Ingot Tree

The Youtube story is another classic fairy tale. Recently acquired by Google, Youtube's simple beginning must be a lesson to learn. Solve a problem, one small step at a time. Here's the Straits Times' account:

ALL Mr Chad Hurley and Mr Steve Chen wanted to do was share some videos from a dinner party with a half a dozen friends in San Francisco.

It was January last year, and they could not figure out how to do it. They tried sending the clips by e-mail but they kept getting rejected because the files were too big. Posting the videos online was a headache, too.

So last February, the two buddies got to work in Mr Hurley's garage, determined to design something simpler.

What they came up with was a website called YouTube - and the rest is Internet history.

BusinessWeek, in its April 10 issue this year, told this story of YouTube's young founders - Mr Hurley is 29 years old and Mr Chen, 28.

They met at an online payment service PayPal where they were among the first 20 hires during the second half of 1999. They became good friends and part of a tight-knit PayPal clique that remains close till today, said the magazine.

In fact, their venture money came in part through their connection to Mr Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, a top venture capital firm and early backer of Google. Mr Botha had been PayPal's chief financial officer.

Mr Hurley, YouTube's chief executive, also had an entrepreneurial streak from the start. He grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and tried to sell paintings from his front yard at the age of five, said the magazine. He studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and landed at PayPal after reading about it in Wired magazine and asking about a job via e-mail.

During his interview he designed a new logo for PayPal, one that the company still uses today. He left after PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002, working with a few companies as a design consultant.

Mr Chen, YouTube's chief technology officer, has been a maths and science geek since high school, said BusinessWeek.

He threw himself into programming and computers at Illinois Mathematics & Science Academy and went on to study computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

During his last semester, he was recruited by Mr Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and a former classmate. Mr Chen remained at PayPal until early last year to help finish launching the company's expansion into China.

By the time of the fateful dinner party last January, the two men were both between jobs and carrying substantial credit card debt.

They founded YouTube in February as a classic Silicon Valley garage start-up with another friend, Mr Jawed Karim. Mr Karim left the company just before it got its first round of funding in November last year to go back to full-time study at Stanford University.

Mr Chen, the programming expert, used Adobe's flash development language to let users stream video clips on their browsers. Mr Hurley, the user interface expert, designed ways to let users easily share the videos they liked and put descriptive remarks or 'tags' on their favourite clips.

They let users paste YouTube clips right on their own Web pages - a trick that led to the exploding popularity of YouTube, especially on another popular website, MySpace.

In an interview yesterday, Mr Hurley told Reuters that he and Mr Chen gave in to Google, after rebuffing other offers, because of its resources and assurances of independence.

They get to keep on running the company and YouTube retains its name and its own corporate offices. The Google stock they will get in a deal worth more than US$1 billion (S$1.6 billion) must have been hard to resist, too.

Categories: youtube, beginning, google, choosing, problem, startup, entrepreneur, chad, hurley, steve, chen, video, sharing, solution, paypal