You can learn all sorts of interesting tidbits from legal documents. For instance, in one of the legal briefs unsealed today in the YouTube-Viacom dispute, such as the amount of money YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley made from the $1.65 billion sale of the company to Google in 2006. His take: $334 million (based on the November, 13, 2006 closing price of Google’s stock). In other words, the young CEO owned about 20 percent of YouTube at the time of the sale.
YouTube’s other co-founder Steve Chen’s stake was worth $301 million at the time of the sale, and the third co-founder Jawed Karim walked away with $66 million. Even YouTube interface designer Christina Brodbeck “received Google shares worth $9.09 million.”
The VCs did even better. Sequoia Capital, YouTube’s venture backer, turned a $9 million investment into $516 million (or about 31 percent of the total). And Artis Capital turned a $3 million investment into $85 million.
Another notable stat from the legal docs: in the past five years, more than 500 million videos have been uploaded to YouTube overall.
Chad Meredith Hurley is one of the co-founders of YouTube. In October 2006 he, along with the other founders, sold the company for $1.65 billion to Google. Prior to YouTube he worked in eBay’s PayPal division, where he helped design the original PayPal logo.
Steve Chen is an internet entrepreneur and the co-founder and previous Chief Technology Officer of YouTube. Born in August 1978 in Taiwan. Raised in Taiwan, Chen and his family immigrated to the United States when he was 15. After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Chen worked at PayPal, where he met Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. In 2005, the three founded YouTube, a website designed to simplify video sharing online. Chen was named one of the “The 50...
Jawed Karim is a co-founder of the popular video sharing website YouTube. He founded the concept and website with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, whom he had met while working at PayPal. Karim had been attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but left campus after co-founder of PayPal and Illinois alum Max Levchin approached him to become one of PayPal’s early employees. While at PayPal, he implemented the company’s first real-time anti-fraud system. Karim returned to school and...
Sequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972. The Wall Street Journal has called Sequoia Capital “one of the highest-caliber venture firms” and noted that it is “one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture-capital firms”. It invests between $100,000 and $1 million in seed stage, between $1 million and $10 million in early stage, and between $10 million and $100 million in growth stage. The firm has offices in the U.S., China, India and...
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