Chapter 1
Everyday People
Chad Hurley wanted to create something; he just wasn't sure what.
It was early 2005, and Hurley spent most of his time hunched over a computer screen in Northern California. Hurley didn't look like the brainy Poindexters around Silicon Valley. He had broad shoulders and a high forehead, a high school jock physique, and dirty-blond locks that he swept back surfer-dude style. He liked beer and the Philadelphia Eagles and considered himself an artist of sorts. With a friend, a kindred spirit, he had recently started a menswear line making laptop bags after finding most on the market ugly and dull.
But Hurley, a web graphic designer, knew the real money was in computers, not bags, so that's where he and his two programmer pals, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen, hoped to strike gold. At twenty-eight, Hurley was the eldest, by a year, and de facto leader. He had a toddler son and had married into Silicon Valley royalty-his father-in-law was Jim Clark, a famed internet entrepreneur. Hurley began dreaming of his own company at the dawn of Web 2.0-websites filled with the work of regular folk, not professionals. Web surfers rushed to post online diaries, photo albums, poems, recipes, screeds, whatever they liked. "Everyday people," Hurley would call them. For months, Hurley and his pals had batted around proposals for a new internet business, meeting at his house in Menlo Park or a cafŽ nearby, where they discussed popular Web 2.0 fixtures to emulate, like Friendster, a social network, and the blogging websites growing like weeds. More often they talked about Hot or Not, a skeletal site that let people upload photographs of a face and vote on its attractiveness. Crude, but so popular. The trio knew one of Hot or Not's creators from a coffee shop they frequented at their old jobs, and they knew he was making decent money. That was cool.
The three finally settled on an idea for a website to let people share and watch video. On Valentine's Day they had stayed up way too late, crammed in Hurley's garage with his dog, and settled on a name for their idea. Hurley tried words that evoked personal television, riffing on old slang for the medium, "the boob tube." A tube for you. They typed it into Google. No results. That evening, they bought the web domain YouTube.com, a first step on solid ground. Eight days later Hurley opened an email from Karim with the subject line "Strategy: please comment."
The site should look good, but not too professional. It should look like it was thrown together by a couple of guys. Note that hotornot and friendster, while easy to use, don't look professional, and yet they've had enormous success. We don't want to look too professional because it scares people off . . . The most important aspect of the design is ease of use. Our moms should be able to use this site easily. Timing/Competition: I think our timing is perfect. Digital video recording just became commonplace last year since this is now supported by most digital cameras. There is one site I'm aware of: stupidvideos.com, that also hosts videos and allows viewers to rate them. Luckily the site hasn't caught on very much. We should discuss why this is the case, and why we expect our site to gain more traction. Hurley read on. Site Focus: Our focus should implicitly be dating, just like hotornot. Note that hotornot is a dating site without seeming too much like one. This puts people at ease. I believe that a dating-focused video site will draw much more attention than stupidvideos. Why? Because dating and finding girls is what most people who are not married are primarily occupied with. There are only so many stupid videos you can watch. Hurley was married but agreed that dating could motivate people to make and watch videos. "People want to see and be seen," he would write weeks later. Karim's email ended with a target date for YouTube's launch less than three months away: May 15, 2005.
They set to work. Hurley tinkered with the way YouTube.com would look to a visitor. Chen and Karim engineered the code to bring the site to life. Then, on March 20, Yahoo announced it was buying Flickr. Yahoo was a web titan, a valuable "portal" for online activity that raked in billions a year. Flickr, a sleek Web 2.0 service, let people upload digital photos. The press reported that Yahoo had paid as much as $25 million for the acquisition. The Flickr deal lit a fire. Karim sent another email, with the subject line "new direction": Chad and I were discussing today that the focus of the site should be more like flickr. Basically a repository for all kinds of personal videos on the internet.
In the coming weeks Hurley, Chen, and Karim doubled down and debated anew how their site should work. Like the dating site or the photo site? Hot or Not appealed to "hip college kids with raging hormones," Chen wrote in one email, while Flickr reached "designers, artists, and creative folks." Who would use YouTube? Should they make two sites? Hurley wavered on the Flickr model, concerned that video was more difficult to upload and edit online, but he also didn't want to pigeonhole the site. Late on Sunday, April 3, Hurley emailed the others that they should just get their site out into the world; they could "figure out where we are going down the road. "Ten days later an obstacle appeared on the road. Google put out a call online for people to submit amateur videos, which the company might then post for the world to see. Hurley would later recall his reaction: "Ah, fuck." Google was scarier than Yahoo. When Google started, it was one of many web search engines, but it quickly pulverized all its competitors. Now Google was starting to reveal its true ambition. On April Fools' Day 2004, it launched an email service, Gmail, with so much unheard-of free data storage that people assumed it was a joke. Then it announced a massive, free digital map of the planet. And now Google, spigot of cash, hoarder of brilliant programmers, was coming for YouTube. When Hurley and his pals next met, a new agenda item appeared: Should we give up?
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Chad Hurley grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, and had landed in California the customary way: on a living room floor. After college, a small school in Pennsylvania where he took odd jobs cobbling together websites, Hurley had moved back in with his parents. He was aimless and a little bored. One day he was leafing through an issue of Wired magazine and came upon an article on Confinity, a California company trying to move currency through early handheld computers called PalmPilots. Confinity needed a designer. On a whim Hurley sent a rŽsumŽ. He heard back the next day. Could he come for an interview tomorrow?
This was 1999, when Silicon Valley was flush with cash and desperate for warm bodies. Confinity asked Hurley to design a logo for their new payments service, PayPal, and hired him quickly. He flew to Northern California, the new epicenter of innovation and commercial success, and slept on a mattress pad on the floor. His host, Erik Klein, a programmer from Illinois, had also started in California this way. Practically all the rookie hires at Confinity initially crashed on pads or couches near the office; with little job and life experience, the twentysomethings waited for a broker they knew who rented apartments without checking references.
At Confinity, Hurley soon met another new hire, a young coder named Steve Chen who had round cheeks, spiky black hair, and an easy laugh. Chen had arrived on a one-way ticket from Chicago, deserting college one semester before graduation, a shock to his parents. Born in Taipei, Chen moved to the United States with his family at the age of eight. On the flight over he didn't know how to ask the stewardess for water in English. Much of his youth in suburban Chicago was devoted to learning the language. Then, at fifteen, he went off to boarding school, the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, where he found his real fluent tongue: computer-speak. Chen got his own hulking desktop machine, and with no parents around he stayed up late, downing coffee, toying with code that animated screens. He went on to study computer science at the University of Illinois but frequently skipped classes. Assignments asked for outcomes from code-a program or an algorithm optimized to perform a task. If this, then that. Chen could figure that out with just a book and a keyboard. And he already had a contact in the industry. One of Confinity's founders, Max Levchin, a University of Illinois alum, liked to recruit from Chen's high school; Levchin once told a reporter that the Illinois academy churned out "hard-core smart, hardworking, non-spoiled" coders, perfect for a start-up. Chen started at Confinity on a Sunday, walking into its office to find four other coders playing video games. Heaven.
Chen liked to work late, fueled on cappuccinos and cigarettes, sometimes stumbling into the office past noon. Colleagues teased him for being a mischievous joker; he took frequent smoke breaks and frequent programming "shortcuts," inelegant technical work-arounds others avoided. Chen loved writing code in Python, an obscure computing language nobody else used. He liked it because it was open source, built and maintained by contributors around the world with an unrestrained spirit he saw in himself. Occasionally, he worked alongside Jawed Karim, another gifted, mischievous immigrant from the University of Illinois. Karim also loved the internet for its rule-bending openness. In college Karim had invented MP3 Voyeur, a file-sharing service tech-savvy college students used to rip music online, months before another named Napster debuted. Chen, Karim, and Hurley lived through turbulent years at Confinity. Start-ups back then were sharks circling for blood, willing to turn on a dime at the smell of money. Confinity ditched its first idea, security software, for another-mobile payments. It managed to survive the dot-com crash, when bursting markets demolished young internet businesses, and changed its name to PayPal. Emerging from the rubble, PayPal went public and, in 2002, sold itself to the auction site eBay.
PayPal's early staff were a tight-knit group of type A overachievers, and after the eBay purchase several of them went on to join blue-chip investment firms and start marquee companies: Yelp, LinkedIn, SpaceX. The press would christen this cadre (of mostly men) "the PayPal Mafia." At PayPal, the YouTube founders had a reputation as more of the B team. Hurley had left soon after the eBay acquisition, chafing at its stuffy corporate culture. Chen worked on PayPal's expansion into China but grew to hate the culture too, believing that it valued financial gain over programming gusto. When the pair started talking up their new idea for a video website in early 2005, few took them that seriously. In April, Chen sent over their test website to an old colleague. "Nice," the PayPal alum wrote back, "it works really well. how you gonna keep out the parn?" (He mistyped "porn.") Chen reassured him that they would, then asked, "Want to put a video in??????" The internet was not yet an enormous public stage, not yet the automatic place for people to share and overshare. Posting unpolished personal stuff felt weird. Chen's ex-colleague wrote back, "I'm not sure I have any."
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Ultimately, a lukewarm reception didn't deter the YouTube dudes. Neither did Google's entrance into amateur web video. Google wasn't the only one after all. Microsoft had a video site and so did a litany of start-ups, like Revver and Metacafe, and crass shock portals, like Big Boys and eBaum's World. Each featured footage on their own websites or applications, but they lacked a way to let videos play everywhere else on the web. YouTube had found a way. Jawed Karim showed it off to a PayPal coder he knew, Yu Pan, at a house party. "It's Flash," Karim explained. With Flash, a software system for rendering text, audio, and video graphics, YouTube could embed its video player box on other websites. That would ultimately be the trio's most brilliant move, an innovation that enabled YouTube to leapfrog all its competitors. At the party Karim pulled up a test video for Pan, who had toyed with Flash at PayPal and grasped its technical potential. On-screen Hurley had sketched a simple rectangle and tiny triangular Play button in pixels, a miniature TV that could plonk down anywhere online.
Getting videos to play in Flash was easy. Getting them to sync with sound was not. Chen made countless four-second films of himself just talking, going back each time into the code to make sure his lips and words moved together. Once the dudes were confident it worked, Karim published their site's first proper video, an eighteen-second clip with a crude wink.
jawed: "Me at the zoo." April 23, 2005. 0:18.
Karim is in a black ski jacket at the San Diego Zoo. Kids chattering in the background nearly drown out his voice, but his mouth moves in sync. "All right, so here we are in front of the elephants," he says, looking straight at the camera. "The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really"-pause-"long trunks. And that's pretty much all there is to say. To populate the site, Karim uploaded clips of 747s taking off and landing. Chen posted clips of his cat, PJ, with his handle, tunafat. But they needed more material. They were still toying with the dating idea, and for that to work, they had to have plenty of videos of women. "YouTube is in need of creative content!" Chen wrote in a Craigslist post. "If you are a female or an extremely creative male between the ages of 18 to 45 and if you have a digital camera that can create short video clips, please follow these steps to earn $20." Instructions followed: visit YouTube.com, start an account, upload three videos of yourself. Visitors could pick from a drop-down menu: "I'm a FEMALE seeking MALES between 18 to 45." They posted these listings around Las Vegas and Los Angeles. No one responded.
Back at the drawing board, Hurley decided these calls for creativity were too daunting, arguing that they should encourage "real personal clips that are taken by everyday people." For him the site's handicap was that it lacked a clear purpose. Was it a place to flaunt your opinions or your sex appeal? "I keep getting mixed signals from both of you," he wrote in one email, exasperated. "Are we moving towards blogging or dating?" Karim wrote back, "Screw blogging. we should just be a site where you can post videos of yourself. Broadcast yourself. That's it." An early slogan the three had used for their site-"Tune In, Hook Up"-was a dud. Karim now proposed that phrase-"broadcast yourself"-as the site's motto, and it stuck.
Copyright © 2022 by Mark Bergen. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
