Recap: Chad Hurley on Growing YouTube

YouTube Co-Founder Chad Hurley spoke to a packed house at the latest Startup2Startup event. Chad gave a very candid recount of his time starting YouTube.

Although originally aimed at online auctions or meeting new people, they eventually moved toward a general online video solution. Chad described the idea as branching out from their experiences at PayPal and their own complications with online video. The idea was to create a video experience that users could take with them similar to the way users could take the PayPal experience with them.

They started out of their garages, eventually taking up residence inside of Sequoia before taking a round from the same firm.

Chad confronted one of the chief criticisms raised against the site, that the site achieved much of its growth from illegal content hosted on the site. He pointed out that although other sites face similar problems, they haven’t achieved the same growth, because they weren’t able to achieve the same community as YouTube.

Although the choice to sell was hard, Chad said they eventually decided to sell to Google as the best path to growing and supporting the service.

Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee has more details and a video from the event below: