Chad Hurley

CHAD HURLEY

www.youtube.com

Place of birth : Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, United States of America

Country of Residence : San Fransisco or Anywhere he wants!

Net worth : $335+Million

Chad Meredith Hurley, 34 is one of the co-founders of YouTube. In October 2006 he, along with the other founders, sold the company for $1.65 billion to Google. In 2006, he was voted 28th on Business 2.0′s “50 People Who Matter Now“ list.

Hurley worked in eBay’s PayPal division—one of his tasks involved designing the original PayPal logo—before starting YouTube with fellow PayPal colleagues Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. Hurley is a user interface expert and was primarily responsible for the tagging and video sharing aspects of YouTube.

YouTube was founded by Hurley, Chen, and Jawed Karim, supposedly to share videos from a dinner party with friends in San Francisco in January 2005. The site soon became one of the most popular on the Internet because the founders designed it so people can post almost anything they like on YouTube in minutes. Members, who can comment on videos and set up their own channels on YouTube, add tens of thousands (or more) new videos a day.

On October 16, 2006, Chen and Hurley sold YouTube to Google, Inc. for $1.65 billion. It was reported in the Wall Street Journal that Chad Hurley’s share in the $1.65B sale of Youtube.com is $345.6M at Google’s Feb. 7, 2007 closing stock price of $470.01. He received 694,087 Google shares directly and another 41,232 shares in a trust. His other two co-founders, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim received 625,366 shares and 137,443 shares respectively valued at $326.2M and $64.6M. The journal’s report was based on Google’s registration statement with SEC filed on Feb. 7, 2007. Chad is also going to be the major investor of Team US F1 one of the new entrants for the 2010 season. It is unclear whether the team will carry YouTube logos.

According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco. Jawed Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, while Chad Hurley commented that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party “was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible.

On October 9, 2009, the third anniversary of the acquisition by Google, Chad Hurley announced in a blog posting that YouTube was serving “well over a billion views a day” worldwide. YouTube serves hundreds of millions of videos daily and has created a new market for discovering, sharing and distributing videos around the globe. YouTube has been awarded “Best Invention of the Year” by Time Magazine and was the first Web site to receive “Entertainer of the Year” by Entertainment Weekly.

Chad Hurley talking about the future of Youtube, and the direction they are taking:

Chad Hurley, CEO & co-founder, Youtube & Joanna Shields, president, Bebo (MidemNet 2008) from James Martin on Vimeo.

Watch how Adam Sadowsky got 50+ million view using a video that became viral onYoutube, and lessons you can learn as an entrepreneur looking to use Youtube to your advantage: