What in the world did we do before YouTube was created? I guess the world saved more than 1 billion hours of watch time every day…but this begs the question of when and how did youtube start?
Everything from how to insert hair-extensions to the proper way to tune a 1969 Camaro or to the chord progressions for your favorite rock songs is now just a click away, thanks to this video-sharing invention by a trio of former PayPal employees. It was February 2005 when Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karin, working out of a garage in Menlo Park, California, debuted their invention. In November 2006, the investors became millionaires when they sold YouTube for $1.65 billion to the search engine Google.
A Virtual Encyclopedia
According to Jawed Karim, the inspiration for YouTube came from the halftime fiasco involving Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake, when Janet’s wardrobe experienced a malfunction. Karim could not find the video clip anywhere online, so the idea to found a destination to watch and share videos on the World Wide Web was born.
Today, YouTube users can create, upload, and share video clips on the site, www.YouTube.com, and also embed them for further sharing on any number of non-YouTube pages, including Facebook and Twitter. Users can access over 7 billion other videos, both amateur and professional, including music videos, how-to’s, product reviews, and political rants—even entire movies and television programs. Why are these people inclined to upload so many videos to YouTube, well besides sharing information many of them make money doing so. YouTube even has a satellite television station. And it’s all mostly free, although there is a subscription component that allows you to customize your use.
While almost anything goes on YouTube, there are a few things that don’t. Content that is sexually explicit, hateful, violent, or that is threatening or bullying will be removed. Likewise, YouTube does not permit spam, scams, or misleading metadata, and they have strict rules against copyright infringement as well. Users are fully able to flag anything they see as inappropriate, and it will be brought to YouTube’s attention immediately.
About the Founders
Co-founder Steve Chen was born in 1978 in Taiwan and immigrated to the United States when he was 15. He was educated at the University of Illinois and after graduation found employment at PayPal, where he met his fellow YouTube co-inventors and co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. In August 2013, he and Chad Hurley also launched MixBit, a smartphone video editing company. Currently, Chen is with GV (formerly Google Ventures), a venture capital firm that focuses on technology companies.
Born in 1977, Chad Hurley received a bachelor’s degree in fine art from the University of Pennsylvania and was later employed by eBay’s PayPal division (Hurley designed PayPal’s trademark logo). In addition to founding MixBit with Steve Chen in 2013, Hurley is also an investor in several major sports teams.
Jawed Karim (born in 1979) also worked at Paypal, where he met his future YouTube founders. Karim also pursued an advanced degree at Stanford University and is considered the most elusive member of the threesome. He was the first person ever to post a video on YouTube, a 19-second video of his visit to the elephant exhibit at the San Diego Zoo. As of this writing, the video has had over 124 million views.
