A touch of grace or luck
Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim joined in 2005 to jointly create the first version of the YouTube platform, which in principle was for line appointments and where people could find love there. Until the young engineers realized that the idea was a total failure and that they should change the theme of the platform.
Several years later, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley come together again to found AVOS Systems, a technology firm that helps developers create mobile apps and online services.Although they have also continued trying to influence the video platforms with two applications: Mixbit, which facilitates the editing of videos, and Wanpai, an app to share short videos similar to what Vine was. For its part and despite being the first face that appeared on YouTube, Jawed Karim has maintained a rather discreet profile in their business, without many public appearances.
The purpose was to create a site to manage online appointments. With that objective, what we know today as YouTube, emerged as a space for men and women to share on video who they were and who they were looking for in love. The founders of the site, the young Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, registered the name of the portal on Valentine's Day 2005.Karim a month after founded, he uploaded the first YouTube video, "Me at the zoo", a small 18-second clip that carried nothing romantic at all.
A short time later, the young people realized that their idea had been a complete failure. But not everything was lost because they realized that they had a valuable platform in their hands, at a time when uploading home videos to the internet was just beginning to take off.
They decided to forget about the dates and open it for any video and that was a great success. By October 2006, the three young people made the business of their lives: they sold the platform to Google for 1,650 million dollars.And maybe they did not get appointments in 2006, but they do enjoy the turn that their romantic idea gave and their advice is very well valued in the technology business.
The young entrepreneurs and co-founders of YouTube do not have a common origin, but they crossed paths after leaving university.Steve Shih Chen is a native of Taiwan, but as a teenager he moved with his family to the United States where he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jawed Karim is also an immigrant, was born in Germany and came with his family to the United States in the early 1990s, where he studied at the same university as Chen. While Chad Hurley was born in Pennsylvania, he studied at Indiana University in the same state.
They met in 1999 on their first day as employees of the PayPal electronic payment site in Silicon Valley, California. As engineers, Chen participated in the development of the PayPal site and Karim got the anti-fraud security system to work; while Hurley, a graduate in fine arts, collaborated with the design of the interface with the user. In 2005, the three team up to create the first version of YouTube.
And although they continued as YouTube executives, over the years the three retired from the platform to start other businesses.