YouTube Founder Worked for Facebook
Amit Chowdhry | Saturday October 14, 2006 | 459 views
Isn’t it funny how things work out in Silicon Valley? On GigaOm I found a post written by Liz Gannes about how a former employee at Facebook wrote a book on what life was like working for the company. Liz also provided a link to the website of Karel M. Baloun where you can buy his book, Inside Facebook: Life, Work, and Visions of Greatness. On the website, Karel also has a blog where he revealed that Steve Chen, the founder of YouTube worked for Facebook.
Karel explained that in his book, on page 8, “The message of YouTube is the same as this story of Facebook. When Steve was at Facebook, 26 years old, he was looking at two choices: be a critical early engineer at a succeeding startup (again, since he’d done that at Paypal) or start his own company with his buddy Chad. He had just bought a clearly overpriced condo in San Francisco with his girlfriend, and they enjoyed weekend days furnishing it, but when I talked to him about the risks of adjustable rate mortgages and how he should maybe stick with Facebook because it was a guaranteed paycheck since having negative equity in your home can lead to bankruptcy, his mind was very much elsewhere. His vision had him worth millions, the fearless and doubtless focus was on just creating value and letting the money flow in, and the details of his mortgages would be handled by financial servants. Since only 16 months later YouTube is selling to Google for $1.65B, I laugh at myself at how insistent we were that he personally come return his corporate laptop!”
I tried searching for more content on what Steve Chen’s role at Facebook was, but I could not find anything. Once I come back to the U.S. in January, I’ll for sure order this book as I also have a vision for a Web 2.0 business start-up and I want to gain a few more tips.
Karel M. Baloun was a senior engineer with Facebook between 2005-2006. As a selling point, Karel states the aim of this book is to: “reveal the inside of Facebook’s explosive growth as it became the premiere online environment for US college students. Including, how and by whom products were made, how you can use them best, views on what makes social networks valuable, and where this industry trends are headed [source].”
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