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I remember a story from someone at the time (or maybe I had read somewhere), that their bandwidth bills were so high in the early days, they were asking employe

I remember a story from someone at the time (or maybe I had read somewhere), that their bandwidth bills were so high in the early days, they were asking employees to open up credit cards and use those personal cards to help keep things running.

redis_mlc 6y ago
From reporting at the time: - the founders had previous exits, and had very high-limit credit cards (think 6 figures) - their VC (who had access to monitoring graphs) wrote them a check every time they ran out of storage to keep the growth "up and to the right" - Google dragged out the close for a long time (several months), so there was a feeling of limbo - Google ended up spending around $1 billion in litigation costs with studios over content claims - during the legal actions, studios kept uploading their own content to maintain views, while griping about theft of the same files. - all pre-sale YT staff received at least $1 million, though most had worked there less than a year. Very cool. - to understand the context of the above, rack-mount servers were in the $10,000 range and bandwidth was $1,500/Mbps 95% at the time, which stopped most competitors cold. - there's a famous San Jose Mercury News article with a double-page chart comparing Google Video to YT - YT had twice as many features.