The YouTube Gurus


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Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and hundreds of the videos that helped turn YouTube into a sensation.

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Turning YouTube from a sensational rumpus to a profitable corporation will require Chad and Steve to thread the company through legal disputes, hire at least 100% more employees than they have now, negotiate with the biggest ad and media companies in the world, maintain their unique identity without getting swallowed up by Google, please shareholders, manage p.r. and flawlessly execute a thousand other tasks that far more experienced executives have flubbed. All while Chad has to make time for his wife and two small children, Steve needs to buy a car to replace his crappy Jeep Wrangler, and the broadband in the YouTube office is so slow, it takes forever to watch their own site. Can a couple of kids who grew up nowhere near Silicon Valley handle all this?


Raised in the southeastern Pennsylvania town of Birdsboro, Chad is the middle child of Donald, a financial consultant, and JoAnn, a schoolteacher. He was an arty kid, always watercoloring and sculpting, which is not to say he ran with the artsy crowd. There is nothing affected or capering about Chad--his temperature runs so low he comes off at first as a dullard--and it's easy to imagine him as a slightly introverted, earnest boy trying to sell artwork (not lemonade) from his front lawn, as he did in an unsuccessful venture that taught him the difference between art and commerce.


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