When you’ve just sold a business for $1.6bn to the most famous internet company of all, does it really matter whether it was planned or not?
It shows that whether you have a vision or not and whatever the reason for starting, if you capture global attention the business can take off in a matter of months. There probably hasn’t been a business that has grown so quickly as You Tube – even Google can’t match it’s first year growth.
So let’s spend some time having a look at You Tube and for comparison some other internet giants – Google and Ebay. How important has vision been to their history?
The simple answer with You Tube was that it wasn’t. It probably didn’t enter the equation at least not for a few months.
YouTube.com was founded by three employees of Paypal – Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. The domain name was registered in February 2005 and over the coming months the web site was developed until its official launch in late 2005.
In its short life, this latest dot-com success has grown at a rate unheard of before and received global press & media attention. Tapping into the popularity of online grass roots video and through clever marketing gimicks and word-of-mouth, You Tube has grown to the global phenomenon we know it for today.
Yet why was it set up? Did the three friends have a clear vision in mind? Did they even think they had a business?
Or did the idea take on a life of its own so quickly that they realised they were sitting on a global gold-mine and were forced to build a business around it almost overnight. If they had failed to add a solid business structure so quickly, You Tube would probably have collapsed under its own weight and allowed someone else to capitalise.
If the ‘official’ history is true then You Tube is one of the greatest commercial accidents of all time.
Frustrated at being unable to easily share home-made videos of a social occasion, the three friends set up their own platform which I’m sure they expected friends and colleagues to make use of, but did they really believe it would allow them to give up the day jobs so quickly? Probably not.
You Tube was to put it simply ‘right time, right place’. If they had started a couple of years earlier they would probably have disappeared without trace. If they started now they may have missed the boat or at the very least would require deep pockets and sympathetic investors to keep going long enough to be considered long-term.
But just like Google and Ebay and by letting the internet do what it does best, word spread…and spread..and spread.
