The montage above shows the founders of YouTube (from left to right) Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The three upper images are from a video showing them as they discuss the failure of their website. Must be from April or May 2005. Half a year later Seqoia Capital invested $ 3.4 million in their project. (Don Valentine, founder of Seqoia, invested in Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Oracle and Apple!) One year later their little site was the fastest growing website in the history of the internet, even outpacing MySpace. (Its current Alexa ranking is 4, directly behind the three big search engines.) On October the 9th, 2006 – 18 month after this video was made YouTube was aquired by Google for $1.65 billion.
Chad and Steve’s shares were worth $326 million, while Jawed only earned $64.6 million, due to the fact he had left the company to graduate in computer science.
The second row of images shows the three founders as they can be seen in the latest clips I could find on YouTube.
Watch: YouTube, the early days and the first video published at YouTube at 8:27PM on Saturday April 23rd, 2005. History in the making!
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