YouTube: From chaos to command

Like, Comment, Subscribe:  Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination

Author: Mark Bergen 

Publisher: Penguin Business

Pages: 403

Price: Rs 799

YouTube has become such a fixture in the lives of people with an internet connection that it is hard to remember the era when it was still struggling to find its feet — or was still a scrappy, independent video upload site that was not part of Google.

Yet in 2005, when three former Confinity employees decided to create it, the odds against its success were high. A website called Stupidvideos.com was already around. Even as YouTube debuted, others — including the biggest guns in Silicon Valley such as Google — had started their own video sharing platforms.

Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen had worked together at Confinity and became good buddies. Confinity, for those who don’t follow Silicon Valley history too closely, is better known for its product PayPal. Strictly speaking, Messrs Hurley, Karim and Chen are members of the PayPal Mafia — the name the media gave to PayPal’s former executives who went on to dominate Silicon Valley after the payment service was sold. But as the author Mark Bergen points out, PayPal had the alpha executives such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin who could be called the aggressive A-team. Messrs Hurley, Karim and Chen were probably the B-team. They were easy-going, and not out to conquer the world.

Mr Bergen, who reports on technology for Bloomberg and Businessweek, started working on the YouTube story in 2019. The meticulous research and hundreds of hours of interviews he did shows in the details he captures in his story of the founding, near-death experiences, chaos and, finally, the dominant position YouTube enjoys today. The book is fascinating — but it occasionally gets bogged down in micro details.

The first part of the book recounting the early days of YouTube is the more interesting of the two sections. By the time it started life, Flickr — the photo uploading site — had become something of a star and was bought by Yahoo, which still was a big force on the Web. Yahoo’s inevitable decline would start soon after that, though that does not form part of the book or is relevant to its narrative. Friendster and MySpace were already big social networks, though neither would survive for very long.

Mr Karim was the first of the co-founders to leave. The other two continued nursing YouTube and testing one idea after another. Mr Hurley was the leader.

YouTube started picking up rapidly— perhaps because it was a free and easy platform without too many rules except that it would not allow porn to be uploaded. Young, creative, digital-savvy people with a streak of exhibitionism or narcissism or a combination of both traits had started uploading oddball videos regularly. They gathered a dedicated audience — other young people with the same sensibilities.

It was getting noticed for its user-generated content. Slashdot, the tech newsletter that had excellent readership among the Silicon Valley elite, had written about it. But the founders, who were largely running YouTube by loading its expenses on Mr Hurley’s credit card, were running out of money.

Mr Hurley tapped one of his former colleagues in PayPal — Roelof Botha — who was with the top-tier venture funding firm Sequoia Capital. Sequoia invested $3.5 million, immediately giving YouTube the resources to hire a proper office and more people and put more money into fine-tuning the website.

Meanwhile, Google video was not taking off. Susan Wojcicki was heading that project and resources were not scarce but it still did not get enough traction. Google put Google Videos on Google.com — but it still failed to catch up with YouTube.

YouTube, meanwhile, had become an attractive acquisition target and started getting feelers. Mr Hurley, however, was waiting for Yahoo and Google — the only two firms he thought whose offer would make sense — to come in. Google acquired it despite its own video offering.

It was not a marriage made in heaven — at least not initially. There was a culture mismatch. There were problems in integrating it with Google’s operations because YouTube was using DoubleClick to serve ads. It would lead to Google acquiring DoubleClick as well.

Google tried to bring many of its pet ideas to YouTube — including its algorithms and its revenue ideas. Some worked and many bombed. Mr Hurley eventually left. YouTube would go through leadership changes.

The second half of the book is a slightly tedious read because it goes into micro details of each crisis. But it offers interesting insights, such as its examination of the fiefdom culture of Google. Ms Wojcicki is not portrayed as a person who could add flair to YouTube — she was a steady hand.

YouTube is now a mature product and a money machine but is no longer considered the hotbed of innovation. Young video creators are also flocking to short video formats like TikTok and Instagram reels. But YouTube is a behemoth that will continue unless it takes major missteps.

Though the book came out much before Ms Wojcicki announced she was stepping down from her role in YouTube, the author probably had an inkling of it. The epilogue talks of her slowly beginning to step back from her role.

All in all, this is a valuable book on one of the most important products to come out of Silicon Valley.