Washington, July 07: It must surely rank as the most mundane business launch in history.
Jawed Karim, one of the founders of YouTube, shuffles timidly in front of a video camera while standing in front of a group of elephants at San Diego zoo, with precious little idea of what he was starting.
“The cool thing about these guys,” he says, nervously gesturing behind him, “is that they have really long trunks. And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”
This 19-second video clip, uploaded to the brand-new website later later that day, 23 April 2005, may have been insubstantial, but it certainly wasn’t inconsequential. Within 18 months, Karim and his partners Steve Chen and Chad Hurley had sold YouTube to Google for $1.76bn, and in doing so became one of a select band of online entrepreneurs who managed to grab our attention – and keep it.
Innumerable jaded web entrepreneurs will tell you how easy it is to get thousands of people to glance at a site, but how tortuous it is to get people to stick around or even come back again the following day. Not only do you have to fulfil a desire that people didn’t even realise that they had, but it has to be done with such style and panache that your service becomes indispensable. While the internet may have dismantled many of the traditional barriers to reaching us, the general public, if your idea is anything less than sensational, we will flatly ignore it.
–Agencies