CC BY-SA 3.0 ↗
YouTube's First Office
- Year
- 2005
- Creator
- Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Jawed Karim
- Company
- YouTube
- Location
- Downtown San Mateo, California
- Room
- The Rebuild ↗
Description
This two-story brick building in downtown San Mateo held the YouTube office on its second floor until October 2006. The entrance was a small door between a pizza restaurant and a Japanese restaurant.
Importance
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who worked together at PayPal, started YouTube in 2005, three years after eBay bought PayPal. Sequoia Capital invested $3.5 million that November. In October 2006, Google agreed to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.
Interesting fact
In October 2006, approximately 60 employees worked in one room of the office, and the building had no YouTube sign.
Acquisition
Google · 2006 · $1,650,000,000
Sources
- File:Youtubeheadquarters.jpg (photographer's description of the San Mateo office) ↗Wikimedia Commons · 2006-10-02
- Google To Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock ↗Google · 2006-10-09
- Google to Buy YouTube in $1.65 Billion Deal ↗NPR · 2006-10-09
- YouTube ↗Acquired (podcast)
- Ready for Its Close-Up ↗The Washington Post (Sara Kehaulani Goo) · 2006-10-07
- Raw and Random ↗Forbes (Scott Woolley), Internet Archive copy · 2006-03-13
- YouTube turns 20! The numbers behind the platform ↗BBC Bitesize · 2025