None other than YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley dropped by the company’s blog yesterday to remind us that he and his two co-conspirators registered the domain YouTube.com exactly five years ago. It wasn’t until two months later that the first video actually appeared on YouTube, but Hurley used the domain birthday to remind us of the basic beliefs that drove the founding of the site.
Of course, the exact details of YouTube’s beginnings have been disputed. Hurley and co-founder Steve Chen originally claimed they came up with the idea for the video sharing site during a dinner party due to their frustration over the lack of options to share videos online. However, the third co-founder Jawed Karim, who left the company early on, has long disputed the story, and Hurley eventually told Time Magazine that the dinner party founding myth was “strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story.” Turns out, this hasn’t been the only case of selective memory.
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