Did you know that the YouTube founder worked for Facebook? Below is an excerpt from Inside Facebook:
“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!”
From page 73: “Lastly, it has to work financially for the site: the service can’t be much more expensive to produce than the site is able to monetize it. Steve of Youtube, I’m talking to you, about your genuinely useful site. What’s that? Oh I see, you can’t hear me because you are talking to Larry and Sergey right now about how you really are worth more than a billion dollars because you are so essential and widely used, showing 100m videos a day, but that they need to buy you this month, no – actually right now – before the next bandwidth bill arrives, because if they don’t Yahoo, Fox or Viacom will. Congratulations, Steve!”
