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they wow they're one of the most important security companies
YouTube became a leader in the video space
shame on us in some level we didn't quite understand how interesting the company was but we kept on thinking about the company we kept on meeting with them and then we made a growth investment in the company
I mean this is talk about a crucible moment early in the life of our investment in YouTube literally I mean there were three founders in Chad's garage they moved into the Sequoia office right after the investment because they didn't have their first office and we faced a crucible decision early on what we
YouTube became a leader in the video space it's you know Google is the leader in the search space
I mean this is talk about a crucible moment early in the life of our investment in YouTube literally I mean there were three founders in Chad's garage they moved into the Sequoia office right after the investment because they didn't have their first office and we faced a crucible decision early on what we and so we just made a very early very clear decision we needed to make sure that that kind of content didn't make it
MongoDB is a leader in the database space
uh YouTube it looked like gosh with the legal issues they had and some of the scaling issues that that business was at risk because of storage and and a lot of things
when you look across YouTube which you were uh you found that as an investment you were the first investor there
I was really impressed with the founders candidly uh the way in which they built this company the way in which they bootstrapped and became profitable with with no paid in capital they had a real sense of solving the problem for their customers and figuring out a way how to ring the cash register right from the get-go
We have investments in Instacart and Door Dash.
I mean I'm I love the service as a user. I think that's a big miss for us.
Uber is is a a great great business. I I think in terms of one of the leading businesses in the on demand economy, which is a big theme for us. ... Uber is just a spectacular business.
Google's worth more than 10 times what it was worth at its IPO. So, when you think about it, 90% of Google's value today came post IPO.
I think Eric Schmidt was very deliberate apparently inside Google of telling people, listen, you know, I know there 50 of you that all want to rush and go and hell, but just think about it. There are only 55 of them, so you know, if we all descend on San Bruno, we're just going to smother you the YouTube culture and creativity and 1.6 6 billion or something like that.
Google to its credit I think made an incredible offer and Google deserves a lot of the credit for the success of the company since the acquisition because they did a lot right to provide infrastructure, support, and capital for YouTube to grow and to scale without smothering the company.
the initial investment in YouTube, these were all series A investments
What would the company be worth today independently in your mind in this market? It's hard to know because we don't have visibility into the company's financials. So, you know, I speak to people and sometimes I hear about the scale of the business and there's billions in revenue, but it's unclear exactly how much how much of that is profit at this point. The company obviously has to pay uh royalties or or share revenue with some of the people who provide content. And obviously serving that many
I think Eric Schmidt was very deliberate apparently inside Google of telling people, listen, you know, I know there 50 of you that all want to rush and go and hell, but just think about it. There are only 55 of them, so you know, if we all descend on San Bruno, we're just going to smother you the YouTube culture and creativity and 1.6 6 billion or something like that.
Google deserves a lot of the credit for the success of the company since the acquisition because they did a lot right to provide infrastructure, support, and capital for YouTube to grow and to scale without smothering the company.
the decision to sell we had a very very hard meeting ... before the Viacom suit and it's pretty hard dealing
YouTube had 9,000 registered users. ... the rate of growth was just stunning.
It was a wild wild ride. To be involved with a company that grew as quickly as YouTube did was a true rare experience.
I mean Google is behind this Microsoft's catching up to it Salesforce is behind that a lot of our companies are exactly on that Trend
it turns out that the average consumer is still using at you know beyond the browser at least one or two other applications and those one or two applications for me are different than they are for Jason and different than they are from you and that heterogeneity has made it very hard to displace Microsoft as the default OS for netbooks
there's sort of an interesting anecdote from there this fantastic growth in netbooks ... initially I think more than half of the netbook shipments were Linux based operating systems and over time what happened was that has become 95% Microsoft OS
people were thinking that these were going to displace Microsoft and this was a fabulous Boon to Linux based operating systems ... over time what happened was that has become 95% Microsoft OS
the hosted exchange business has been a very good and fast growth business but not a very high margin business
Microsoft hasn't completely clarified its licensing arrangements for virtual desktop instances and it's unclear how they charge in a virtual machine basis or a CPU basis and what happens as you point out the machines are idle a lot of the time and at least the economics that I've seen so far suggest that it can be it might be a very low margin business on the Enterprise side because of the licensing rules
yeah eBay was completely closed and sort of PayPal was one of the first companies to have the sort of embed strategy where PayPal buttons were on eBay but they they were essentially closed you know they they tried to not have us be on eBay and yet we managed to get in there and delivered an interesting service did they ever ban pay did eBay ever ban PayPal or or threaten to was that threatened to they threatened to basically and and I mean they probably could have uh I mean it would have been il
eBay was completely closed and sort of PayPal was one of the first companies to have the sort of embed strategy where PayPal buttons were on eBay but they they were essentially closed you know they they tried to not have us be on eBay and yet we managed to get in there and delivered an interesting service
at PayPal we we had to raise a lot of money and you know at the end of the day the founders and the people in the building I think maybe earned 15 or between 15 and 20% by the time we went public um you know that was unfortunate that's not a great outcome
one of the things that Mark did at uh zingo even uh slide did and rocku one of se's Investments did um was to have a portfolio of applications because they too ran into some of these issues that some of the initial very popular apps around top friends or sort of twists on poking you know food fight and things like that would um have viral Loops but they would quickly be shut down by Facebook so um if you could use the the base that you have from this first application try to build a few more so
the benefit is if Facebook didn't exist you wouldn't have had the opportunity and you can't ride their phenomenal wave so there's a good part there and I don't think it I don't think you completely should abandon the opportunity to build a business on a platform like Facebook or or iPhone even if they are closed or semi closed