Portal:Internet/Selected biography/19

Chad Meredith Hurley (born 1977) is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of the popular San Bruno, California-based video sharing website YouTube, one of the biggest providers of videos on the Internet. In June 2006, he was voted 28th on Business 2.0's "50 people who matter" list. In October 2006 he sold YouTube for $1.65 billion to Google. Hurley worked in eBay's PayPal division before starting YouTube with fellow PayPal colleagues Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. One of his tasks at eBay involved designing the original PayPal logo. Newsweek describes Hurley as a user interface expert. He was primarily responsible for the tagging and video sharing aspects of YouTube. YouTube was born when the founders (Hurley, Chen, and Karim) wanted to share some videos from a dinner party with friends in San Francisco in January 2005. Sending the clips around by e-mail was a bust: The e-mails kept getting rejected because they were so big. Posting the videos online was a headache, too. So they got to work to design something simpler. In 11 months the site became one of the most popular sites on the Internet because the founders designed it so people can post almost anything they like on YouTube in minutes.