Confinity - the company that would go on to merge with X .com and become Paypal.
Steve Chen, the other founder of Youtube, graduated around the same time and also came across the small startup called Confinity.
Both Steve and Chad were the earliest employees at what became Paypal. Both of them joined when the company barely had 10 employees.
Getting Acquired & Exiting 💰📈
Seeing Paypal go from being a small startup to a conglomerate taught the duo a lot about startups.
They witnessed Paypal go through the dot com bubble, mortgage crisis, and everything in between during the early to mid 2000s.
Everything came to an end when Paypal was acquired by Ebay in 2002 and former employees were able to liquidate their stock options and leave.
Chad Hurley and Steve Chen both took time off after the acquisition.
Only problem was both of them were still in their early twenties and full of ambition - they didn’t have families and barely any responsibilities.
Brainstorming Ideas 🧠
Chad, Steve, and another former Paypal employee called Jawed Karim (he is the guy from the me at the zoo video lol) started meeting up at cafes to discuss ideas they could build together.
“So we’d just sit around down in Palo Alto there used to be a cafe - University Cafe on University Avenue - we’d meet there from time to time to have a cup of coffee and talk about different opportunities.”
One of the opportunities that excited the trio was video.
“There is photo services like Flicker that existed at the time where you could share a photo publicly, people could tag it, you could browse all these photos that were public, and share them with others. And we were like maybe there is an opportunity in the video space for something like that.”
This was right around 2005 when Facebook and other social media platforms were starting to appear on the radar and take off (still very early days).
The trio had different ideas on how to utilize video to build something exciting - one of their earliest ideas was a video based dating platform.
As they started building MVPs they quickly realized it was better to make Youtube a generic video platform instead of focusing on something like dating.
I hate to cut this wonderful story in half but I don’t want you to spend an hour reading this.
So I’m splitting this story into two parts.
Stay tuned to hear how Youtube became what it is today :)