WEBVTT - The YouTube Story Part One 0:00:04.480 --> 0:00:13.200 Technology with tech Stuff from works dot com. Hey there, 0:00:13.200 --> 0:00:17.160 and welcome to text Stuff. I am your host, Jonathan Strickland, 0:00:17.200 --> 0:00:20.599 executive producer, here at how Stuff Works, and today I 0:00:20.600 --> 0:00:22.360 thought we'd take a look at one of the most 0:00:22.440 --> 0:00:26.520 influential sites on the Internet. In fact, it's the second 0:00:26.640 --> 0:00:30.280 largest search engine on the Web. And if you haven't 0:00:30.280 --> 0:00:32.080 looked at the title of this episode, you might be 0:00:32.120 --> 0:00:36.040 thinking I'm talking about Yahoo or something, but nope, I'm 0:00:36.040 --> 0:00:38.839 talking about YouTube. It's a site that has recently been 0:00:38.840 --> 0:00:42.400 in the spotlight for lots of not so great reasons, 0:00:43.000 --> 0:00:45.559 but we'll get into those a bit later. And I 0:00:45.560 --> 0:00:48.440 should mention this is part one of a multipart episode, 0:00:48.760 --> 0:00:51.000 and as of the recording, I'm not exactly sure how 0:00:51.040 --> 0:00:54.000 many episodes this is going to end up being in total, 0:00:54.120 --> 0:00:57.360 but I suspect it will be too. I'll let you 0:00:57.400 --> 0:01:00.960 know more in our next episode after I've those notes done. 0:01:01.360 --> 0:01:06.520 But today, YouTube is the dominant player in online video content. 0:01:07.000 --> 0:01:11.640 Users watch, share, and upload hours of videos every moment, 0:01:12.160 --> 0:01:14.160 So we're gonna take a look at how YouTube got 0:01:14.160 --> 0:01:17.120 it start, how it rose to prominence, and some of 0:01:17.160 --> 0:01:20.640 the stories and scandals that have shaped it along the way. 0:01:20.720 --> 0:01:24.520 So let's start at the very beginning, which I am 0:01:24.560 --> 0:01:27.760 told through song is a very good place to start, 0:01:28.440 --> 0:01:33.080 and that would be at PayPal. Now. PayPal, to back 0:01:33.160 --> 0:01:37.800 up even further, was founded partially by two other companies. 0:01:39.160 --> 0:01:44.800 Peter Thiel, Ken Howary Luke Nozack and Max Levchin created 0:01:44.880 --> 0:01:49.720 a service called Confinity. Like today's PayPal, this was a 0:01:49.800 --> 0:01:55.120 money transferring platform, and in two thousand, Confinity merged with 0:01:55.160 --> 0:01:58.600 an online banking site called x dot com, which was 0:01:58.680 --> 0:02:01.720 co created by Elon Musk. So already we've got some 0:02:01.760 --> 0:02:05.720 really big names involved in this story, namely Peter Thiel 0:02:05.760 --> 0:02:09.360 and Elon Musk. Really, the news service became known as 0:02:09.400 --> 0:02:12.840 PayPal shortly thereafter, and by two thousand two had attracted 0:02:12.880 --> 0:02:16.560 attention from a little company called eBay. eBay moved to 0:02:16.560 --> 0:02:21.280 a choir PayPal for the princely sum of one and 0:02:21.480 --> 0:02:26.720 a half billion with a B dollars. Now, this acquisition 0:02:26.919 --> 0:02:31.640 made a lot of people really rich. Or let's get 0:02:31.840 --> 0:02:34.840 real here for a second. People, it made some people 0:02:35.000 --> 0:02:39.079 rich and other people it made way more rich than 0:02:39.120 --> 0:02:42.320 they already were. Because I hate to tell you this, 0:02:42.440 --> 0:02:45.200 but the fairy tale of the developer who comes from 0:02:45.240 --> 0:02:49.079 nothing and then becomes a millionaire isn't nearly as common 0:02:49.120 --> 0:02:52.399 as we would all like to think. Often it's more 0:02:52.480 --> 0:02:57.200 like rich person goes and does things and gets more rich. 0:02:57.480 --> 0:03:01.200 But that's a topic for another show on another podcast. 0:03:01.240 --> 0:03:05.360 Really now, two former employees of PayPal, Chad Hurley and 0:03:05.440 --> 0:03:09.520 Steve Chen, were shooting the breeze at Chen's then new 0:03:09.720 --> 0:03:13.560 San Francisco home, and I like to imagine they were 0:03:13.560 --> 0:03:17.560 having money fights with each other, throwing balls of cash around. 0:03:17.960 --> 0:03:22.680 That's probably not accurate. They did shoot some video while 0:03:22.720 --> 0:03:25.480 they were hanging out, and then they lamented that sharing 0:03:25.600 --> 0:03:30.000 video online was unreasonably hard. The Internet and the Web 0:03:30.080 --> 0:03:34.560 had started to transform everything, but it was still difficult 0:03:34.600 --> 0:03:38.960 to get video to anyone. This is the era before 0:03:39.040 --> 0:03:42.400 the smartphone, so for one thing, we didn't all have 0:03:42.520 --> 0:03:45.560 video cameras in our pockets. And it was the era 0:03:45.720 --> 0:03:50.520 before anyone had created a really dependable platform upon which 0:03:50.560 --> 0:03:53.840 you could upload and share video that could get a 0:03:53.840 --> 0:03:58.120 lot of traction. Meanwhile, there was a third former PayPal 0:03:58.240 --> 0:04:02.880 employee named Jawed Catam who was lamenting that there was 0:04:02.960 --> 0:04:06.960 no easy way to find videos of specific events online. 0:04:07.320 --> 0:04:10.560 He was thinking about some events that had really made 0:04:10.600 --> 0:04:14.000 the news and you should be able to find video 0:04:14.640 --> 0:04:18.000 of those events online, But unlike other sources on the 0:04:18.160 --> 0:04:21.240 other types of media, there was no really good way 0:04:21.240 --> 0:04:24.599 of searching for video. So you could find news reports 0:04:24.720 --> 0:04:28.440 or sometimes images, but you couldn't necessarily find video clips. Now, 0:04:28.480 --> 0:04:32.360 there were two events in particular that he cites as 0:04:32.440 --> 0:04:36.800 being sort of the inspiration for thinking about this, and 0:04:36.839 --> 0:04:40.120 one of them is is a catastrophe, and the other 0:04:40.200 --> 0:04:43.200 one not as much, although it was treated as a 0:04:43.200 --> 0:04:46.320 catastrophe at the time. So the two events he cited 0:04:46.360 --> 0:04:49.080 in an interview in two thousand six were the moment 0:04:49.279 --> 0:04:52.000 during the halftime show of the two thousand four Super Bowl. 0:04:52.800 --> 0:04:56.080 That moment the moment in which Janet Jackson's breast was 0:04:56.160 --> 0:05:00.839 exposed during what was later called a wardrobe malfunction. So 0:05:00.880 --> 0:05:03.760 that was the first event he cited as one of 0:05:03.800 --> 0:05:06.400 the reasons he wanted to create a platform that would 0:05:06.400 --> 0:05:10.200 be easier to share video because he couldn't find video 0:05:10.400 --> 0:05:14.359 of that event. And the other was a tsunami that 0:05:14.400 --> 0:05:19.520 had devastated places like Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and India, 0:05:19.600 --> 0:05:21.839 and he knew that there were a lot of people 0:05:21.920 --> 0:05:26.560 who had captured video footage of the tsunami and that 0:05:26.680 --> 0:05:30.880 video footage could be really valuable for people and educational 0:05:30.920 --> 0:05:34.080 for people, but there was no easy way to search 0:05:34.120 --> 0:05:36.240 for it. You couldn't find it anywhere. And he knew 0:05:36.279 --> 0:05:39.160 that there were other events like this, but again there 0:05:39.200 --> 0:05:41.920 was no way to find them. So he would end 0:05:42.000 --> 0:05:44.840 up having a meeting with Chen and Hurley, the two 0:05:44.839 --> 0:05:47.599 guys I mentioned earlier, and talk about this problem, and 0:05:47.600 --> 0:05:50.680 they were all kind of going over this same issue. Now. 0:05:50.680 --> 0:05:52.920 There was no platform at that time where you could 0:05:52.960 --> 0:05:55.880 easily upload a video and other people could go there 0:05:55.920 --> 0:05:58.800 to watch it that really gained traction. There were a 0:05:58.839 --> 0:06:01.360 lot of little sites, but no one had really come 0:06:01.400 --> 0:06:04.520 to the forefront. When it came to video online, your 0:06:04.520 --> 0:06:08.000 options were pretty much limited. You might host a file 0:06:08.160 --> 0:06:10.720 on a server and people could visit a website and 0:06:10.880 --> 0:06:14.919 download the file to their own machine. That's not terribly 0:06:15.040 --> 0:06:18.040 user friendly and it took a long time and still 0:06:18.120 --> 0:06:20.840 let's somehow. That's how some of the earliest web series 0:06:20.839 --> 0:06:24.080 like Red Versus Blue from Rooster Teeth distributed their content 0:06:24.160 --> 0:06:26.520 in the early days, is that you would actually pop 0:06:26.560 --> 0:06:30.080 onto their site, download a file when it became available, 0:06:30.440 --> 0:06:33.400 and then on your computer at home you would launched 0:06:33.440 --> 0:06:36.480 the video in a video player program that was compatible 0:06:36.520 --> 0:06:40.960 with whatever file format the content creator was using. It's 0:06:41.040 --> 0:06:45.240 not the smoothest experience. You can also create a web 0:06:45.240 --> 0:06:49.840 based video player using one of several different proprietary formats, 0:06:49.839 --> 0:06:54.040 which just made things more confusing. Microsoft had Active Movie, 0:06:54.080 --> 0:06:57.200 which was a media player that launched in Nix and 0:06:57.279 --> 0:07:01.520 allowed streaming media. Real Player had launched their application the 0:07:01.560 --> 0:07:05.440 following year in and Apple would follow suit in n 0:07:06.560 --> 0:07:10.040 with quick Time four and their streaming media format, So 0:07:10.080 --> 0:07:12.520 there were a few solutions out there if you wanted 0:07:12.560 --> 0:07:15.600 to host streaming video on a site, but it was 0:07:15.640 --> 0:07:17.440 still not the greatest experience in the world from a 0:07:17.600 --> 0:07:21.640 user perspective because most people were relying upon dial up modems, 0:07:22.160 --> 0:07:26.080 so it was really slow to access anything. They had 0:07:26.120 --> 0:07:31.320 to download whatever the applicable movie playing program was and 0:07:31.400 --> 0:07:34.520 have that stored on their machine, and streaming video was 0:07:34.560 --> 0:07:37.240 just hard to do without all those annoying buffering issues. 0:07:37.280 --> 0:07:42.120 So still not very great now. Those solutions also, again 0:07:42.160 --> 0:07:44.080 we're not entirely based on the web. You had to 0:07:44.120 --> 0:07:47.080 have that program, so first you have to go and 0:07:47.160 --> 0:07:50.000 download your Active movie player, and then you would have 0:07:50.080 --> 0:07:53.120 to access the website that actually has the streaming content 0:07:53.200 --> 0:07:55.560 on it, and if you went to a different site 0:07:55.600 --> 0:07:58.240 that had say quick Time for streaming content on it, 0:07:58.600 --> 0:08:00.800 you would have to get a totally different later because 0:08:00.880 --> 0:08:05.680 they were incompatible formats. This proprietary approach was fragmenting the 0:08:05.720 --> 0:08:09.720 experience and that's never really satisfying from a user perspective. 0:08:10.560 --> 0:08:13.920 In two thousand two, Adobes Flash product came along, and 0:08:13.960 --> 0:08:17.160 that simplified things because people began to adopt that as 0:08:17.200 --> 0:08:20.080 this standard for streaming technology at the time. And a 0:08:20.080 --> 0:08:24.120 couple of years later, more people had access to broadband speeds, 0:08:24.560 --> 0:08:27.720 making streaming video a viable option that didn't always include 0:08:27.800 --> 0:08:30.040 ages of buffering time. So you had sort of this 0:08:31.120 --> 0:08:36.160 convergence of different events that were making it easier to 0:08:36.800 --> 0:08:41.560 have a streaming video service. You had Flash coming about, 0:08:41.760 --> 0:08:46.079 which gave a lot more versatility to streaming video, and 0:08:46.120 --> 0:08:48.960 you had the fact that more than half of American 0:08:49.000 --> 0:08:53.800 households had access to what was then considered broadband speeds, 0:08:54.160 --> 0:08:58.160 which was much lower than what we consider broadband today. 0:08:58.400 --> 0:09:01.240 So in early two thousand five things were kind of 0:09:01.280 --> 0:09:03.800 falling into place. It was the right time to look 0:09:03.800 --> 0:09:08.560 into creating a platform in which users could upload video 0:09:08.559 --> 0:09:12.480 footage and watch other video clips. It would become parts 0:09:12.520 --> 0:09:16.600 social platform, parts search engine, and the three felt they 0:09:16.600 --> 0:09:19.199 were onto something and began to have some serious discussions 0:09:19.200 --> 0:09:22.199 about what it would take to launch such a platform. 0:09:22.240 --> 0:09:25.360 So who are these guys? Well, Steve Chen was born 0:09:25.480 --> 0:09:29.959 in nineteen seventy eight in Taipei, Taiwan. His family moved 0:09:29.960 --> 0:09:33.440 to Chicago, Illinois, when Chen was fifteen years old. He 0:09:33.480 --> 0:09:37.520 attended the University of Illinois Champagne, Urbana. This was a 0:09:37.559 --> 0:09:41.280 school that had some pretty notable alumni, particularly in the 0:09:41.320 --> 0:09:44.920 field of computer science. For example Mark Andreson, who would 0:09:44.960 --> 0:09:49.559 go on to co create the first commercially successful web browser, Mosaic. 0:09:49.720 --> 0:09:53.560 He went there. Chen was interested in coding and graduated 0:09:53.720 --> 0:09:56.520 from the university and moved on to work for PayPal, 0:09:56.920 --> 0:09:59.160 and he would end up meeting Chad Hurley on his 0:09:59.280 --> 0:10:03.520 first day on the job. Hurley was born in nineteen 0:10:03.559 --> 0:10:08.160 seventy seven in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania. He studied fine art at 0:10:08.200 --> 0:10:11.800 the University of Pennsylvania, and he leveraged his artistic abilities 0:10:11.960 --> 0:10:15.400 to help design user interfaces and join PayPal to work 0:10:15.480 --> 0:10:19.800 on its UI. And that's really important. We often will 0:10:19.960 --> 0:10:23.319 not really consider how challenging it is to create a 0:10:23.400 --> 0:10:30.280 user interface that is clear. It gives the user very 0:10:30.400 --> 0:10:36.640 uh simple instructions on how to use the service, and 0:10:36.880 --> 0:10:39.319 there's not a lot of clutter there. It's actually a 0:10:39.400 --> 0:10:42.600 lot more challenging to do than you would think. And 0:10:42.679 --> 0:10:45.400 so Hurley came from this from a fine arts perspective, 0:10:45.400 --> 0:10:48.719 which is pretty interesting to me. Jawad Karnem was born 0:10:48.760 --> 0:10:51.640 in nineteen seventy nine and East Germany and his family 0:10:51.640 --> 0:10:54.440 moved to West Germany in nineteen eighty, which was a 0:10:54.559 --> 0:10:57.280 thing back then because there used to be an East 0:10:57.320 --> 0:11:01.679 and West Germany. I remember those His parents were scientists 0:11:01.679 --> 0:11:04.720 and researchers. They moved to the United States in nineteen 0:11:05.760 --> 0:11:08.960 Kareem would attend the University of Illinois along with Chen, 0:11:09.080 --> 0:11:13.320 although he didn't actually meet Chen while attending the school, 0:11:13.360 --> 0:11:15.800 and he dropped out before graduating in order to go 0:11:15.920 --> 0:11:19.160 work at PayPal. Now, according to the sources I research, 0:11:19.240 --> 0:11:21.480 Kareem didn't meet up with Chen until they were both 0:11:21.600 --> 0:11:23.719 at that company, until they were both at PayPal, though 0:11:23.760 --> 0:11:26.960 they again did attend the same university. Kareem would later 0:11:27.160 --> 0:11:30.400 leave YouTube and finish his studies first, though he would 0:11:30.400 --> 0:11:33.080 graduate in two thousand and four with his undergraduate degree. 0:11:33.120 --> 0:11:38.760 He would leave YouTube later on and pursue post graduate degrees, 0:11:39.120 --> 0:11:41.520 and early on he was frequently left out of stories 0:11:41.520 --> 0:11:45.160 about YouTube's rise to success, though that was later rectified. 0:11:45.240 --> 0:11:47.240 And I'll talk a little bit about why he was 0:11:47.320 --> 0:11:49.480 kind of written out of the history and just a 0:11:49.520 --> 0:11:52.840 little bit. Oh and uh. Like I said, YouTube wasn't 0:11:52.880 --> 0:11:55.800 their first go at a video platform service. There was 0:11:55.840 --> 0:11:59.640 an earlier failed concept that I think I should address. 0:12:00.720 --> 0:12:05.160 The original video platform concept before they settled on YouTube 0:12:05.400 --> 0:12:08.720 was one that Chen Hurley and Kaream called tune In 0:12:09.280 --> 0:12:12.040 hook Up and yes, it was meant to be a 0:12:12.120 --> 0:12:16.559 dating website. Users were supposed to post videos of themselves 0:12:16.960 --> 0:12:20.040 and Peru's other videos, all in the name of finding 0:12:20.040 --> 0:12:23.960 a certain special someone with whom you could then hook up. 0:12:24.840 --> 0:12:27.440 According to Kareem in an interview in two thousand sixteen, 0:12:27.720 --> 0:12:31.600 the founders even trolled through Craigslist personal ads and offered 0:12:31.640 --> 0:12:35.640 women twenty dollars to upload videos of themselves to this 0:12:35.800 --> 0:12:41.440 service in order to populate it, but they found zero takers. Anyway, 0:12:41.679 --> 0:12:45.120 that particular startup fizzled, but the three founders saw possibilities 0:12:45.120 --> 0:12:48.280 in using the video platform technology a different way, And 0:12:48.360 --> 0:12:53.240 on February two thousand five Valentine's Day, which Kareem would 0:12:53.320 --> 0:12:57.040 later say was to a coder, just a normal day, 0:12:57.520 --> 0:13:00.360 which I think is just a sly remark on the 0:13:00.480 --> 0:13:04.440 personal lives of your typical coders, the team pivoted away 0:13:04.800 --> 0:13:07.880 from this concept of tune in hook up and they 0:13:08.000 --> 0:13:13.000 pivoted toward YouTube. Hurley registered the trademark for the logo 0:13:13.120 --> 0:13:16.079 and the domain of the site on that day. Their 0:13:16.120 --> 0:13:18.920 new platform would be one where people could upload videos 0:13:18.920 --> 0:13:22.080 about whatever subjects they like within reason, and I wouldn't 0:13:22.120 --> 0:13:25.520 have a narrow focus on dating like their original concept, 0:13:25.600 --> 0:13:29.320 but rather serve as a general video publication and consumption site. 0:13:29.600 --> 0:13:33.120 But would it work well? They weren't sure. Chinn and 0:13:33.200 --> 0:13:36.319 Kareem were focused on creating the technical platform for the service, 0:13:36.480 --> 0:13:40.040 while Hurley concentrated on the user interface and the logo 0:13:40.200 --> 0:13:43.600 design for the site. The team built out the infrastructure 0:13:43.640 --> 0:13:46.560 for the service, and the first video to officially hit 0:13:46.720 --> 0:13:51.600 YouTube would not go up until April two thousand five. Now, 0:13:51.600 --> 0:13:53.520 I'm sure a lot of you already know the name 0:13:53.559 --> 0:13:57.120 of that video because it is a piece of Internet history, 0:13:57.160 --> 0:14:00.640 But just in case you don't and you some pub 0:14:00.679 --> 0:14:03.480 trivia knowledge in your back pocket. The title of the 0:14:03.600 --> 0:14:07.120 very first video upload to YouTube was Me at the 0:14:07.240 --> 0:14:10.800 Zoo and it's a video of Jawad Kareem standing in 0:14:10.840 --> 0:14:14.040 front of an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo 0:14:14.120 --> 0:14:18.280 and it published on April two thousand five. As of 0:14:18.320 --> 0:14:21.240 the recording of this podcast, it has accumulated more than 0:14:21.320 --> 0:14:26.240 forty four million, five hundred thousand views. It lasts eighteen 0:14:26.320 --> 0:14:30.680 seconds long and contains the important information that elephants are 0:14:30.720 --> 0:14:35.200 really cool because they have really long trunks. And while 0:14:35.200 --> 0:14:37.440 I'm poking some fun at the content of the video, 0:14:37.520 --> 0:14:40.240 the important thing was it was a piece of content 0:14:40.320 --> 0:14:43.320 that could be tested out on the platform itself. What 0:14:43.480 --> 0:14:46.000 was in the video wasn't nearly as important as the 0:14:46.040 --> 0:14:48.440 fact that this was the first video to go live 0:14:48.600 --> 0:14:52.880 on an official YouTube server it would ultimately face the public. 0:14:52.960 --> 0:14:56.440 This wasn't just some random test video on a server 0:14:56.560 --> 0:14:58.840 that was never going to be forward facing and only 0:14:58.840 --> 0:15:02.640 be used by developers. This was the first actual YouTube video, 0:15:02.720 --> 0:15:05.480 and that is why it is significant. Now. I have 0:15:05.520 --> 0:15:09.000 a lot more to say about YouTube in those early days, 0:15:09.040 --> 0:15:11.520 but before I get into that, let's take a quick 0:15:11.560 --> 0:15:21.440 break to thank our sponsor. All right, it's two thousand 0:15:21.560 --> 0:15:27.240 five April. YouTube still was not yet open for the public. Essentially, 0:15:27.560 --> 0:15:30.760 in late April early May two five, the company launched 0:15:30.800 --> 0:15:34.320 its beta home page. They had secured a deal with 0:15:34.520 --> 0:15:39.040 an internet service provider called Server Server Beach, and the 0:15:39.080 --> 0:15:41.640 deal was for an unlimited data plan for a hundred 0:15:41.640 --> 0:15:45.160 and twenty nine dollars a month. The earliest incarnation of 0:15:45.200 --> 0:15:49.840 YouTube wasn't exactly a home run. Kareem said that their 0:15:49.880 --> 0:15:54.520 original version of the site didn't let users select which 0:15:54.600 --> 0:15:58.000 videos to watch. Imagine that going to YouTube, but you 0:15:58.040 --> 0:16:01.720 have no control over what video is going to play. Instead, 0:16:02.040 --> 0:16:04.800 it was a Russian roulette style of experience. You'd go 0:16:04.880 --> 0:16:07.520 to the site and it would randomly serve up one 0:16:07.720 --> 0:16:10.920 of the videos stored on its servers. And because there 0:16:10.920 --> 0:16:14.400 were relatively few videos available and meant you were likely 0:16:14.440 --> 0:16:17.000 to see a lot of the same stuff, it wasn't 0:16:17.000 --> 0:16:19.040 the sort of experience that would lead people to coming 0:16:19.080 --> 0:16:21.920 back for more. And in fact, Karim himself had gone 0:16:21.960 --> 0:16:26.240 to airports and filmed planes landing and taking off just 0:16:26.360 --> 0:16:29.720 to have more content to throw into the servers, because 0:16:29.760 --> 0:16:32.720 otherwise you didn't really have anything to populate them, and 0:16:32.800 --> 0:16:36.920 that is obviously any that's a problem any user generated 0:16:36.960 --> 0:16:40.240 platform is going to face. You don't have a lot 0:16:40.240 --> 0:16:43.840 of content until you have users to generate that content. 0:16:44.160 --> 0:16:47.480 But how do you attract the users in the first place. 0:16:48.080 --> 0:16:50.920 It could have been the very end of YouTube at 0:16:50.960 --> 0:16:54.200 that very beginning, because they had to get enough people 0:16:54.200 --> 0:16:57.720 in there to create content to to alter the user 0:16:57.800 --> 0:17:01.360 interface of this approach, and the founders were still sussing 0:17:01.360 --> 0:17:04.199 out what YouTube was supposed to be because besides the 0:17:04.280 --> 0:17:08.520 dating site idea they had already abandoned, they thought perhaps 0:17:08.560 --> 0:17:11.080 that YouTube would be a place where you'd have relatively 0:17:11.119 --> 0:17:14.520 small circles of friends and you would share videos between 0:17:14.520 --> 0:17:17.639 the folks in that circle. In other words, the YouTube 0:17:17.640 --> 0:17:20.320 founders had a vision for their service kind of similar 0:17:20.320 --> 0:17:23.680 to what Twitter founders thought their users were going to want, 0:17:24.119 --> 0:17:26.800 And it turns out that both groups weren't quite on target. 0:17:27.080 --> 0:17:29.480 While they thought this is a place where you could 0:17:29.480 --> 0:17:34.160 share videos with your close friends and family, what they 0:17:34.200 --> 0:17:37.120 saw was that people wanted to share to the rest 0:17:37.119 --> 0:17:40.360 of the world. It was a much grander scale than 0:17:40.400 --> 0:17:44.080 they had anticipated. The site was still struggling to find 0:17:44.119 --> 0:17:47.560 its place when on July four, two thousand five, Kareem 0:17:47.800 --> 0:17:52.040 attended a Faithful Independence Day barbecue party and it was 0:17:52.080 --> 0:17:55.719 hosted by a guy named Mike Greenfield. Greenfield had been 0:17:55.760 --> 0:17:59.600 another PayPal employee back in the day. Also in attendance 0:17:59.640 --> 0:18:03.280 of that already was a guy named Keith Rabboi or 0:18:03.320 --> 0:18:06.840 Reboi I guess it would be the French pronunciation. He 0:18:06.880 --> 0:18:11.160 had another PayPal employee. He had been an executive with PayPal, 0:18:11.200 --> 0:18:14.800 and Reboi and Kareem got into a conversation about YouTube, 0:18:15.359 --> 0:18:19.840 and Kareem was convinced to show off YouTube by plopping 0:18:19.880 --> 0:18:23.879 down in Greenfield's bedroom and using Greenfield's personal computer to 0:18:23.960 --> 0:18:28.399 check out all the videos on YouTube. They literally sat 0:18:28.440 --> 0:18:34.320 down and watched all of them. Jawed, Kareem and Uh 0:18:34.359 --> 0:18:38.320 and Keith Reboi, So, Keithan and Jared are sitting there 0:18:38.480 --> 0:18:41.760 there watching every single video that's on YouTube these days, 0:18:41.760 --> 0:18:43.679 If you tried that, you would never finish watching it. 0:18:43.720 --> 0:18:45.800 There would just be too much content there. You would 0:18:46.200 --> 0:18:48.160 die of old age before you got through it all. 0:18:48.200 --> 0:18:51.760 But back then, on July four, two thousand five, the 0:18:52.119 --> 0:18:55.960 entirety of all the content on YouTube consisted of about 0:18:56.119 --> 0:18:59.960 thirty minutes worth of videos. Many of them were playing 0:19:00.160 --> 0:19:03.560 is taking Off and Landing Now. Despite the lack of 0:19:03.600 --> 0:19:07.959 compelling content, Keith saw the potential in YouTube and offered 0:19:08.000 --> 0:19:11.040 to become an investor on the spot. And according to him, 0:19:11.080 --> 0:19:13.600 the only other time he ever felt compelled to make 0:19:13.640 --> 0:19:17.040 an investment that quickly was when he first heard about 0:19:17.040 --> 0:19:21.080 the concept of Airbnb. Kareem was getting ready to leave 0:19:21.119 --> 0:19:24.040 YouTube in order to pursue a PhD program at Stanford. 0:19:24.240 --> 0:19:27.679 He would continue to serve as a consultant for YouTube 0:19:27.800 --> 0:19:31.320 while he was going off to pursue his studies. Meanwhile, 0:19:31.600 --> 0:19:36.240 Keith Reboise showed off YouTube to Yeah, another former PayPal employee, 0:19:36.920 --> 0:19:40.479 this one named roll Off. Both of both had actually 0:19:40.480 --> 0:19:43.600 worked as the chief financial officer of PayPal, so you 0:19:43.640 --> 0:19:47.080 may notice this is a bunch of former PayPal folks 0:19:47.200 --> 0:19:50.280 who were all kind of coalescing around this YouTube concept, 0:19:50.359 --> 0:19:54.159 and in fact, without PayPal, YouTube never would have existed. 0:19:54.560 --> 0:19:57.280 In the summer of two thousand five, Botho was working 0:19:57.400 --> 0:20:01.000 at an investment firm called Sequoia cap at All and 0:20:01.080 --> 0:20:04.000 both was able to help secure an initial investment in 0:20:04.080 --> 0:20:07.760 YouTube through Sequoia. Now they get those investments going, they 0:20:07.760 --> 0:20:11.679 had to change the narrative a bit of YouTube and 0:20:11.720 --> 0:20:15.880 had it focused solely on Chen and Hurley and kind 0:20:15.920 --> 0:20:19.480 of write Kareem out of the picture because Kareem, who 0:20:19.480 --> 0:20:23.159 had left to continue his studies, was creating kind of 0:20:23.200 --> 0:20:27.240 a problem. Not on purpose, it's just because of his absence. 0:20:27.520 --> 0:20:30.600 The justification was that it would be really challenging to 0:20:30.680 --> 0:20:34.439 pitch a company to potential investors if part of the 0:20:34.480 --> 0:20:37.440 story was that one of the three founders had recently 0:20:37.680 --> 0:20:42.600 left the company. They made YouTube sound less stable, so 0:20:42.720 --> 0:20:45.960 they sort of erased Kareem from the history of YouTube 0:20:46.080 --> 0:20:48.720 for the time being. He would eventually get written back 0:20:48.800 --> 0:20:52.639 into that history, and he also would not complete his 0:20:52.680 --> 0:20:56.320 postgraduate work. He never earned that PhD from Stanford. He 0:20:56.359 --> 0:21:00.200 did earn a master's degree, and he did with Tame 0:21:00.320 --> 0:21:03.720 Shares of YouTube, which softens the sting of not getting 0:21:03.760 --> 0:21:06.520 that doctor in a little bit. Now. Both have created 0:21:06.560 --> 0:21:11.640 a memo and presentation arguing for the investment into YouTube 0:21:11.760 --> 0:21:15.320 for Sequoia Capital. His investment plan was to supply one 0:21:15.400 --> 0:21:19.320 million dollars initially, followed by a four million dollars Series 0:21:19.400 --> 0:21:22.879 A funding and in return, Sequoia Capital would get at 0:21:23.480 --> 0:21:27.760 stake in YouTube once it emerged from Series A funding. Now, 0:21:27.800 --> 0:21:30.639 the actual details of the funding deal once it was 0:21:30.680 --> 0:21:34.399 concluded are a bit clouded in secrecy, but a lot 0:21:34.440 --> 0:21:37.520 of the sites I research suggested the initial investment was 0:21:37.560 --> 0:21:41.040 more like half a million dollars, with another three million 0:21:41.080 --> 0:21:44.800 dollars investment in Series A funding in November two thousand five, 0:21:44.920 --> 0:21:47.000 for a total of three and a half million dollars 0:21:47.080 --> 0:21:50.080 of that initial funding. But considering what happened to the 0:21:50.119 --> 0:21:53.359 site over the following years, any investment of around that 0:21:53.440 --> 0:21:55.760 size was more than worth it and more than paid 0:21:55.800 --> 0:21:59.480 for itself. When you talk about big gets, this one 0:21:59.560 --> 0:22:05.960 definitely counts now. Just to backtrack a bit, in September 0:22:06.000 --> 0:22:09.960 two thousand five, YouTube hit a milestone. The site had 0:22:10.000 --> 0:22:14.920 its first video to hit one million views. This video 0:22:15.000 --> 0:22:18.119 was an advertisement for Nike, and it started Brazilian soccer 0:22:18.160 --> 0:22:22.520 player or football player if you prefer, named Ronald Dino. 0:22:23.440 --> 0:22:25.879 He puts on a new pair of Nikes and then 0:22:25.880 --> 0:22:29.040 he shows off some truly impressive ball juggling skills with 0:22:29.080 --> 0:22:32.040 his feet before kicking the ball precisely so it hits 0:22:32.080 --> 0:22:35.520 the goals crossbar and bounces back to him. He's standing 0:22:36.119 --> 0:22:39.520 many yards away from the goal. It's actually really impressive 0:22:39.560 --> 0:22:41.720 to me that he is so precise with his kicks. 0:22:41.760 --> 0:22:44.680 He's juggling the ball, kicks it while it's coming down, 0:22:45.080 --> 0:22:47.879 It hits the crossbar, bounces right back to him. He 0:22:47.920 --> 0:22:50.800 starts juggling the ball again, does this a few more 0:22:50.920 --> 0:22:55.240 times in a row consistently. The video itself is about 0:22:55.240 --> 0:22:58.359 two minutes forty five seconds long, and I came to 0:22:58.400 --> 0:23:01.080 the realization that I will never do anything in my 0:23:01.119 --> 0:23:05.280 life as well as that man was able to juggle 0:23:05.359 --> 0:23:08.879 and kick a soccer ball. You could also argue that 0:23:08.920 --> 0:23:11.679 this was the first viral video on YouTube. It was 0:23:11.720 --> 0:23:14.479 an advertisement and it got more than a million views. 0:23:14.920 --> 0:23:18.200 It was pretty much a breakaway success in those early days. 0:23:19.040 --> 0:23:22.760 Also in September two thousand five, Julie Supan left the 0:23:22.880 --> 0:23:25.960 Best Buy Corporation to join YouTube as the head of 0:23:26.000 --> 0:23:30.240 marketing for the company. Now with the founders, she brainstormed 0:23:30.320 --> 0:23:33.639 the position YouTube wanted to take to the public, like 0:23:33.720 --> 0:23:37.399 what were they going to portray themselves as? What was 0:23:37.440 --> 0:23:41.439 their mission statement? And they decided that YouTube was going 0:23:41.560 --> 0:23:45.639 to become a broadcast medium for average people. This is 0:23:45.680 --> 0:23:48.560 all according to a piece that was written in mash 0:23:48.600 --> 0:23:51.800 Double a few years ago. One thing that set YouTube 0:23:51.840 --> 0:23:55.760 apart from many other sites was that they were deciding 0:23:55.840 --> 0:24:01.920 to to convert video files into a standard format. See 0:24:01.920 --> 0:24:04.600 a lot of other video sites, you had to actually 0:24:04.960 --> 0:24:09.240 have a specific format before you could upload it. YouTube 0:24:09.440 --> 0:24:12.840 would allow users to upload videos in different formats, and 0:24:12.880 --> 0:24:15.440 then the site would take care of converting those formats 0:24:15.520 --> 0:24:18.560 into flash, which removed that pressure from the user to 0:24:18.600 --> 0:24:20.720 make sure the video file they were sending met some 0:24:20.840 --> 0:24:23.920 specific criteria. There was a limit to how long a 0:24:24.000 --> 0:24:27.000