Meant to blog this earlier when I came across it, but a guy named Matt — a student at Stanford studying design and business — wrote a post the other day about a couple of special visitors who came to his class: Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the co-founders of YouTube. Matt says that he had the good fortune to go out to lunch with the two new multimillionaires, and asked them what the keys to the company’s success were.
The answer is fairly succinct, and not exactly a secret either, but still worth repeating: the first key to success was the ability to embed video, and the second was an infrastructure that allowed the site to scale quickly and easily. Sounds simple, but the first was unique when YouTube offered it — and I would argue it was also by far the most important of the two factors — and the second is a lot harder than it sounds.
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"Their reluctance is understandable: Jim Clark is one of the valley's most revered figures, and because he runs a media-sharing website—Shutterfly, founded in 1999—it would be tempting to think he was the real force behind the video-sharing site his son-in-law was starting. But Chad says Clark has had only a tiny role in YouTube, merely offering the boys advice in 2005, when the start-up was seeking its initial round of funding. "
Yeah, right. A super-rich father being "only a tiny role". Not even worth mentioning ...
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But if you're going to argue that having a super-rich, ultra-connected, venture-capitalist father-in-law who in fact tried the same business earlier isn't a factor, well, I think that's an utter denial of social reality.
It just doesn't make for nearly as inspiring a story :-(.
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And Seth, I'm willing to admit that having Jim Clark as a father-in-law probably helped -- I'm just not sure it qualifies as one of the top three secret ingredients in YouTube's success. Of course, you're entitled to your own list.
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