No. 10 – YouTube was sold to Google for $1.65 billion. I know, I know. This is no secret and everyone knows about this because if you don’t you are from Mars or something BUT this is not it.

Do you know how long it takes YouTube to attract this billion dollar deal? Not 10 years, not 5 years, not 1 year, but 10 months! 10 months after its official launch, Google set an eye on the popular video-sharing website and offered perhaps the most outrageous offer ever to buy over an online company.

No. 9 – YouTube’s founders consist of a Bangladeshi, a Caucasian and a Chinese.

Jawed Karim was born in Merseburg, East Germany to Naimul Karim, a Bangladeshi researcher and Christine Karim, a research assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Minneseto.

Chad Meredith Hurley grew up in Pennsylvania with an older sister, Heather and a younger brother, Brent. His Father is a financial consultant and his mother is a school teacher.

Steve Shih Chen was born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan till the age of 15 before his whole family moved to the United State.
Hurley is currently the CEO of YouTube with Chen as the Chief Technology Officer. Karim has since moved on. He left the company when YouTube started to get mainstream recognition.

No. 8 – YouTube was initially set up in the garage.

Funny how all multimillion-dollar companies or in this case billion-dollar starts from the garage. Think it’s for the sake of having a story to tell or something but YouTube really starts in the garage. The three young men meet, mastermind and set up the company in a garage in Menlo Park, California.

No.7 – The founders of YouTube were once PayPal employees

The three self-made multimillionaires first met at the Internet payment company, PayPal. Hurley was a designer in PayPal (more juicy bits about this in No. 3). Chen was a programmer where he developed a reputation for quick and dirty programming.

Karim was responsible for a few key projects in PayPal and was an early and key hire when the company first started; he received equity in the company too. When the company was sold to eBay, Karim received several million dollars at the young age of 23.

No.6 -70,000 videos are being added on YouTube every single day

So many videos, one could not possibly hope to watch it all even over a few lifetimes.

No.5 – You Tube is not the only video-sharing website

There are other websites not as popular but offer similar service namely Video Bomb, Blinkx.TV, Guba, Metacafe, VideoEgg and Grouper.

No.4 – YouTube was initially a dating service.

YouTube was first launched in February 2005 as a dating website, where the users post video of themselves and take message from other users. Plan failed. So the boys revamped it to a more general use, more like what you see today, that anyone can upload any kind of videos and have it officially launched in mid-June 2005.

No.3 – One of the YouTube founders designed the PayPal logo

Hurley who worked in PayPal as a designer back then, designed the company’s logo, which is still the PayPal logo today!

No. 2 – YouTube was funded by the founders’ credit cards – NOT TRUE!

One of the popular stories about YouTube is most probably the ‘fact’ that YouTube was funded by the three young men’s credit cards. It is true to a certain extent BUT not as desperate as it tries to sound like. It is more like a good story to tell and sell as though the website is struggling for marketing purposes.

What most people don’t know, Hurley, Chen and Karim left PayPal as multimillionaires and there is no problem at all to pay the credit card bills. While it’s true that they pay off the companies’ expenses, etc with their credit cards, they pay off the credit card balance in full every month.

No.1 – YouTube was accidently discovered at a dinner party – SO NOT TRUE!

So Hurley and Chen were attending a dinner party where friends were taking videos of each other trying to send the videos among themselves via the Internet, but the process is troublesome and that immediately strike the brilliant minds to work out a solutions and ta-da! YouTube was born!

That’s the story we all know, right? WRONG WRONG WRONG. That’s more like a story made simple for the press.

As a matter of fact, YouTube is not a coincident but a carefully-sketched project . To cut the story short, Hurley, Chen and Karim started to talk about a video site in early 2005 when they were disputing about who first reached the top of Everest. Another version of this is, they started to talk about the idea when Karim failed to find a video of Janet Jackson’s SuperBowl wardrobe malfunction online.

So one discussion leads to another and they decided to execute their plan in the all-so-famous garage in California. The team works so quickly; the idea was discussed on the 15th February 2005 and it was launch 2 months after on 23rd April that very same year.

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