Interesting, if unsurprising, to see that a large factor in the interest in YouTube was based purely on location, as well as knowledge of the people working there, their backgrounds, and who specifically they were funded by.
Where you are and who you know often outweighs having the best product, features, etc.
I didn’t get that at all. They talked about the funding round as a signal for what the asking price might be, and then “Mike from Sequoia” because they know Mike and therefore know which partner at Sequoia to reach out to broker a conversation.
These very commonly considered success-probability multipliers and derisking factors -- at this stage, the makeup, expertise, and reputations of the individuals leading a company are the biggest success factors. Even if the acquisition fails, having a strong (and nearby) team adds a lot of value to the acquirer.
So basically the only reason they were considering YouTube was to either deny it to their competition, or force their competition to pay more for it.
It sounds like they expected it to die on a backroom shelf somewhere if they made the purchase. This seems anti-competitive behavior even during what might otherwise be viewed as their "don't be evil" phase. They didn't see it as valuable for their own needs, they just didn't want it to grow into competition itself or via another competitor and so considered buying it to let it die.
I think you’re mis-reading the thread. Jeff Huber says YouTube are cranking features, but their backend probably won’t scale and they don’t have good monetization. That ultimately ends up being what they do — after acquiring YouTube, they re-built it using Google’s distributed systems infrastructure and software. And the monetization model today is in fact (mostly) ads.
What you then see in the thread is someone else saying: yeah we’re going to catch up, we just need a couple of more devs.
And then the counterpoint that well, even if Google doesn’t end up doing it, at least it makes it harder for Yahoo.
The original motivation isn’t just to make it harder for Yahoo. It’s that Huber wants to bring these people on board because they are really good at innovating, and Google can help make it really successful. But there was some pushback, and then other reasons were presented to continue with the conversation.
At these companies (any company?), sometimes to get what you want you have to present a diverse set of reasons, even if only one of them is the principal reason why you want to do something.
>It sounds like they expected it to die on a backroom shelf somewhere if they made the purchase. This seems anti-competitive behavior [...] They didn't see it as valuable for their own needs,
I think you're reading too much conspiracy motive into Larry's terse email.
Based on various interviews, Susan Wojcicki was head of Google Video at the time and she acknowledged they were losing against the upstart Youtube. She originally thought Google Video would succeed because Google was "playing nice" by negotiating legal licenses with broadcasters like NBC whereas Youtube was just a bunch of pirated content.
It was a big risk to acquire Youtube because the Viacom piracy lawsuit was looming. Google decided they could handle it and went ahead with the acquisition. They saw the value in Youtube and didn't have any intention of killing it.
One of them wrote something like that, and seemed against the idea on that basis because there were other options Yahoo could go for. That was basically an argument for not doing the deal because it would only, maybe have those effects, but that wasn’t the opinion of the others. Ultimately that’s not why they bought them anyway. So no, not really.
I was at Google during this period, and did a lot of work with YT ads, 2009-2010. Their backend was still Python then; I have no idea about now.
Memory: I was over there and someone was introducing me to a group of folks and said "he's from Google." I spread my hands around and said "we're ALL from Google."
> "I think we should talk to them, if nothing else to make it more expensive for Yahoo."
Love this.
Another thing: Jeff Huber thought that having 2.5 Google engineers would be enough to outcompete YouTube at the time. Given that they eventually acquired YouTube for over $1B, was that essentially paying for their ~2 best engineers?
"I think if we had one more good java/ui engineer we'd be kicking butt vs youtube."
Unfortunately, this very attitude continues to be the bane of every large company. Thinking they can throw a body on the problem can make them invincible.
YouTube finally sold for $1b to google. And at that time everyone felt that was an unjustifiable price for a company that was burning millions per month on bandwidth and possibly will run out of cash any time.
A bigger concern was that by the time of the acquisition it was clear that Google was buying a legal mess in the form of lawsuits that were spinning up from various Hollywood media companies. What wasn't clear (to many of us on the outside, at least) was that Google was prepared to deal with that and not go broke doing so.
Yes but the instant Google bought them they stopped burning millions on bandwidth, because even at that time Google had more latent fiber than anyone else. As I've said here dozens of times hardware has been the key to Google's success. Fiber in the ground is a big part of it.
I wonder what led up to that. If I were the YouTube founders at the time bleeding millions with no business model, I'd probably have taken the $10 million.
Talking about bandwidth, aren’t we talking anymore about how all those big services clog the pipes by delivering content that users want instead of small websites who deliver content that users want, and how this is unfair and how we should tax the hell of Youtube and Facebook and Netflix for being most of the bandwidth that is consumed?
What's Larry up to now? Instead of using his brilliance to build some new venture he's hiding out off-grid on a private island in Fiji[1] and getting New Zealand residency[2]. Pretty weird stuff to be up to IMHO. Is he smarter than all of us and bugged out for the apocalypse now or something?
Google and their services are indispensable for billions. Doesn't he deserve a personal life where he can do whatever he wants to do instead of being beholden to humanity and serve it with his brilliance forever?
Third, Google was often a place that ascribed little value to people who didn’t have the right degrees and right coding pedigree. For years, the company ignored
@ev
and the Blogger team. Hell, they still checked all of our SAT scores back then.
Strange thought: up until 2010-11 Vimeo was a vastly superior platform in terms of service quality(then Google stepped up the game of course). But it does make me wonder what would have happened if Google had bought Vimeo instead and where would either be today
And here I thought Google used their search data to spot YouTube's relevance before anyone else. Nope.
I enjoyed the one guy saying they just need one more front end guy to keep up, but they were estimating $10-15M to acquire the company. Must have been just to keep it away from Yahoo... or maybe they realized there's more to good products than throwing another developer at them.
"Their content quality is worse than ours. They seem focused on home video/community space while we want to be more like iTunes/TV"
16 years later, home video is still the core value of YouTube, yet they are still trying to push overproduced shows and TV while mistreating original creators.
I noticed this with one of my favorite channels, Vsauce… they were one of the pilot channels to be “upgraded” to YouTube Red, back when that was a thing; the series was called “Mind Field”. I never subscribed to it when it was premium, but when YouTube Red shut down it all became free.
I tried watching a few episodes of the ostensibly “higher quality” format of Mind Field, and it was demonstrably worse in most aspects. Bloated, way more filler, way more pointless behind the scenes stuff of the host interacting with the guests, and an overall much slower pace of interesting material. It felt a lot more like a cookie cutter Nat Geo show instead of the denser, faster paced material of Vsauce.
Overall I think that the smaller, self-produced (or minimally produced with small teams) format is the future and I’m glad to see that YouTube is failing to change that despite their efforts.
> 16 years later, home video is still the core value of YouTube
Is it? I guess it depends on what you mean by home video. Is it "Me at the zoo"[0], or independent content creators like PewDiePie or Veratassium? Compared to Hollywood most if not all Youtube channels are completely different, but when I think of home video and early Youtube I think of personal family trips, not NileRed.
The overproduction of "home content" is killing it for me. As soon as Youtubers get a whiff of success suddenly all of the authenticity drops out of the channel and absolutely everything becomes sponsored content.
The part that's more interesting to me is the "UI/Java" part. It's very hard to think of any consumer web company from that era that iterated on a UI quickly with Java and hit exponential growth.
Here is a list of YC startups, and you have to scroll down before you hit anything but Ruby/Python (and C++ for back ends, presumably Go too). But I'd say this is true of all web companies in general, not just YC companies. (You'd probably see more PHP in non-YC companies, and I'd argue it's still more appropriate than Java for this use case)
Aside from the outliers that were GMail and Maps (acquisition), Google had a lot of trouble producing good UIs. Google+ was a good example of UI well below the state of the art at the time.
Notably YouTube was a huge Python codebase ... which Google was already using at the time, but not much for web front ends.
I suspect what you're seeing is a bit of "I've got a hammer and everything looks like a nail" in relation to the fancy shiny GWT thing that some teams at Google built at the time. IMHO GWT was an awful toolkit and had a slow and terrible development cycle, but there was a lot of hype about it back then as if it was solving the bridge between dynamic front ends and backends written in Java.
I wasn't even at Google at the time but had management types trying to foist it on me at a company I worked at, and it was frankly a failure. I'm not sure if Google Video was done in GWT, but it certainly had the look of a GWT product.
When I came to Google in 2012 there were still some products using it but it was mostly recognized for being clunky and those products have been migrated.
Interestingly the first version of Google Search's frontend was written in Python, based off the Medusa framework. It was replaced by a heavily-optimized C webserver (GWS) written by Craig Silverstein in 1999. The Python -> C rewrite took the frontend server fleet from 30 machines down to 3, and it would've fit on 1 but they needed fault tolerance.
There continued (and continues) to be a large prejudice against Python for large-scale software projects at Google, even among people who were core members of the Python Software Foundation! I think this is a good example of peoples' mental models of the world ossifying and not understanding how economics have changed. Python continues to be 30x or more slower than C - but it doesn't matter. Computing has gotten so cheap that you just eat the cost, build your product anyways, and then figure out how to optimize after you sell to Google.
This email seems to be about 6 months before they released GWT 1.0. Their toolkit to compile Java to JS for web UI's. They likely already used it internally by then.
If I remember correctly at the time they also used lots of Java on the backend.
YouTube’s primary value add for me is music remixes and covers that can’t legally make it to Spotify / Apple music / etc., but skirt around the DMCA takedowns. I try and use it as my primary driver for music but the recommendation engine is just terrible. I listen to days of classic rock and most of my recommendations are still centered around that one EDM song I listened to a week ago. Probably because the ratio of people playing EDM videos with sexy thumbnails to people “watching” classic rock lyric videos is very high. Oh well.
> their content quality is worse than ours ... if we pick them up it would be defensive vs yahoo
> I think we should talk to them, if nothing else to make it more expensive for Yahoo
Holy anti-competitive moly, how can these people talk like this while (supposedly) knowing the laws in the country they operate in? In clear text emails on top of that... Google supposedly has the smartest people working there, but doesn't seem like it's true for management.
I hope they get to pay for this, at least to prove that no companies are too big to get sanctioned for anti-competitive behavior. If they are not, I think we can all conclude that the government has lost all of its spine.
[+] [-] gnodar|4 years ago|reply
Where you are and who you know often outweighs having the best product, features, etc.
[+] [-] wilsynet|4 years ago|reply
As for location. Totally. It was likely critical.
Disclosure: I work at Google.
[+] [-] zeroxfe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bloodyplonker22|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majani|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lumost|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineedasername|4 years ago|reply
It sounds like they expected it to die on a backroom shelf somewhere if they made the purchase. This seems anti-competitive behavior even during what might otherwise be viewed as their "don't be evil" phase. They didn't see it as valuable for their own needs, they just didn't want it to grow into competition itself or via another competitor and so considered buying it to let it die.
[+] [-] wilsynet|4 years ago|reply
What you then see in the thread is someone else saying: yeah we’re going to catch up, we just need a couple of more devs.
And then the counterpoint that well, even if Google doesn’t end up doing it, at least it makes it harder for Yahoo.
The original motivation isn’t just to make it harder for Yahoo. It’s that Huber wants to bring these people on board because they are really good at innovating, and Google can help make it really successful. But there was some pushback, and then other reasons were presented to continue with the conversation.
At these companies (any company?), sometimes to get what you want you have to present a diverse set of reasons, even if only one of them is the principal reason why you want to do something.
Note: I work for Google.
[+] [-] jasode|4 years ago|reply
I think you're reading too much conspiracy motive into Larry's terse email.
Based on various interviews, Susan Wojcicki was head of Google Video at the time and she acknowledged they were losing against the upstart Youtube. She originally thought Google Video would succeed because Google was "playing nice" by negotiating legal licenses with broadcasters like NBC whereas Youtube was just a bunch of pirated content.
It was a big risk to acquire Youtube because the Viacom piracy lawsuit was looming. Google decided they could handle it and went ahead with the acquisition. They saw the value in Youtube and didn't have any intention of killing it.
[+] [-] simonh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] AlbertCory|4 years ago|reply
Memory: I was over there and someone was introducing me to a group of folks and said "he's from Google." I spread my hands around and said "we're ALL from Google."
She said, "No, this is YouTube."
[+] [-] BurningFrog|4 years ago|reply
By the time that was complete, the product had died.
For some reason, YouTube was allowed to keep their infrastructure.
[+] [-] sleavey|4 years ago|reply
Love this.
Another thing: Jeff Huber thought that having 2.5 Google engineers would be enough to outcompete YouTube at the time. Given that they eventually acquired YouTube for over $1B, was that essentially paying for their ~2 best engineers?
[+] [-] os7borne|4 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, this very attitude continues to be the bane of every large company. Thinking they can throw a body on the problem can make them invincible.
[+] [-] rasz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] habibur|4 years ago|reply
YouTube finally sold for $1b to google. And at that time everyone felt that was an unjustifiable price for a company that was burning millions per month on bandwidth and possibly will run out of cash any time.
[+] [-] blihp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muzani|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laurent92|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narrator|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9816787/Google-foun...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58128475.amp
[+] [-] sgpl|4 years ago|reply
Google and their services are indispensable for billions. Doesn't he deserve a personal life where he can do whatever he wants to do instead of being beholden to humanity and serve it with his brilliance forever?
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nova22033|4 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/sacca/status/1433947735640715271
Third, Google was often a place that ascribed little value to people who didn’t have the right degrees and right coding pedigree. For years, the company ignored @ev and the Blogger team. Hell, they still checked all of our SAT scores back then.
[+] [-] Macha|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axegon_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|4 years ago|reply
I enjoyed the one guy saying they just need one more front end guy to keep up, but they were estimating $10-15M to acquire the company. Must have been just to keep it away from Yahoo... or maybe they realized there's more to good products than throwing another developer at them.
The whole thing seems so casually uninsightful.
[+] [-] Craighead|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] arnaudsm|4 years ago|reply
16 years later, home video is still the core value of YouTube, yet they are still trying to push overproduced shows and TV while mistreating original creators.
It's literally killing the golden goose.
[+] [-] ninkendo|4 years ago|reply
I tried watching a few episodes of the ostensibly “higher quality” format of Mind Field, and it was demonstrably worse in most aspects. Bloated, way more filler, way more pointless behind the scenes stuff of the host interacting with the guests, and an overall much slower pace of interesting material. It felt a lot more like a cookie cutter Nat Geo show instead of the denser, faster paced material of Vsauce.
Overall I think that the smaller, self-produced (or minimally produced with small teams) format is the future and I’m glad to see that YouTube is failing to change that despite their efforts.
[+] [-] sorenjan|4 years ago|reply
Is it? I guess it depends on what you mean by home video. Is it "Me at the zoo"[0], or independent content creators like PewDiePie or Veratassium? Compared to Hollywood most if not all Youtube channels are completely different, but when I think of home video and early Youtube I think of personal family trips, not NileRed.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw
[+] [-] doopy1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdoms|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afarrell|4 years ago|reply
The word “literally” has no synonyms and if it dies it will leave a massive lexical gap.
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chubot|4 years ago|reply
Here is a list of YC startups, and you have to scroll down before you hit anything but Ruby/Python (and C++ for back ends, presumably Go too). But I'd say this is true of all web companies in general, not just YC companies. (You'd probably see more PHP in non-YC companies, and I'd argue it's still more appropriate than Java for this use case)
https://charliereese.ca/article/top-50-y-combinator-tech-sta...
Aside from the outliers that were GMail and Maps (acquisition), Google had a lot of trouble producing good UIs. Google+ was a good example of UI well below the state of the art at the time.
Notably YouTube was a huge Python codebase ... which Google was already using at the time, but not much for web front ends.
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|4 years ago|reply
I wasn't even at Google at the time but had management types trying to foist it on me at a company I worked at, and it was frankly a failure. I'm not sure if Google Video was done in GWT, but it certainly had the look of a GWT product.
When I came to Google in 2012 there were still some products using it but it was mostly recognized for being clunky and those products have been migrated.
[+] [-] nostrademons|4 years ago|reply
There continued (and continues) to be a large prejudice against Python for large-scale software projects at Google, even among people who were core members of the Python Software Foundation! I think this is a good example of peoples' mental models of the world ossifying and not understanding how economics have changed. Python continues to be 30x or more slower than C - but it doesn't matter. Computing has gotten so cheap that you just eat the cost, build your product anyways, and then figure out how to optimize after you sell to Google.
[+] [-] zorr|4 years ago|reply
If I remember correctly at the time they also used lots of Java on the backend.
[+] [-] tomdell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devops000|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jxl180|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skizm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] capableweb|4 years ago|reply
> and it would be nice for y! not to have them
> their content quality is worse than ours ... if we pick them up it would be defensive vs yahoo
> I think we should talk to them, if nothing else to make it more expensive for Yahoo
Holy anti-competitive moly, how can these people talk like this while (supposedly) knowing the laws in the country they operate in? In clear text emails on top of that... Google supposedly has the smartest people working there, but doesn't seem like it's true for management.
I hope they get to pay for this, at least to prove that no companies are too big to get sanctioned for anti-competitive behavior. If they are not, I think we can all conclude that the government has lost all of its spine.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Apocryphon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xtat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausudhz|4 years ago|reply