Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Checking in at BuckGet.com - Make Money Social Networking! for the first time! http://4sq.com/136OB54

Saturday, June 8, 2013

The Real YouTube.com Story. How Eric Skaggs Gave Chad Hurley The Idea For YouTube.com

     I was finishing up another fun and exciting day of work in the Eberly College of Business computer lab at Indiana University of Pennsylvania at 8pm. I was the last person to leave the lab, as usual. As I closed the door behind me, I saw a guy coming in the side door of the building. There was nothing else open in the building but the computer lab and he looked like he was in a hurry to get there.
     I said to him"I guess you're here to use the computer lab. It closes at 8pm. It's exactly 8 now". He looked disappointed and tried to convince me to let him in. I think he thought I ran the computer lab.
    I said to him"The computer lab in the computer science building is open till 9 but you might not make it there on time because it's all the way on the other side of campus. I would use that lab but I live right across the street from this one. I come here all the time to work on my website". He suddenly got really interested.
     "You have a website?"he asked."What kind of website? I want to start a website but I can't think of a website to start. Can you give me a good idea for a website?"
     I said "My website is called GoGetItNow.com. It's an internet portal that combines the free search capabilities of Yahoo, the free web pages of Geocities and the free email of Hotmail into one interface. It gets 10 million page views a day, makes $5000 a month and it's doubling every couple of months."
     Now He was really excited. We introduced ourselves to each other. He told me his name was Chad and he was a graphic arts major on a track scholarship. We talked as we walked to the front doors of the building.
     Chad persisted "I have been learning html on my own in my spare time. If you could give me a great idea for a website, I am sure I could make it work".
     We walked out the doors of Eberly and toward a yellow Jeep. "Is that your Jeep?" I said.
     He said "Yes" in a way that kind of implied he didn't like it.
     "I love it" I said. "My step dad has one just like it but his is black. It might look better if it was black, but it is kinda cool and different. I am driving that little red 3 series BMW over there, but I would much rather drive an American car. That Beamer makes me feel like a pretentious yuppie...I miss my Camaro I traded for it. I love cars, but I can't get into Nascar. Isn't it strange how there is no formula one racing team in America? When you make billions from this idea I give you, you should start a formula one racing team in America."
     He said "That's a great idea. I will. (it is well documented that he did try to start a United States formula one race team)Now what's your idea?.
     I said "I will give it to you, but first, you have to promise me three things. When you are super rich, you have to let me hang out on your private island, ride around on your yacht, and you have to give me 1% of the company."
     He said impatiently "Okay."
     I repeated "You promise to give me 1% of the company?"
     He reiterated "Yes. I promise. Now what's the idea?"
     I said "Now pay attention. This is the most important idea anyone will ever give you. Just do what I say and you will be successful."
     Chad eagerly said "I will".
     I said "Okay. In the future, television and internet will become one. People will start using their cell phones like camcorders and making videos".
     Chad looked confused, and for good reason. At that time, they were just coming out with camera phones and there was a rumor of a cell phone that could take 5 second video clips of poor quality, but not many people knew about it except for those that kept up with such things like myself. And television and internet were considered two very different things back then. Despite his skepticism, I convinced him it would happen and continued.
     "When they take these videos, they are going to want to share them with friends, family and the world. They will need a website to do that. It will be called something whimsical like Yahoo. What's a funny thing to call a tv? I got it. BoobTube.com." We laughed for a while and talked about how it had the word "Boob" in it and sounded like an adult website.
     I said "Take the word "Boob" out and put in another word. The website is about people sharing videos...put a pronoun in there...conjugate the verb...I, you, he, she, it, we, you, they, and I said "You" twice. YouTube.com. That sounds good."
     We said "YouTube.com" back and forth to each other a couple of times and agreed that it sounded great.
     It is well documented that Chad said he used boobtube, a way to refer to television, that later became YouTube.com. I gave Chad the name YouTube.com and used boobtube as a guide.
     Chad anxiously awaited the rest of my idea. He was hanging on my every word.
     I said "No offense, but you are on an athletic scholarship studying graphic arts at a low level state school, so the first thing you have to do is get a job in the .com industry. Do you have a portfolio of graphic designs you can send to .com companies to show them that you can design logos and graphics for them?"
     He said "Yes. I can put a portfolio together".
     I said "Find out which .com companies look like they are growing fast and send them your portfolio".

It is well documented that Chad Hurley applied to and got a job at PayPal.com where he designed the logo.
     I said "When you get the job, you will need two things. You will need to find really smart Asian and Indian guys from top level technology oriented universities with advanced degrees in computer science for credibility and to program the website."
     Chad got Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, the Asian and Indian guys to help him with the website.
I said "And secondly, you will need to beg borrow and steal money to get the website going and keep it going. Finding the most bandwidth for the least amount of money will be a top priority too because all those videos will use a lot of bandwidth."
     Chad got a lot of cheap bandwidth from a company in the area.
     I continued "Some videos will get shared with others and they will share them and so on. There will be exponential growth(we didn't call it viral back then because of the negative implications). Everybody will get their 15 minutes of fame and some people will become stars."
     YouTube.com did get big fast and grew exponentially as I predicted. We really started seeing how big something like this would be.
     I said "It will be like everybody has their own channel on tv on the internet."
     YouTube.com allows users to create their own "channels" as I stated to Chad. We marveled at the possibilities for awhile, and then got back to reality.
     I said "It will take so much money to do something like this. You will be able to make a little bit of money selling ads around the videos and in the videos like commercials, but you won't make real money until you sell YouTube to a company with more money than brains like Yahoo(Google didn't exist yet), and if GoGetItNow is big enough by then, I will buy YouTube."
     Chad Hurley did sell YouTube to "A company with more money than brains". That company was called Google.com and he sold YouTube.com to Google.com for approximately $1.65 billion.
     I said "It's going to take so much money, you will need to constantly go around to venture capitalists, angel investors, banks, and anyone you can get to listen to you to raise money, but make sure you never give up controlling interest in YouTube. Give up percentages of the company for money, but never so much that you lose control of the company.
     Chad was able to retain 20% of the company, which was controlling interest. Steve Chen kept 19% and Jawed Karim got a small percentage since he left the company before it was sold. Chad was able to get approximately $330 million for the YouTube.com idea I gave him.
     I continued "When you ask for money for YouTube, you are going to have to tell them it's your idea or you won't have any credibility. They aren't going to give you any money if you tell them I gave you the idea. Make up a story about how you and some friends were at a party taking videos and you wanted to share them with each other and couldn't so you created a website to share videos with each other called YouTube."
     The official story of how YouTube got started is that Chad, Steve and Jawed were at a party taking videos with their phones and couldn't share them with each other so they created YouTube.com. That is the exact story I told Chad to use. It has since been discounted as untrue by Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. The actual story of how YouTube.com started is I gave Chad Hurley the entire idea from domain name to exit strategy. It is this story.
     We started talking about ways to raise money, and I had another brainstorm. I said "You know what you will have to do? You will have to marry a rich girl. Make a list of the richest women in the area, start at the top and follow her around. Do whatever you have to do to get her pregnant and marry her."
     That was such a shocking statement, we had to stop and think about it for a while. It really is the best way to get rich. Get a rich girl pregnant and she will have to marry you.
     Despite it sounding like a joke, we agreed he would have to do it, and it seems like he did. He crashed a birthday party for someone he didn't know where a woman named Kathy Clark was. They are married with two children. Kathy Clark is the heiress to the Silicon Graphics fortune and her father was on the Forbes list of the riches people. He is also a venture capitalist and I don't think YouTube.com would've made it through the lean years without the help of Kathy Clark and her billionaire venture capitalist father.
     By now, it was 9pm and all the computer labs were closed on campus. Chad needed to find a list of .com companies to send his portfolio to and a list of rich women to marry, so I said "The only thing that is still open where you can get that kind of information is the Giant Eagle grocery store magazine rack. Go to Giant Eagle and get the Forbes list of the richest people magazine to find a rich girl to marry and one of those Wired magazines with a list of the fastest growing .com's to get a job at".
     It is well documented that Chad Hurley found PayPal.com, his first job after college with a .com company, from a Wired magazine.
     After the excitement of our conversation, I asked him where he hangs out in Indiana.  He said he doesn't really go out much. They have parties in the cross country house. I asked him when he is graduating from IUP and he said he was graduating this semester and was just back to pick up the last of his things. He didn't want to hang out with me. He wanted to go to Giant Eagle and get started on YouTube. I reiterated the promise he made to give me 1%, he agreed he would fulfill his promise, and we parted ways.
      I never thought much about Chad, the YouTube.com idea I gave him and the 1% he promised me after that. I just worked really hard on GoGetItNow until two things happened that ended my dream. First, as I was trying to take GoGetItNow public, the .com bubble burst. Smith Barney called me a week before the  meeting with them to go public and said they had to reevaluate .com's and basically, they weren't interested anymore.
     Then, my website went down. I called my server administrator, Chris, at Cyberwurx, and he said it was on Network Solution's end. I called Network Solutions and after getting bounced around from one person to another, someone said "rogue call center workers" at their India office were cancelling domain names that were popular and renewing them privately. The company that took GoGetItNow is still in existence. It is called ITSSN.com. There was a class action lawsuit, but I don't believe it went anywhere because I don't think anyone knew who stole all the domain names and they couldn't be extradited.
     I let my dream die and went back to college using grants and loans from FAFSA. I went on to become a stock broker for Merrill Lynch, got laid off, and became a Social Worker and got laid off. I reentered the .com world recently after sharing some of my ideas with friends who encouraged me, but had no credibility, so venture capitalists wouldn't help me.
     I was talking to some folks at Alphalab, an internet incubator on the South Side of Pittsburgh about how I gave Chad Hurley the idea for YouTube.com and how Chad sold it about 10 years after I gave him the idea for $1.65 billion. They suggested I get in touch with Chad. I was a little confused as to why I hadn't tried to contact Chad before. He knows I have good ideas and promised me what amounts to about $16.5 million. Why was I trying to get backing for my new ideas from people that didn't know how good my ideas are and don't owe me $16.5 million?
     For the first time in 10 years, I tried to contact Chad. I connected with him on Twitter and I was blocked. I tried to friend him on Facebook. I was blocked again. I found his phone number and talked to his housekeeper, I think her name was Anne, for about a half an hour. She was very nice and said Chad would definitely want to talk to me about my new ideas. I emailed Chad at all his email addresses. I applied for jobs at Google, YouTube, Avos, Delicious and all the companies Chad was involved with. I never got a response.
     I emailed Roelof Botha, one of the first venture capitalists to back YouTube.com. I don't think he believed me when I emailed the story of my involvement with YouTube. He thanked me for the "color" in the email I sent him. I don't think he believed me or wanted to believe me.     
     Chad never contacted me in any way. I searched the internet to see if there was any mention of me and YouTube. I found an old newspaper clipping that said YouTube was a play on words from BoobTube. That's how I came up with the name. I found the story I told Chad to tell people about how he and some friends were taking videos at a party and couldn't share them with each other so he created a website with Steve Chen and Jawed Karim called YouTube. There was no mention of me and why would there be? I told Chad he would have to lie and he did.
     My searching led me to a guy named Herb that said he invented YouTube and we messaged each other for a while on YouTube. I found out Herb had an attorney in Pittsburgh. The attorney met with me and said he couldn't represent me because they already represented Herb. I said "Why would you represent somebody who lied and not me when I am telling the truth?" He indicated it was simply a conflict of interests, but I should continue to try to reach Chad. I was never able to reach him.
      It was suggested that I document my story or even write a book by some filmmakers so that is what I am doing.
     The rest of this book is about what Chad did after our conversation outside the Eberly College of Business computer lab at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
     My hope is that Chad will fulfill his promise and give me the 1% or approximately $16.5 million he promised me. If he does fulfill his promise, we can work together on the other projects I have ideas for and I may even take the real story, this story, off the internet to protect Chad's reputation. If Chad doesn't want to work with me, maybe this would make a nice documentary in the style of "Social Network" and maybe I will get what was promised to me anyways.



     Everyone has ideas...cheese in pizza crust, Doritos tacos...but have you ever come up with a world changing billion dollar idea, got a promise of 1% and not had it fulfilled? I did.
     It's funny how sometimes life comes down to one defining moment...an epiphany...divine intervention. Do you make a left or a right? One path leads to success beyond your wildest dreams. The other leads to disaster. It's time for the truth to be told.
     My defining moment...the one that makes me who I am today...was a two hour conversation I had with a guy named Chad Hurley, the co-founder of YouTube.com in the late 90's at Eberly College of Business outside the computer lab.
     I got out of the military a few years before and had gone back to college at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. I was supposed to be taking classes, but I found out that I was not eligible for the G.I. Bill I was promised. Sergeant Vincent, our First Sergeant, lied to my face and told me I would get it to get me out of the military. So I moved in to an off campus dormitory called Mcgregor hall until I could figure out how to get the G. I. Bill I was promised. It was the least expensive living arrangements I could find and for good reason. It was little more than a cockroach and rat infested hellhole. The only good thing about it was that it was directly across the street from the newly erected Eberly College of Business. The computer lab in Eberly had the best facilities on campus.
     There was a lot of talk about people starting websites out of their dorm rooms and garages and getting rich and until I could figure out how to pay for college, I would go over to the computer lab and work on being a .com billionaire. The only problem was I knew nothing about computers.
     My first computer was a Packard Bell I got for Christmas ten years earlier when I was about 14 years old. I hooked up my Prodigy internet to the phone line in our house and stayed online for the whole month. We got a $500 phone bill that month, and my mom put the computer in a closet and locked it. We didn't know that the 30 days of free internet service didn't include the dial up phone service calling a long distance number.
     So ten years later when I was about 24, I asked my uncle who worked at IBM if he could get me a cheap computer. He got me an employee discount on a top of the line IBM desktop computer. It was awesome. It was jet black and the floppy disk drives popped up from under the monitor when you pressed down on them. Unfortunately, I was too poor and cheap to get internet access, so I would go over to Eberly's computer lab every day and learn how to be a .com billionaire.
     Right around that time in the mid 90's, my mom was making a lot of money with .com stocks and tried to convince me to invest in some .com companies, but I noticed the .com companies weren't and never planned to make any money. People were just throwing money at .com companies. I wanted to have money thrown at me like that. I didn't want to just invest in stocks.
     There was a steep learning curve for someone who hadn't used a computer in 10 years. It took me a long time to figure out how to register a domain name. Back then, you had to go to Network Solutions and pay $45 a year for a domain name. That seemed really expensive to me, so I got free websites at Geocities and Angelfire.
     I noticed a major problem with the internet. Every time I tried to search the internet on Yahoo, check my email on Hotmail and work on my free web pages at Geocities and Angelfire, I had to open four windows and the computer would freeze up, so I made a website that was a combination of the search capabilities of Yahoo, the free email of Hotmail, and the free web pages of Geocities.
     It got fairly popular, so I decided to register a domain name. I called it GoGetItNow.com. The search box was from a company called Search Traffic. They paid me 5 cents a search. The email was from a company called Big Mailbox and the free web pages were from a company called Free Community. They split the banner ads on the top of the web pages with me 50/50 and let me configure the accounts so that your email and web pages were the same username like gogetitnow.com/username and username@gogetitnow.com.
     GoGetItNow.com was a pretty revolutionary concept and, as far as I knew, there was nothing else like it at the time. It caught on quickly and after a few years, I was getting as many as 10 million page views a day making as much as $5000 a month and it was doubling every couple of months. It was right around that time that I met Chad Hurley about 5 years before he became the co-founder of YouTube.com.



     When Chad Hurley and Eric Skaggs parted ways that one fateful day in the late 90's outside Eberly College of Business at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Chad knew he was on a mission of epic proportions...but it would have to start now.
     Chad went to the track house and packed the rest of his things into his Jeep and headed to the Giant Eagle magazine rack. He got the Forbes magazine with the list of the richest people in it and a business magazine with the top internet companies in it. He headed home to a little suburb outside Reading, PA and made two lists...a list of the richest single women and a list of the top internet companies. He got his portfolio and resume together and sent them to all the top internet companies, and put the list of the richest single women away for later.
     Nobody was responding to his portfolio until, one day, a company called PayPal called him for an interview. They wanted him to design them a logo. He got started right away. He sent them his logo and PayPal loved it. They offered him a job and he took it. It wasn't Chad's first choice on his list of places to work, but it was the only offer he got.
     Chad loaded up his Jeep and headed to Silicon Valley. Chad met Steve Chen and Jawed Karim at PayPal. They put Chad's logo up on Paypal.
     Later, they would work together on Chad's YouTube idea. The first part of the plan Eric Skaggs gave Chad Hurley was working perfectly.
     Chad went to a birthday party and met Kathy Clark. She was the daughter of Jim Clark, one of the richest men in the world and the CEO of Silicon Graphic. He married her and had two children. Please help me with the research by leaving comments, questions and suggestions and please subscribe and check out some of my websites. Thank you, Eric Skaggs, EricSkaggs.com , TheYouTubeGuy.com , IInventedYouTube.com , 3DYouTube.com , BuckGet.com
    
    

    

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

I'm still the mayor of BuckGet.com - Make Money For Searching The Internet! on @foursquare! http://4sq.com/12O3Ewp

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Secret Finally Revealed! How YouTube REALLY got started!

How I gave Chad Hurley the idea for YouTube.com http://ericskaggs.blogspot.com/2012/10/how-i-gave-chad-hurley-idea-for.html

Monday, January 7, 2013

How We Met

     I was sitting in my regular spot at Tom's Diner on the South Side of Pittsburgh writing in my journal and drinking coffee when a very handsome man walked in and sat at the counter next to me. When the waitresses saw him, they yelled in unison"Debbie Downer!" One of the waitresses went over to him and asked him if he had found a girlfriend yet. I felt my heart skip a beat in anticipation of the answer. He sadly said "Not yet". I hoped he would talk to me. After he ordered his breakfast, he watched tv for awhile, but I could sense he was building up the courage to say something to me. Finally, he said "What are you writing?" I said "Just some random thoughts and ideas". He seemed very interested and asked if I was a writer. I said "Not really, but I like to write". He asked me if he could read something I had written. I never let people read the things I write, but I trusted him for some reason. I handed him my journal and asked him to read what I had just written only. He read it half out loud and with wide eyed excitement and when he finished, he said "I think you are really talented and you should do something with this". We talked for about a half an hour while he finished his breakfast and we exchanged names and phone numbers before he left. His name was Eric. The next day, I got a call from the handsome stranger, but I was afraid to answer. Then he followed it up with a text that said"Do you want to come over and swim in my pool?" It was a good suggestion since it was a very hot summer day, but I didn't feel comfortable wearing a bathing suit in front of the handsome stranger, so I didn't respond.
     I never heard from or saw him again...for about a year.  And  then one day I was playing basketball and stopped into a local pool hall to visit some friends. The handsome stranger came in with an extremely tall friend of his. He came over to me and asked if we could play basketball. I said sure. I handed him my basketball and we went to the park. He was not very good at basketball but his tall friend was. We played horse and pig for awhile and we once again introduced ourselves to eachother. I looked much different than I had when we first met and he didn't recognize me. We exchanged names and phone numbers again and that very night, I lost my phone and had to get another phone number, but this time, he looked me up on facebook and sent me a message with his phone number. I called him and talked briefly about how I lost my phone, but we didn't connect the way we had the first time we met and I was a little bothered that he didn't remember me from before.
     I never heard from or saw him again...for about a year. And then I started noticing he and his tall friend had a pattern. They would go to the spelling bee at Lava Lounge on Monday nights and rock 'n' roll bingo at Tiki Lounge on Tuesday nights, so I would go to those places in the hopes that he would talk to me again. He would say hi occasionally and sometimes he would say he thought he recognized me, but I was too shy to say much back, and he would invariably move on to talk to his other friends. One time, we had a chance to have a bit of a longer conversation, and I mentioned that we had met years earlier without going into detail. He asked if I wanted to go to his house to watch movies and have a steak. I don't care for movies or steak, but I really liked him, so I said sure. We watched some movies and had a really nice steak dinner in his little studio apartment on the river and then I said thank you and told him I would catch the bus home. I was about 10 miles from my house, but I felt like walking, so I did. Eventually, he stopped going to the spelling bee and tiki lounge.
     I never heard from or saw him again...for about a year. And then, one day, I thought of him and our nice dinner and a movie night, and I drove to his house at 5 in the morning. I couldn't remember his apartment number, so I was afraid to ring the doorbell. Since I lost another phone, I wasn't sure how to get in touch with him. Then I remembered the facebook message he sent me with his phone number in it. I went to a local copy store that had computer time for rent that opened at 7am and looked for the message from years earlier and found it. I called him at 8am and built up the courage to leave him a message. He called me back at 11am on his first break from work. He was really excited to hear from me and wanted to come to my house after work. I gave him my address. He came over at 5:30pm. He was wearing a nice suit jacket and looked even better than I had remembered. We laughed and talked for hours on my porch and reminisced about all the times we had met. We decided this time we wouldn't lose touch. He came over after work every day after that. I started having trouble with my roommate and he suggested I come stay with him. I went to his house and after awhile, we developed a very strong close bond. We decided very quickly to be boyfriend and girlfriend and we started making plans for me to move out of my house and in with him officially. He encouraged me to start writing again and I encouraged him to pursue his dreams with his internet business. We have been together now for about 6 months and I have never been happier. One day, Eric asked me if I could remember how we met. He loved the story of missed connections so much he asked me to write it down for him. He wanted more people to read it, so he started me a website and a blog and this is the story of how we met.