How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? Probably depends on how motivated they are. But you'll be surprised to learn that just three are enough to create… YouTube.
In the beginning it was quite different. Because the platform that became a synonym for video content was originally supposed to be a dating site. Three former PayPal employees launched the project in early 2005, and less than two years later Google bought it for $1.65 billion!
Here is the little-known, twist-filled story of one of the giants of the digital world. Of the site that made video unimaginably easy to share. Of the project that for many years ranked among the three most visited pages on the planet.
Limelight
Was the venture's success down to luck, to enterprise, to instinct? To landing at the epicenter at exactly the right moment? You could say it was a bit of all of these.
Ever since he was a boy, Chad Hurley couldn't decide what he wanted to do. His great love was art, but he was also strongly drawn to technology. And while today such a career choice has plenty of logical paths, at the end of the 1990s that was not the case at all. He had to choose between the two, and his heart led him to drawing.
In 1999 he graduated in fine arts from a university in Indiana, and the time came to look for a job. For a long while he wondered whether to start out as a teacher, but one day, while reading the newspaper (yes, back then young people still did that too), he came across an ad that caught his eye. It was a technology company looking for a designer. Here was the long-awaited chance for Chad to work with art and technology at the same time!
Just Like in the Movies
Ever heard of a company called Confinity? Neither had I, and Chad knew next to nothing about it when he went to the job interview. They asked him to quickly sketch a logo for a future project of theirs, something to do with payments. He handled the improvised task so well that his drawing became one of the most recognizable trademarks in the online world to this day. No, it's too early to turn to video sharing—we're talking about PayPal here.
Confinity worked on cybersecurity software, but at the start of the new millennium its managers concluded that one of the revolutions the mass internet would bring was coming to the world of payments. Soon the whole company was renamed PayPal, and the work focused precisely on building a system that would make it easy for people to send and receive money over the web. PayPal made it possible to transfer money online and became an electronic alternative to traditional checks and bank transfers.
A young, motivated team capable of miracles came together. Chad had landed in a wonderful place, where he quickly made friends with his colleagues. Above all with two programmers—Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. Steve was born in Taiwan and came to the US when he was 8, and learning the language cost him enormous effort. He and Jawed both studied computer science in Illinois, but dropped out after receiving tempting offers to work at the future PayPal.
Modern Times
The very beginning of the millennium was a dynamic period for life online. Everyone was excited about the possibilities the internet offered, and a huge number of companies sprang up to develop all kinds of promising projects. But it soon became clear that the technology was not yet advanced enough, and people were not yet online in large enough numbers. This led to the crisis known as the dot-com bubble. Many companies went bankrupt and let their employees go.
PayPal, however, pulled through, thanks to a series of important, quick decisions. Such as merging with the startup x.com, headed by an ambitious young man named… Elon Musk. The company not only survived, but in 2002 it was acquired by the online retail giant eBay for what was then an unthinkable $1.5 billion. All of this laid the foundation of Musk's enormous fortune, which made his later, most significant ventures possible.
But what happened to our three heroes—Chad, Steve and Jawed? Nothing much. Except that they suddenly found themselves transported from a small, likable company with friendly relationships into a giant with all its typical corporate and commercial dimensions. Chad left right after the deal; his two colleagues held out for a few more months before they, too, became convinced the new environment wasn't for them.
They tried different things. Chad started a company making laptops, but quickly realized that the big breakthroughs were possible not in the hardware world but in software, where you can build something truly big quickly and without a large investment.
Don't Make a Movie Out of It!
And so we find ourselves in a café near Chad's home (yes, not in a garage, as Silicon Valley tradition demands). A few years have passed, the three are out of work, but they walked away from the sale with decent bonuses that allow them to start a business of their own.
But what kind? They weighed a platform for bloggers, some form of social network, or a dating site. They decided the last direction was the most promising, inspired by the site Hot or Not, where you rated whether the people in the photos the site showed you were attractive.
A designer and two programmers, they discussed and discussed ideas until they settled on one: a platform where people would meet their other halves by presenting themselves in short videos.
No sooner said than done! The three already had experience; they knew it was important to seize the moment fast and get the project to some initial stage, just enough to check whether things worked. So the site youtube.com was registered… on February 14, 2005, of all days.
YourTVset
It's said that the platform's name was also invented on that Valentine's Day, which is why they hurried to register it. The idea was for it to carry the message of a “personal television.” That's what YouTube means—“your TV set,” since alongside the official word “television,” English has the very popular colloquial term “tube.”
At that time neither Facebook nor Twitter existed; Google was already around, but far from its present position as an online empire.
Back then, however, internet speeds had unexpectedly improved, and suddenly it had become possible to exchange video, too. The three correctly sensed this, but not the exact direction. They came up with a motivating slogan: “Tune in, Hook up!”
They began inviting attractive young women, offering them 20 dollars each to upload a video introduction of themselves to the new dating site… and perhaps we're lucky it didn't work out well enough; it's easy to imagine what kind of content it might soon have become.
The three opted for unconventional technical solutions—they settled on the then-rising Flash platform, which had just “set in motion” web pages by making it possible to upload video and animations. As technology advanced it quickly became obsolete, but at that moment it turned out to be the right choice.
Stories in Pictures
The months went by, and candidates looking for a girlfriend or boyfriend were still nowhere to be seen. The three never quite remember who exactly suggested changing direction—turning the platform into a place where people could share all kinds of videos.
Chad says the idea came while they were discussing how hard it had been to exchange the clips they'd shot while visiting Steve. According to Jawed, though, the idea came after he remembered the notorious Super Bowl final a year earlier, when Justin Timberlake supposedly accidentally bared Janet Jackson's breast. He never managed to find a clip of the incident online, and so he decided to propose a venture that would make sharing easier.
What is known for certain, however, is the first clip uploaded to YouTube, and it can still be watched today! April 23, 2005: Jawed Karim shows himself strolling around the San Diego Zoo.
Although the site was running before that, its official launch came on December 15. By then it already had 8 million views a day, even though at first clips were limited to just 30 seconds.
From then on they didn't even need to pay their first guests. Things developed at a dizzying pace. So much so that less than a year later the site would make them richer by… more than 1 billion dollars!
The Eighth Art
At first the battle seemed almost impossible. It turns out that the other platform we know today—Vimeo—appeared even earlier, in November 2004, but never managed to match the success of our three heroes. In 2004 Windows had made its Media Player install automatically along with the operating system. Every one of the big companies sensed that video content would become the next big success, but it came precisely to the three enthusiasts. How? Perhaps because they were the first to build a fast and sufficiently convenient site. The ability to easily share videos and embed them in other pages certainly helped, too.
A Nike ad featuring Ronaldinho became the first clip to reach a million views. An NBC series also appeared on the platform and was watched millions of times. In the end it was removed at the network's request, but that turned into extra publicity.
By July 2006, 65,000 clips were being uploaded every day, and views reached 100 million a day.
Can heavy traffic become a problem? Interestingly, around that time a company selling pipes and tubes sued the three. Its site was constantly down because it sat on the domain www.utube.com, and far too many people visited it looking for the video platform.
Get Out of Here
In any case, they settled out of court. But such enormous interest was bound to attract other, more important attention as well. Serious bidding followed, until the three agreed to sell their venture to Google. Yes, they split their share of the famous $1.65 billion not in cash but in Google stock, but the online giant's subsequent growth made them even wealthier.
What happened next to the three newly minted billionaires? Mostly… they enjoyed their fame. Chad stayed at the helm of YouTube for a while, then took on the role of adviser. He tried various startups that achieved no impressive success, and invested in Formula 1 and NBA teams. Steve delved into computer science and also tried his hand in the startup world without making big news. Not much has been heard of Karim, apart from a brief moment of fame when he changed the description of the famous first zoo video to protest the platform's idea of removing the dislike button.
Meanwhile, YouTube never stopped growing and breaking records. It piled up market share and developed a huge system for advertising and content creation. Today you can even use a free studio in Los Angeles to shoot your clips…, if you're one of the vloggers who have managed to gather at least 10,000 followers.
Doo, Doo, Doo, Doo, Doo, Doo
Gradually politicians appeared, too; the first to have the courage, in 2007, was Tony Blair.
Miracles never stop happening on this platform. Like the story of MrBeast—one of the most popular vloggers, with his remarkable social experiments, such as giving away… an island. YouTube created its own stars and became an industry that is still strong enough to fight for the top spots against young, ambitious rivals like TikTok.
The most subscribers today—220 million—belong to an Indian film company. In 2012 the irritating K-pop hit “Gangnam Style” became the first to reach 1 billion views, but… who do you think leads today? You'll be surprised. As of 2023 the record, at 12.5 billion, is held by… the children's song Baby Shark, known in Bulgaria in a local version as “Baby Whale.”
Today more than 500 hours of video are uploaded to the platform every minute. Last year advertising revenue exceeded $28 billion, and users number close to 3 billion…
So if you think a good idea can't possibly make you rich, remember the three friends. Online, all kinds of miracles definitely never stop happening…
