SAN FRANCISCO — Jawed Karim doesn't begrudge the spotlight on YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen this week after they negotiated the video website's sale to Google for about $1.7 billion. Still, Karim, 27, would like more people to know that he was YouTube's third co-founder — and, he says, the guy who first suggested the idea that became the company. "It took the three of us," he said Wednesday. The story of YouTube's birth, like that of many companies, is more nuanced than the one widely known. In many accounts, Hurley and Chen take center stage. If he's mentioned at all, Karim is cast in a bit part, ending when he assumed an advisory role after leaving YouTube last year for graduate computer studies at Stanford. Other entrepreneurs lost their place in history, too, says James Hoopes, a business history professor at Babson College near Boston. Historians and journalists "like to write about personalities," so they often focus on individuals, brushing aside other co-founders. Popular wisdom, for example, says Bill Gates and Sam Walton single-handedly started Microsoft and Wal-Mart, respectively, but they were co-founders. Karim says his idea for what became YouTube sprang from two very different events in 2004: Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," during a Super Bowl show, and the Asian tsunami. YouTube fizzled in an early version, Karim says: A dating site called Tune In Hook Up drew little interest. The founders later developed the current site, now broadcasting 100 million short videos daily on myriad subjects. YouTube says Karim was part of the "core" team that developed the idea for the company and notes that he is listed as one of three founders on its website. "There's no question about that," spokeswoman Julie Supan says. Karim is one of the company's biggest stockholders and is in line to get millions of dollars in Google shares when the deal announced Monday closes. He declined to reveal his stake, or the stakes of the other founders and venture-capital investors at Sequoia Capital. Karim grew up in West Germany, and his family immigrated to Minnesota when Karim started high school. His Bangladeshi father is a chemist at 3M, and his German mother is a biochemistry research professor at the University of Minnesota. Karim got his bachelor's in computer science and engineering in 2004 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hurley, 29, Chen, 28, and Karim met as early employees at PayPal, the payment service sold to eBay in 2002. The three, newly rich after leaving PayPal, talked about a start-up of their own, possibly a database venture, Karim says. Then, early last year, Karim recalled the difficulty involved in finding and watching videos online of Jackson accidentally baring her breast during the Super Bowl show. The same was true with the many amateur videos made of that winter's devastating tsunami. Karim says he proposed to Hurley and Chen that they create a video-sharing site. "I thought it was a good idea," Karim says. The three agreed within a few days in February, then divided work based on skills: Hurley designed the site's interface and logo. Chen and Karim split technical duties making the site work. They later divided management responsibilities, based on strengths and interests: Hurley became CEO; Chen, chief technology officer. Karim had already planned to resume computer studies, so he opted out of management and agreed to take a smaller ownership stake than the other two founders. He continued advising YouTube and a growing number of employees — now 67 — as Hurley and Chen took his "little spark" of an idea and turned it into a fire. "My only interest was in helping the company get off the ground, implementing it, and raising money," he says. Hurley and Chen handled the Google talks; Karim says he signed off on the deal once details were reached. Now in a two-year master's program, Karim says he's considering another start-up but declines to give details. For now, he's basking in YouTube's success and its eye-popping sale price. "I definitely thought that this was a possible outcome," he says. "But I didn't think it was the most likely outcome." |
A founder and YouTube's chief executive Chad Hurley received 694,087 shares of Google and an additional 41,232 in a trust. Based on Google's closing price yesterday of $470.01, the shares are worth more than $345 million. Another founder, Steven Chen, received 625,366 shares and an additional 68,721 in a trust, for more than $326 million. And Sequoia Capital XI, the name of the Sequoia fund that had invested close to $11.5 million in YouTube from November of 2005 and April of 2006, was listed as having 941,027 shares, which are valued at more than $442 million. That is not a bad return for an investment whose payoff came within less than a year. Sequoia, considered one of the most successful venture capital firms in the country, was also a principal investors in Google. The third founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, who left the company early on to pursue a graduate degree in computer science, did not do too badly either. He received 137,443 shares worth more than $64 million. In addition, several funds affiliated with Artis Capital Management, a San Francisco hedge fund managed by Stuart L. Peterson that was a co-investor with Sequoia, were listed as having received a 176,621 shares, valued at $83 million. When the deal was announced in October, YouTube was less than two years old and had fewer than 70 employees. Several of the early employees are listed in the filing statement as owning thousands of Google shares. |
It’s not around anymore, but shareyourworld.com was the first video sharing site that allowed users to upload files in various video file formats and share videos. It was started back i 1997 by Chase Norlin, who now heads the very cool video/audio search company Pixsy. Chase takes us down memory lane, during the last Internet boom when he launched this company whose time was not quite right. In this interview, Chase talks about the challenges in bandwidth. He marvels how the YouTube guys picked up where he couldn’t at the time. And, yes the progress since 1997 is amazing. This past 12 months have been unbelievable. To bring you to speed on video sharing sites and various monetization schmemes, you should read this terrific round-up by Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch. |
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Chen
2013(?) - Bloomberg - Steve Chen: No regrets about selling YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_WgzCnObMY
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Hurley
2013(?) - GigaOm(?) - Chad Hurley: How We Did It
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZBgQBnQFl0
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawed_Karim
Y Ventures - Jawed's VC Firm
http://www.yventures.com/
2008.03.20 - Mashable - YouTube Co-Founder Starts Venture Capital Firm
http://mashable.com/2008/03/20/youniversity-ventures/