In February of 2005, three PayPal employees – Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen – came up with the idea of creating a video sharing site. YouTube was born not long after, and it quickly grew into a website that would change the internet (and the world) forever.
Early Whisperings
There are two different stories that claim to reveal what inspired the three men to invent YouTube. According to Chad and Steve, the idea to create a video sharing site stemmed from them experiencing difficulty sharing videos taken at a dinner party hosted by Steve at his apartment in San Francisco.
Jawed, meanwhile, says that he was inspired by two major events from 2004: Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, and the Indian Ocean tsunami. Jawed could not easily find videos of these events online, and this led to the idea of creating a video sharing site.
Regardless of where exactly its inspiration came from, YouTube began as a venture capital-funded startup. Sequoia Capital invested $11.5 million to fund its development. A beta test of the site was offered to the public in May of 2005, and the site was officially launched in December of that same year, bolstered by another round of investment from Sequoia Capital (this time worth $3.5 million). Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion just ten months after its launch. Sequoia Capital received around $495 million from the sale.
