Chad Meredith Hurley (born 1977) is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of the popular San Bruno, California-based video sharing website YouTube, one of the biggest providers of videos on the Internet. In June 2006, he was voted 28th on Business 2.0's "50 people who matter" list. In October 2006 he sold YouTube for $1.65 billion to Google.

According to an October 10 2006 Wall Street Journal article, he worked in eBay's PayPal division -- one of his tasks involved designing the original PayPal logo -- before starting YouTube with fellow PayPal colleagues Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.

According to a March 1, 2006 online Newsweek column, Hurley is a user interface expert and was primarily responsible for the tagging and video sharing aspects of the site.

Chad Hurley grew up near Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, with an older sister (Heather) and a younger brother (Brent). His parents are Donald Hurley, a financial consultant, and JoAnn, a school teacher. Since childhood, he showed interest in the arts.

He graduated from Twin Valley High School, Elverson in 1995, where his mother still teaches the Gifted program and Math. He then went on to receive his B.A. in Fine Art from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He was a stand-out runner for Twin Valley High School's vaunted Cross Country program, which won two of its numerous PIAA State titles with him as a member in 1992 and 1994. He was also member of the Technology Student Association during high school.

When he was about to graduate, Hurley heard of then-new company PayPal that, at the time dedicated to enable PDA users to send money among themselves. Hurley sent his resume and received a job interview. After flying to California, he was asked to design a logo to show his skills. The result is the current logo of PayPal that now dedicates to securing all kinds of online transactions.

Also, it was during his days at PayPal that he met Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, two PayPal engineers with whom he talked about several ideas for businesses. In 2002, when eBay bought PayPal for $1.54 billion, Hurley received a bonus which he used to finance their future venture. Another link that helped their future venture was their connection to Roelof Botha, the South African former PayPal CFO.

YouTube was born when the founders (Hurley, Chen, and Karim) wanted to share some videos from a dinner party with friends in San Francisco in January 2005. Sending the clips around by e-mail was a bust: The e-mails kept getting rejected because they were so big. Posting the videos online was a headache, too. So they got to work to design something simpler.

In 11 months the site became one of the most popular on the Internet because the founders designed it so people can post almost anything they like on YouTube in minutes. Members, who can comment on videos and set up their own sites on YouTube, add tens of thousands (or more) new videos a day. Steve Chen points out that "From Day One we concentrated on building a service and community around video. That made us a lot different from the iTunes and the Googles out there."

However, some users have been posting videos that are still under copyright, without any of the required legal approvals. YouTube normally does not screen out copyrighted works before they're posted, but they do comply with all such requests. Although this raises potentially thorny problems, Sequoia Capital is betting on YouTube, having invested $3.5 million. But skeptics wonder if the startup can balance its surging popularity with the looming legal risks. "I think YouTube is fantastic," said Joanne Bradford, head of sales at MSN and other Microsoft properties. "But five years from now I don't know how they make their money. Their problem is all the pirated content" .

On October 162006, Chen and Hurley sold YouTube to Google, Inc. for $1.65 billion.

It was reported in the Wall Street Journal that Chad Hurley's share in the $1.65B sale of Youtube.com is $345.6M at Google's Feb. 7, 2007 closing stock price of $470.01. He received 694,087 Google shares directly and another 41,232 shares in a trust. His other two co-founders, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim received 625,366 shares and 137,443 shares respectively valued at $326.2M and $64.6M. The journal's report was based on Google's registration statement with SEC filed on Feb. 7, 2007.

Hurley is married to Kathy Clark, daughter of noted Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jim Clark. They have two children together.

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*YouTube * Michael Moritz interviews Chad Hurley et al at TechCrunch40 conference video