YouTube Co-Founder talks Partnerships with Google, Yahoo, PayPal, etc

Steven Chen, YouTube’s co-founder, reflects on selling the company to Google 5 years ago. Did he sell the company too soon? YouTube was created in 2005 and Chen sold it to Google Inc. for $1.65 Billion in 2006.

According to TechCrunch; “Chen revealed that the entire $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition was completed in one week’s time. Chen met with executives from both Google and Yahoo, including Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, at a Denny’s in Palo Alto, “We didn’t want to meet at offices, so we were like, ‘Where’s a place that none of us would go?’”

Chen said that his meeting with then Google CEO Eric Schmidt was instrumental in the decision to go with Google. Schmidt basically promised the founders unlimited resources in return for an “infinite amount of happy users” and an “infinite amount” of good content; “Here are all the resources that Google has around the world, and you can pick and choose.”

“For twelve months, whatever we wanted to do, we were allowed to do,” Chen said “It was tremendous courage from Eric, allowing this group of 20 year-olds to run the company.”

Source: TechCrunch