YouTube : The World’s 2nd Biggest Search Engine

Way back in 2005, three PayPal ex-employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim founded the video sharing behemoth they called YouTube.
You may take for granted that YouTube was later bought by Google, is said to be the world’s 2nd biggest search engine (behind its parent company), and in 2013 reached a remarkable milestone of 1b unique users/month.
You probably can’t easily imagine early 2005 when YouTube had one solitary video uploaded to its platform; the aptly titled Me At The Zoo starring Karim simply hanging out at San Diego Zoo.
Early on in 2005, the YouTube team were headquartered above a pizza shop but this fledgling startup didn’t stay that way for long.
In November that same year, venture firm Sequoia Capital saw the potential and invested $3.5m and then based on impressive early adoption by their audience added in a further $8m less than 6 months later. Then in late 2006, Google purchased the company for a mere $1.65 billion in stock. Chump change really; given that Google is said to be in a race with Apple to become the first business valued at the $1 trillion mark.