Chad Hurley

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chad Hurley is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of the popular San Mateo, California-based video sharing website YouTube, one of the biggest providers of videos on the Net, ahead of Yahoo! (YHOO) and Google (GOOG) and just behind Microsoft (MSFT), according to the Nielsen//NetRatings estimates. In June 2006, he was voted 28th on Business 2.0's "50 people who matter" list. In October 2006 he sold YouTube for $1.65 billion to Google[1].

According to an October 10, 2006 Wall Street Journal article, he worked in eBay's PayPal division -- one of his tasks involved designing the original PayPal logo -- [2] before starting YouTube [3] with fellow PayPal colleagues Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. ^[1]

According to a March 1, 2006 online Newsweek column, Hurley is a user interface expert and was primarily responsible for the tagging and video sharing aspects of the site[4].

Hurley, Chen and Karim got their start in the business world during the dot-com bubble and the bust that followed. They were among the first hires at online payment service PayPal. They got to know each other well during the lean years, becoming part of a tight-knit "PayPal mafia" that remains close today. Their venture money came in part through their connection to Roelof Botha, the South African former PayPal CFO. You Tube was born when the founders wanted to share some videos from a dinner party with friends in San Francisco. It was January 2005, and they couldn't figure out a good solution. Sending the clips around by e-mail was a bust: The e-mails kept getting rejected because they were so big. Posting the videos online was a headache, too. So they got to work to design something simpler. In 11 months the site became one of the most popular on the Internet because Chen and Hurley designed it so people can post almost anything they like on YouTube in minutes. Members, who can comment on videos and set up their own sites on YouTube, add tens of thousands (or more) new videos a day. Steve Chen points out that "[f]rom Day One we concentrated on building a service and community around video ... [t]hat made us a lot different from the iTunes and the Googles out there." [5]

However, some users have been posting videos that are still under copyright, without any of the required legal approvals. You Tube normally does not screen out copyrighted works before they're posted, but they do comply with all such requests. Although this raises potentially thorny problems, Sequoia Capital is betting on You Tube, having invested $3.5 million. But skeptics wonder if the startup can balance its surging popularity with the looming legal risks. "I think YouTube is fantastic," said Joanne Bradford, head of sales at MSN and other Microsoft properties. "But five years from now I don't know how they make their money. Their problem is all the pirated content" [6].

Chad Hurley grew up near Birdsboro, with an older sister (Heather) and a younger brother (Brent). He graduated from Twin Valley High School, Elverson in 1995, and received his B.A. in Fine Art from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He was a stand-out runner for Twin Valley High School's vaunted Cross Country program, which won two of its numerous PIAA State titles with him as a member in 1992 and 1994[7].

[edit] References