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Chad Hurley Bio, Founder of YouTube

Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of YouTube, Chad Hurley was a PayPal employee -- and the designer of the original logo -- when he met Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, and discussed the possibility of the video-sharing site with them. The three had received a bonus when eBay bought PayPal, and used it -- along with considerable funding from Sequoia Capital -- to build an office in a garage, from which they launched their site, which would provide a public space on the internet for hosting videos -- which were generally too large to attach to email the way audio, text, and picture could be.

Throughout 2006, when the site got on its feet, YouTube was one of the fastest-growing and most popular websites, allowing browsers to view or upload short video clips ranging from home videos to excerpts of sitcoms or movies -- but especially including "viral videos," the sorts of videos that internet users have been sharing with each other for a decade. The site's demographics are solidly adolescent, a group that has the most time for watching video after video, no matter how brief.

While it has been targeted repeatedly by copyright infringement lawsuits, sometimes by copyright holders who do not seem aware that YouTube allows users to put content up but does not put it up themselves, YouTube has nevertheless thrived. Google purchased the company in late 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock, making the founders multimillionaires. The company has announced the incredibly ambitious goal of hosting every music video every made, by early 2009. There are plans for sharing ad revenue with active uploaders, the people providing the content that draws users to the site.

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