I had the honor and pleasure to listen to Jawed Karim speak last week. He talked mostly about his experience co-founding youtube and current trends. Some highlights of his talk are the following:
• YouTube’s design originally copied hotornot.com and flickr.com
• They knew there was a clear problem with sharing video
• Only a few people investors understood the problem they were solving
• Many trends were converging around the video space as they entered
• They built features for the community, to enable them to grow
• They only hired people they worked with in the past (ala PayPal)
• Bandwidth cost was their greatest challenge
Jawed is soft spoken and dresses like an average person walking down the street. At first glance, you wouldn’t have known he was a co-founder of youtube and one of the first engineers at PayPal. He seems like a very humble person, and there’s a lot to admire about the awesome things he’s created for the world.