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the thing that motivates us to work eighty, ninety hours a week without
problems,” Steve said.
Fortunately, they didn’t have to work that hard for long. The team
found some wealthy investors who liked the idea so much that they chose
to fund it early on. Startups that receive funding from investors are re-
ferred to as angel-funded because of the help they receive from people
who are already wealthy.
YouTube did its best to keep its budget small despite the outside help it
was getting. Like many famous technology startups, it began in a garage
to reduce costs. A public preview of the website was made available in
May 2005, pulling in an average of 30,000 visitors to the website per
day.
A lot of people began to take notice of YouTube, with Sequoia Capital
being one of the first companies to invest money into the project. An initial
$3.5 million was invested into YouTube by Sequoia Capital in November
of that year, when the website had about 200,000 total registered users.
PayPal’s chief financial advisor joined YouTube’s board of directors at the
end of 2005 as well. It was clear by that point that YouTube was getting
the attention it deserved. Sequoia Capital eventually invested another $8
million in YouTube. It needed the extra money because of the rising costs
of running the website as it became more and more popular.
SHAPED BY THE WORLD
The initial vision for YouTube was very different from what it eventually
became. “We thought it was going to be more of a closer circle friend-
ship,” Steve said. His team envisioned that people would use YouTube
to share videos with friends and family on a smaller scale, with only a
handful of people being able to see any one video. “We had no idea it
was going to be as big as it was,” he admitted.
One of the other ways the cofounders hoped people would use You-
Tube was alongside PayPal. Videos could be embedded into auction
sites like EBay and used as a form of advertising for items being sold.