The ironic entrepreneurs
You could not imagine Sergey Brin and Larry Page doing this.
Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the 20-somethings behind YouTube, are caught on video the day they agree to sell their company to Google for $1.65bn. The hand-held camera sways as they spout corporate-speak about how they are still going to “develop the most innovative service” for their users, then collapse into giggles over a joking allusion to the catch-line from a Burger King advertisement.
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It could hardly be more different from the high-minded rhetoric of Google’s founders. The talk at the time of Google’s initial public offering two years ago was of “making the world a better place” and “don’t be evil”. In the new world of Web 2.0, it seems, some of the old dotcom ways may be making a comeback. -Having sold their loss-making company after less than two years, Mr Hurley and Mr Chen cannot resist the pleasure of acting up on camera.
The video that they released this week was partly tongue-in-cheek, a nod to the amateur production values and juvenile sense of humour of YouTube’s many part-time auteurs. In the ironic, self-referential universe inhabited by the YouTube generation, you cannot create a new media colossus and sell it for a king’s ransom without poking fun at the whole process. Yet Mr Hurley and Mr Chen also exhibit many of the characteristics typical of the new wave of entrepreneurs rising to the top in the latest internet boom. They have anticipated and benefited from some of the profound shifts in behaviour that the internet is bringing about, yet they do not make the sort of provocative or visionary claims that characterised the first generation of dotcom successes. The mix of pragmatism and opportunism they showed in building
