The Background
After graduating from college with a fine arts degree, Chad Hurley read about PayPal and interviewed for a job there. He created the company's logo as a test in his interview - the same logo that PayPal went on to use for over a decade. Chad got the job, and it was while working there that he met his future co-founders, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen. After PayPal's acquisition by eBay, the trio went their own ways for a brief period until coming together to create YouTube.
The Spark
The idea for it came in January 2005, when Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, at a get-together at the latter's new house in San Francisco, realised that they had no way to share the video that they'd shot at the event. The video files were too large to email and uploading them onto the web took hours. They decided to solve the problem themselves. Hurley and Chen brought in Karim, and the trio registered the domain YouTube.com in January 2005.
The Launch
YouTube launched in beta in April 2005 with the first-ever video upload titled "Me at the zoo", featuring Karim. In September 2005, it got its first 1-million hit video, a Nike ad featuring the football player Ronaldinho. Following a $3.5 million investment from Sequoia Capital a month later, YouTube went on an astronomical rise, with Google splashing the cash to buy it for $1.7 billion within a year, which was the tech major's largest acquisition at the time.
