Chad Hurley - The Rise of YouTube

Chad Hurley started early in February 2005 to upload videos... his own videos. The idea was simple. His site allowed you to upload your videos to their server and to embed them into any web pages on any web site. It became free advertising for free server space and people could click on the videos to come back to the Youtube.com site.

What quickly speeded up the rise of Youtube.com? Three events upsarted the trend. Myspace disabled the embedd functionality of videos on their site (but MySpace members overturned their ruling), they tripled their server, and Saturday Night Live comedy uploaded their Lazy Summer video on YouTube.com. They used flash media player. It was easy and simple to upload any video in any format and convert them into flash. No other site was doing it on the Internet. They allowed the community to see what they wanted to see. They controlled the length and quality of videos. The videos had a viral effect. Members could share and email their videos to their friends.

The graduate majoring in fine arts from Indiana University, in Pennsylvania, in 1999 was one of the earliest employees of PayPal, the online payment processor. As PayPal's senior designer, he played an integral role in designing the PayPal feature. His credits include crafting its first user interface as well as the PayPal logo, which are both still in use today. He was also quite a whiz at T-shirts, it turns out.

"He helped design the original PayPal T-shirts during his interview at PayPal at 2 a.m. in the morning, back in mid-1999," said Peter Thiel, one of PayPal's co-founders. "They're still pretty classic." After eBay purchased PayPal, Hurley left the company in 2002 to work as a consultant for several technology firms. He also dabbled in Hollywood as a producer; his credits include the comedy "Thank You For Smoking" earlier this year

But it was an experience with a digital camera at a party in 2005 that set Hurley on his present-day course to becoming arguably the first bonafide success story among the new generation of Web entrepreneurs set on feeding America's huger for new things to do with their broadband connections.

After snapping lots of photos and videos at the occasion, Hurley discovered just how hard it was to share the files with friends online; they were simply too large to e-mail and it took too long to load them onto a photo-sharing site he belonged to.

Armed with $11.5 million in start-up capital, Hurley began working on a better way to put video online in February 2005. By May, YouTube was being previewed for the first time and by last December, the firm emerged from its test-launch phase.

As YouTube's audience grew, so did the number of offers; reportedly from four major firms including Yahoo Inc. (YHOO: Yahoo! Inc and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT: Microsoft Corporation And so did the trouble it found itself in. A head of a major recording studio called it a black hole for pirated material. Meanwhile, maverick entrepreneur Mark Cuban wrote on his blog that anyone who wanted to buy YouTube was a "moron."

In a conference call Monday to announce the company's acquisition, Hurley said he based his decision to accept Google's offer on its "revolutionary" applications, its reputation for an often freewheeling development environment, and the company's vow to let YouTube remain an independent entity.

"Google's success in building revolutionary ad programs has inspired us to make a new platform for video content on the Web," Hurley said. "We wanted to remain independent. By working with Google, that's still the case. Now we'll be able to sharpen our focus."