YouTube’s 2 Success “Secrets”

Meant to blog this earlier when I came across it, but a guy named Matt — a student at Stanford studying design and business — wrote a post the other day about a couple of special visitors who came to his class: Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the co-founders of YouTube.

Matt says that he had the good fortune to go out to lunch with the two new multimillionaires, and asked them what the keys to the company’s success were.  

The answer is fairly succinct, and not exactly a secret either, but still worth repeating: the first key to success was the ability to embed video, and the second was an infrastructure that allowed the site to scale quickly and easily. Sounds simple, but the first was unique when YouTube offered it — and I would argue it was also by far the most important of the two factors — and the second is a lot harder than it sounds.

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