July | 2008 | Matt Mazur

I’ve been reading Quentin Zervaas’s Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP for about the last week and a half. Despite working with Visual Basic for the last, I dont know, 8 years, I’ve had a tough time picking up the Model-View-Controller of Zend Framework. MVC, as it is known in the biz, is a way to break up the code so that the code for the logic and the code for the display are stored in separate places.

The thing that makes ZF great is the same thing I’m frustrated with right now: there are a lot of libraries. One for authorization, one for control lists, one for this, one for that, and so on. It’s a bit overwhelming at first, but I can see how it becomes really useful once you’ve become familiar with everything the libraries can do.

YouTube was sold to Google for $1.65 billion in Nov 2006. 1.65 billion dollars. How is that possible? Thats what I’m trying to figure out. This post starts small, covering the history of YouTube. In future posts, I’ll dig deeper, and try to find out what’s going on.

Founders

YouTube was founded by three former PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.

Chad went to Indiana University of Pennsylvania where he got a Fine Arts degree [1]. After he graduated, he went to work for PayPal where he met the other two YouTube founders. According to Wikipedia, he designed the PayPal logo and according to a speech he gave recently [2], he designed the YouTube logo as well. It would seem like he’s got an eye for design (hence the Fine Arts degree). Its interesting to note that it doesn’t seem like he’s got a formal technical or business education, yet he’s currently YouTube’s CEO.

Steve went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), not positive on what degree. According to Valleywag [3] he worked at Facebook temporarily after starting YouTube, to pull a paycheck. When YouTube started taking off, I guess he went back to work on it full time. He’s currently the YouTube’s CTO, indicated he probably had a CS degree.

The third and apparently less well known founder was Jawed Karem. He’s another UIUC grad, with a CS degree, who went to work for PayPal, where he worked with Steve, who he already knew from school [7], and Chad [4]. He helped found YouTube — the idea for it was his — but never held a major roll in the company. After it started taking off, he went back to grad school at Stanford, where he served as an informal adviser to the company. You get the impression reading about him that he’s a really smart and really modest. He wants to be a professor one day. The NY Times article on him [4] has a lot of good information on him, if anyone is interested in reading more.

Timeline

2005

Jan – “The three of them would meet at night at Max’s Operate Café, near Stanford, to discuss their ideas.” And so it starts [4]. The original idea was to make videos for online auction sites.

Feb 15 – Domain is registered

April 23 – First YouTube video posted, of Karem at the Zoo [5]

April 28 – First archive.org entry. The about page reads only: “YouTube is the first online community site that allows members to post and share personal videos.” The site isn’t much to look at, but given that they only started developing it four months earlier, you can’t really say too much. There’s something to learn from that.

May – Preview to the world. “To try to attract viewers, the three figured the best thing would do would be to get hot chicks involved. So, Karim recounts, they posted an ad on Craigslist in Los Angeles promising attractive females $100 if they’d post 10 videos on YouTube. They got not a single reply.” [6]