Jawed Karim (YouTube)

2006.10.21 - YouTube: From Concept to Hypergrowth
- This is a very, very useful talk.
- 4:15 - He's going to talk about the process of how YouTube came to be, and why YouTube came along when it did, and not earlier.
- 6:00 - He shows a YouTube video to demonstrate what YouTube is all about: if you have a good idea for a video, you can easily get it out and quickly get an audience of millions of people for free.
- 6:45 - He lists YouTube's stats at the time of the video. "The average user spends ~30 minutes on YouTube a day, which is similar to that of a sitcom."
- 8:00 - He compares the Alexa growth graph of YouTube compared to MySpace, Wikipedia, eBay.
- 8:50 - The majority of his lecture is going to talk about killer apps.
- 9:30 - Killer apps on the Internet seem to build on each other; one killer app will provide the base for the next one.
- 10:00 - He lists a series of social websites that he thinks laid the groundwork for YouTube:
  - LiveJournal (1999)
  - Hot or Not (2000)
  - Wikipedia (2001)
  - Friendster (2002)
  - del.icio.us (2003)
  - Flickr (2004)
- 10:15 - "What's interesting about this list is that anyone in this room could probably implement any of these websites in a pretty short period of time. An undergrad could probably implement most of these in a few weeks. Of course, scaling them would be another matter, but it's encouraging to know that the initial implementation is not that complicated."
- 10:40 - LiveJournal (1999)
  - It was the first time Internet novices could easily broadcast personal content on a large scale.
  - It popularized social interaction on the web in the mainstream. It proved that people were willing to share personal information on the web.
- 12:05 - Hot or Not (2000)
  - 12:40 - He was so impressed that two people could build a website and it would instantly take off and become a huge hit.
  - 12:50 - Hot or Not was the first time that someone built a website where anyone could upload content (pictures) and anyone could download that content.
  - 13:10 - It also demonstrated that such a website could be profitable.
  - 13:40 - HoN also pushed digital camera usage into the mainstream. When he first visited the website (soon after it launched) he noticed that most of the pictures were scanned, but by the end of the year most of the photos were taken by digital cameras.
- 14:10 - Wikipedia (2001)
  - Jimmy Wales said that Wikipedia isn't a technical company as much as a social experiment.
  - The big questions were 1) would people be willing to put in the time to create such a website, and 2) would the outcome be cohesive articles?
  - 15:20 - He gives an anecdote about how he created an article for Air Force One, then checked recently and was amazed at how detailed it was.
- 16:35 - Friendster (2002)
  - Friendster wasn't the first social network, but it was the first to catch on.
  - He says that the problem with the previous social network was that it required knowing the other person's email address, which made it hard to find people whose email address you didn't already have.
- 17:30 - del.icio.us (2003)
  - They popularized the idea of tagging to find related information.
- 19:10 - Flickr (2004)
  - They combined tags and photos. Basically Hot or Not combined with del.icio.us.
- 20:05 - All these services proved that you could use this tech stack of Python, PHP, MySQL, and Apache to build a large service.
- 20:30 - What did video sharing look like in 2004?
  - 21:00 - You would need to upload a video to your website, then give another person a URL to that video.
  - Another problem was that codecs could make it hard for people to view videos. People would encode videos with divx to save space, but that required the viewers to download xvid, which wasn't easy to install.
- 22:10 - What did video browsing look like in 2004?
  - You'd basically search Google and hope that someone's list of video files would show up.
  - This has several problems:
    - The only information you're going on is the filename, and those filenames often weren't helpful (eg "Apache.mpeg").
    - Another problem was that there were no connections between videos. If you watched one video, it wouldn't help you connect to other related videos.
    - Another problem is that it doesn't allow viewers of those videos to connect with each other. Each viewer has no idea who else is viewing the video.
- 23:50 - What did the video viewing experience look like in 2004?
  - You had either two options: Windows Media Player or Real Player.
  - Windows had these problems:
    - The video would take a long time to buffer, and then tell you it didn't have the right codec, and then have to download the codec, and then tell you that it couldn't decode the video. So basically: it took a long time and didn't always work.
  - Real Player had these problems:
    - It would try to take over other functions on your computer: "it wants to be your jukebox, it wants to be your toaster..."
    - It wasn't easy to find the free version. The main page would have a big link to buy the full version and then a tiny link to download the free version.
- 25:15 - In 2004 the "clip culture" emerged. A few different events pushed this.
  - One event was the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction on Feb 1st 2004.
  - The other event was the Jon Stewart debate with Tucker Carlsen on Crossfire on October 15th 2004.
  - 26:20 - The thing was that both of these events only happened once on TV, but people who missed it on TV still wanted to be able to see what happened. In other words, there was pressure for a synchronous process to become asynchronous.
- 26:40 - In December 2004 he read an article in Wired called "The BitTorrent Effect", and it noted:
  - "CNN's audience for Crossfire was only 867,000. Three times as many people saw it online as on CNN itself."
    - This made him think that "Hmm...maybe online is the future of video content, and not television..."
  - "The whole concept of must-see TV changes from being something you stop and watch every Thursday to something you gotta check out right now, dude. Just click here."
    - He thinks that this is exactly what they have now with YouTube.
  - "What exactly would a next-generation broadcaster look like? The VCs at Union Square Ventures don't know, though they'd love to invest in one."
    - He knew that BitTorrent wasn't likely to be the answer, because it had various technical problems:
      - There was no bandwidth guarantee. If you downloaded something, it could take six hours or six weeks.
    - He started thinking about what the best solution would look like.
- Right after the article came out, the Indian Ocean Tsunami happened (Dec 26th, 2004).
  - This was the first disaster captured on cellphone cameras. This would not have been possible even one year prior.
  - Most views occurred online, because CNN wasn't on-site when the disaster happened.
- So he started asking, "What if there was a video sharing site where anyone can upload videos and anyone can watch videos?" He said it was basically nothing more than "Flickr for videos".
  - Because of these earlier websites, a bunch of potential dangers were already removed: they knew community sites could work (from LiveJournal / Friendster / Hot or Not), they knew the scalability issue could probably be overcome (from Hot or Not already working with images), and they knew it could possibly be profitable (from Hot or Not).
- 30:50 - The two questions he was left with were: 1) would people use it?, and 2) Why now?
- 31:25 - In answering #2: There were a variety of secondary technologies that allowed YouTube to work. Secondary technologies are "things that your end-user doesn't care about but that makes your product possible."
  - Broadband in the home. In 2000 he moved into Palo Alto and was stunned to see that the fastest internet speed available was 28.8k
  - Macromedia Flash 7 - Flash 7 was the first time that Flash included video capability in the software. Flash is perfect a site like YouTube because it works across browsers and OSes.
  - Proliferation of digital cameras and camera cellphones. - Even as late as 2003 digital cameras had just gotten video capabilities, and he had friends who still were just learning to use it.
  - Cheap dedicated hosting bandwidth
- 34:25 - The three cofounders had been talking about a video site for a while.
  - They started work on February 14th, 2005.
  - He (amazingly) has a picture of them doing a brainstorming session, where you can see on the whiteboard the actual list of features.
    - I could make out "TAGS", "SOCIAL NETWORK", and "BROWSING"
- 35:05 - He describes his cofounders.
  - Steve Chen was also at U of I, he dropped out after being recruited by Max Levchin.
  - Chad Hurley was the original designer at PayPal.
  - Steve and Jawed were on the infrastructure team at PayPal and helped scale PayPal from a few hundred thousand users to over 60 million users over five years (reminds me of Brian Acton and Jan Koum).
- 36:20 - He says they hired a bunch of their former coworkers at PayPal to help them at YouTube.
- 36:25 - By April 23rd they had the website implemented.
- 36:50 - They launched the site, but they had no users. No one was uploading videos other than them.
  - He showed the site to a bunch of his friends, and while most thought it was a pretty good idea, some weren't sure if anyone would use it.
  - They wrote to a bunch of Wired reporters but didn't get any replies.
  - They talked to a bunch of VCs early on but none of them saw what it could become.
  - "And so the thing that I kind of learned from this is that just because so-called 'experts' reject your idea doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea. And the other thing is that in certain areas there are no experts, because the thing is, if they were experts, why didn't they develop this. So...I think if you're doing something new, then you are basically the expert."
  - Just because "experts" reject it doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
  - There are no experts.
  - You are the expert.
- 38:20 - He shows an email that he sent out to all his friends:
- He says he talked to the guys who did Hot or Not and they said they built the website in a weekend, then they emailed all their friends, and then they never did any marketing again, and it just took off. He says they tried doing the same thing but it didn't work all that well. (Note: In Founders at Work, the guy who did Hot or Not says that one thing he did that he had never done before was to go up to people randomly and say 'Hey have you seen this new website Hot or Not? It's pretty cool.'
- 39:00 - By May 2005 they were feeling frustrated, because the site hadn't taken off.
  - He (amazingly) has a video recording of them discussing the problems they were facing:
  - Chad: I think videos are just going to be just as large, I mean...
    Steve: Well it was getting pretty good press, like, towards the end of last week, and I was like, 'Dude, we have like maybe 40, 50, 60 videos on the site, but...I'm not...it's like, I'm thinking, 'OK, so, if I'm actually a user of this site, I'd be like, I'd be gone (in like four videos?) because there's just not that many videos that I wanna watch.
    Chad: Like, videos like this.
    Steve: Yeah, you can't put this up, 'cuz it's gonna be like (indecipherable)
    Jawed: (laughingly) I'm not, I'm not gonna put this up. (laughs)
    Steve: (indecipherable)
    Jawed: This is lame.
- 39:50 - They actually went onto the Craigslist for LA and Las Vegas and posted ads offering attractive women to $20 to post videos to the site, but they didn't get any replies.
- 40:30 - June 2005 - They changed the concept of the site.
  - They added the 'Related videos' pane to get people to continue watch.
  - They made it easy to share videos.
  - They added features to encourage social interaction.
  - They added an external video player to allow people to put video on their own website. He says "it's really very simple" (does that mean 'simple to implement' or 'simple to use' or both?)
    - He says this exploded on MySpace.
- 42:20 - By August 2005 they saw signs that it was really starting to catch on.
- 42:40 - They were trying to understand their growth, and they noticed that every two weeks or so (on average) they'd have some video go extremely viral, and they reasoned that over time, as the number of videos that got uploaded went up, they'd have more and more of their videos go viral and the period between viral videos would go down. This ended up being exactly what happened.
- 43:50 - They didn't anticipate a lot of the ways that people ended up using the website. For example, they didn't anticipate video replies, but when they saw users starting to do it they built a feature to make it easier for users to do this.
  - The followed a policy of watching how the users were using the site and building the site to support those behaviors.
- 47:05 - They started pitching the data to VCs (August 2005), and they had a really big growth curve, but the VCs weren't sure if the rate of growth would continue.
  - They felt that they were filling such a big hole that things were just getting started.
  - He shows how the growth graph as of August 2005 compares to the growth graph as of the time of the talk, and it shows that they were right that the growth would continue.
- 48:20 - He thought it was interesting how different VC firms have different approaches to evaluating them. He says Sequoia was just about the only VC firm that had the entire office sign up and start using the product. The rest of the VCs just evaluated it as an investment opportunity without actually evaluating the product.
- 49:12 - He says they spent the $3.5 million to hire people, pay for bandwidth, and upgrade their hardware. He says they were giving out an iPod nano every day for a few months as a marketing tactic.
- 49:50 - "The next big thing will exploit newly emerging secondary technologies."
  - "So, one question is, 'Well, what's next? What's the next big thing?' No one, of course, knows until they try it out, but I think what's clear is that the next big thing will exploit newly-emerging secondary technologies. So a lot of these products that are going to be the big thing are not the current big thing because they're just not possible yet. So I think these newly emerging secondary technologies will come along and will enable one to build something that wasn't previousl possible. So one way to find the next big thing–I think–is to watch these enabling technologies that may not even be getting that much attention, but they are what will make the product possible. And of course, like many popular products, it will probably be something that makes something that was previously difficult, easy."
2007 - Commencement at the University of Illinois