YouTube, Google, the Rest of the Story
If you aren't aware that YouTube is being acquired by Google, you must be living under a rock. What is always fascinating about these kinds of success stories is the interesting parallel stories that crop up. Two that caught my eye this week are particularly interesting.
The first is a post by Josh Koppelman who runs First Round Capital out of Philadelphia. Josh is a friend of a friend and recently posted an email exchange he had with Chad Hurley from YouTube back in August of '05 about investing in YouTube. For whatever reason, the investment didn't happen, and the rest is history (Sequoia made an estimated $480M on its $11M investment in YouTube).
The second is a "fifth Beatle" story in USA Today this morning about Jawed Karim, the 27 year old "third founder" of YouTube. While Hurley and Chen have received an immense amount of media coverage over the past year, Karim left the company in '05 to head to Stanford for a graduate course in Computer Science. Apparently much of the idea for the site was his. Don't feel too bad - he still owned a big chunk of the company when it was acquired :).
