Chad Meredith Hurley (1977) is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of the popular San Bruno, California-based video sharing website YouTube, one of the biggest providers of videos on the Internet. In June 2006, he was voted 28th on Business 2.0’s “50 People Who Matter Now” list. In October 2006 he sold YouTube for $1.65 billion to Google.
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.
Early years
Chad, the middle child of Don and JoAnn Hurley, grew up near Birdsboro, Pennsylvania. He has two siblings – an older sister (Heather) and a younger brother (Brent). Since childhood, Chad showed interest in the arts and became interested in computers and electronic media during high school.
He graduated from Twin Valley High School, Elverson in 1995 and went on to receive his B.A. in Fine Art from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He was a stand-out runner for Twin Valley High School’s vaunted Cross Country program, which won two of its numerous PIAA State titles with him as a member in 1992 and 1994. He was also member of the Technology Student Association during high school.
PayPal
When he was about to graduate, Hurley heard of then-new company PayPal, that at the time was dedicated to enabling PDA users to send money among themselves. Hurley sent his resume and received a job interview. After flying to California, he was asked to design a logo to show his skills. The result is the current logo of PayPal that now dedicates to securing all kinds of online transactions.
It was during his days at PayPal that he met Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, two PayPal engineers with whom he talked about several ideas for businesses. In 2002, when eBay bought PayPal for $1.54 billion, Hurley received a bonus which he used to finance their future venture. Another link that helped their future venture was their connection to Roelof Botha, the former PayPal CFO.
YouTube
YouTube was born when the founders (Hurley, Chen, and Karim) wanted to share some videos from a dinner party with friends in San Francisco in January 2005. Sending the clips around by e-mail was a bust: The e-mails kept getting rejected because they were so big. Posting the videos online was a headache, too. So they got to work to design something simpler. 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 sites 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.
Source: Wikipedia