46 ms·

Larry Page: “I think we should look into acquiring YouTube” (2005)

405 points by ent101 5y ago

sleavey 5y ago
> "I think we should talk to them, if nothing else to make it more expensive for Yahoo." Love this. Another thing: Jeff Huber thought that having 2.5 Google engineers would be enough to outcompete YouTube at the time. Given that they eventually acquired YouTube for over $1B, was that essentially paying for their ~2 best engineers?
- raldi 5y ago
  YouTube grew explosively between the time of these messages (Nov 2005) and their Nov 2006 acquisition. I made my Reddit account in Nov 2005, and remember for the first half of that period, YT was just one of several competing video sites, particularly in the shadow of one called throwawayyourtv.com (see https://www.reddit.com/domain/throwawayyourtv.com/ https://www.reddit.com/domain/throwawayyourtv.com/ ) Then suddenly by the end of the summer, YT was pulling away from the pack, seemingly unstoppable.
  - andruby 5y ago
    Any idea why youtube was “winning” over the other sites? What did they do differently or better? Or was it just “luck” and better content being uploaded?
    - raldi 5y ago
      YT beat sites founded later because they were too late to catch up with the network effects. YT beat sites founded earlier (and there were many) because browser, codec, and bandwidth technology just wasn’t ready yet to support decent web video. YT beat contemporaneous sites, perhaps, because they were (as far as I know) the only one around in early 2006 with serious funding. ThrowAwayYourTV.com, for instance, was just one dude in his 20’s who had another day job.
    - dilap 5y ago
      I personally remember around that time that watching a video was pretty hit-or-miss, but YouTube always seemed to work. I've also heard that they focused on supporting the max possible number of codecs for upload, so uploaders were less likely to hit problems as well. I think both of those could have played a large part in their success.
    - danielrhodes 5y ago
      It was mostly better content, but also it just worked. Many of the other sites didn’t work well. Video sites are actually very complex engineering-wise and have lots of moving parts. Additionally, some turned on ads right away, which people hated. There was also YouTube embeds. The site just felt fun. By contrast, Google Video had very little good content. There wasn’t anything fun about it. Whereas YouTube had a social aspect to it, Google Video felt like a VCR.
    - blihp 5y ago
      It was trivial for authors to upload a variety of popular video formats/codecs and it 'just worked' in pretty much all web browsers for users.
    - barbecue_sauce 5y ago
      Well if the name "Throw Away Your TV".com is anything to go by... maybe syllable count.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      YouTube was the only place where I could find pirated uploads of “Lazy Sunday”, so there was that.
      - zhoujianfu 5y ago
        I believe lazy Sunday was actually the inflection point for YouTube.. the YouTube version got shared way more than other sites… and (because?) it stayed up the whole time.
    - flomo 5y ago
      Youtube's flash player was massively superior to plugin-based quicktime/windows media/mystery google thing. (Several replies and nobody has mentioned it, it was a huge factor.) Also you could just name a song and Youtube had the music video - it was the "napster" of video.
      - shp0ngle 5y ago
        Yep, the flash player just worked everywhere. YouTube was so popular on MySpace (that just allowed you to add random HTML… yeah that was a thing) that MySpace panicked for a while and added some javascript to make youtube videos not “clickable”; you could not click through to the YouTube page, just to play the video.
    - Andrex 5y ago
      From my perspective, it was their embeddable video player. You'd see it pop up in other sites, spreading the YouTube name on external sites the web-over. I remember thinking that capability was extremely cool at the time (and built off things like iframe chatboxes and embeddable hit counters.)
    - arihant 5y ago
      I my mind, YouTube did not prematurely optimize. 1. They took full advantage of DMCA and pirated videos made easy home there until copyright notice came in. No technology to try and do it before upload, no pre publish human intervention. 2. YouTube player was just better, especially with most of the globe on dial up. It would let videos buffer for hours until 100%, even if you had a disconnection it would just restart downloading as it should. Won’t just stop after some time to preserve bandwidth. Once downloaded, videos won’t restream and you could easily move on timeline so long as you kept the browser window open. None of their competitors did this as I recall and were preserving bandwidth they would never get to use.
      - deanCommie 5y ago
        > Won’t just stop after some time to preserve bandwidth. All online video players did this (continue buffer until 100%) at the time. It's the simpler and more naive option. In fact, YouTube was the first to introduce the feature that it didn't pre-buffer the whole thing to save bandwidth many years later, and it was HUGELY controversial in the geek community.
    - tomnipotent 5y ago
      > why youtube was “winning” over the other sites? MySpace. People would upload music videos and embed them on their profile, back when the "Embed HTML" feature was still novel. The player made it easy for users to copy/paste to their own profile, and then network effects kicked and the rest is history. I was at the parent company at the time and through the News Corp acquisition, and remember the shit show when MySpace first banned YT embeds in late 2005 and again in 2006 ("for security"). Lot of internal bitterness that YT was riding their coattails.
      - jbverschoor 5y ago
        Yup. The embedding market was huge. It’s funny how people forget history so quickly. Even Facebook’s story is simply forgotten. Fb does what google can’t … copy features and products, and cannibalize their own audience when a product is obsolete/outdated. Google usually tries to copy, but launches as a separate product. Or they buy and mess it up. Facebook is good at both integrating acquisitions, and at copying features and leveraging their userbase.
    - mmmmmmmike 5y ago
      One thing I distinctly remember they _weren't_ doing better was letting you just watch your video in piece. The controls were obtrusive and always visible, the background was bright white, and the suggested videos took up a huge chunk of the screen. I don't know how much that may have played to their advantage (by encouraging you to surf new videos) but I remember avoiding YouTube links in favor of basically anything else for a good long while.
      - stan_rogers 5y ago
        I'd consider all of those "bugs" to be features, myself. As they say in French, everyone has gout. The autohiding controls and loss of the always-visible time bar really ticked me off when they happened, and backgrounds other than white annoy the hell out of me.
    - markmark 5y ago
      Others mentioned it, but I think a big chunk of it was it "just worked" thanks to their flash-based video player. Everyone already had flash installed, so when they went to youtube video worked. Google video needed some other plugin installed before it would work. It's always struck me as a classic early example of someone coming up with a solution that I'm sure they thought was technically better, but users don't care about that.
  - belltaco 5y ago
    I was also on Reddit at the time and noticed something funny on YouTube, it'd recommend other videos featured on Reddit because their algo saw unrelated videos being watched by the same group so thought it should recommend the others, although they were irrelevant.
- Aissen 5y ago
  Jeff does react about this downthread, and the feedback from Chris Sacca is also quite interesting: https://twitter.com/jhuber/status/1433863045613174784 https://twitter.com/jhuber/status/1433863045613174784
- hitekker 5y ago
  Jeff Huber did not think that. Peter Chane, the product manager of Google Videos, wrote the 1.5 engineers comment and "we have all of their [Youtube's] features in our q4 plan". The email thread indicates that Peter wanted Google Video to win and wasn't listening to Jeff. Jeff then raised the Youtube acquisition with his peers, and then to their CEO. A year later, Peter proposed a deal to link "Flip Video" cameras to Google Videos in the hopes of competing with Youtube's exponential video production. That gambit was squelched by his boss. https://9to5google.com/2020/07/31/google-flip-video-youtube-emails/ https://9to5google.com/2020/07/31/google-flip-video-youtube-...
  - dang 5y ago
    (redacted above to help out someone who's apparently been getting spam and hate mail)
draw_down 5y ago
> they aren’t doing anything where I say “wow they have some big video brains” Sometimes I wonder what people in these big-brain companies are thinking. Ay yi yi. It’s hard to remember now, but YouTube made watching web videos not be an exercise in pain. I know I’m speaking with hindsight here but kind of an obvious value prop.
- silisili 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm unsure of most of the writers so want to be careful not to offend anyone, but the guy who wrote that, and also that G would be ahead of them soon and just needed Java people, AND that he didn't think much of their system and talent...did not seem in tune with reality.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    It's hard to remember that period well and put things into context, but if you were there, honestly, Google Video was pretty good. In the very early days Google Video vs YouTube could have been a toss-up. There was nothing particularly compelling about the UX on YouTube (it got much better later). Google Video wasn't amazing UX, but technically it was fine. And had the advantage of getting prime real estate in search results. YouTube's early success I suspect had a lot more to do with them paying fast and loose with enforcing IP rules. It wasn't until a bit after the Google acquisition that they started getting more serious about it. EDIT: also remember this is an era when Google was actually doing quite well shipping rather geeky and minimalistic invented-by-engineer consumer-facing things. There was no reason to assume they wouldn't do well with Google Video. They had just recently had a lot of success with Gmail. Gchat was a thing. Their calendar was good. They were making some ok stuff.
    - silisili 5y ago
      Yeah, it has been a while for sure. You make good points, and Sacca kind of touched on a similar note in his reply. Google had thus far been technically correct, and built good tools(email, search). But video is such a different realm...as he said... people just wanted to have fun. And for that technical correctness meant little... it's not a problem you can throw brains at. Even today, look at how TikTok has absolutely crushed others. Even with the power of big G, YT feels stagnant and dated in comparison.
ausudhz 5y ago
1.5 engineers?
- nudpiedo 5y ago
  A Person is working only 50% in That Project/Area due other responsibilities (project management, partial time, shared time with another team or whatever)
  - ausudhz 5y ago
    Yes but doesn't work that way, with context switching cost and all of the rest people who are 50% in one projects are not really that effective. If anything, shows that they were not that committed to even put a resource dedicated to that project
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      It depends how granular the 50% is. I don't feel much cost from "context switching" overnight if Tuesday and Wednesday are project A time while Monday and Friday are project B time, but it gets to be a problem if I'm context switching hour by hour or taking random calls about A versus B during my normal working day.
      - ausudhz 5y ago
        Don't know where you work, but you're not switching from cooking to washing dishes. So yes there's a cost involved and is never a clear cut especially if you run projects in parallel.
        adjkant 5y ago
        As someone who regularly works on a lot of projects at once or regularly context switching, I think this is missing the larger point here. Returns are not magically nothing for someone 50/50 on two projects, but there is of course a cost, and that cost increases with the number of projects, the complexity of the projects, and the pressure for delivery of the projects. It also varies person to person. Going back to your original post: > Yes but doesn't work that way, with context switching cost and all of the rest people who are 50% in one projects are not really that effective. Again, person dependent but missing the point. Would have it been more accurate to say they have 1.4327 engineers on the project? Probably. Is that helpful when everyone understands what 1.5 actually means? Not really. And two projects is not so unreasonable depending on the situation. > If anything, shows that they were not that committed to even put a resource dedicated to that project 100% yes to that. And as we have learned since this comment thread, it was not a 50% time situation but actually someone wearing two hats (PM and engineer): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28426523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28426523
gnodar 5y ago
Interesting, if unsurprising, to see that a large factor in the interest in YouTube was based purely on location, as well as knowledge of the people working there, their backgrounds, and who specifically they were funded by. Where you are and who you know often outweighs having the best product, features, etc.
- lumost 5y ago
  All else being equal, Those closest to the money stream are the most likely to succeed.
- zeroxfe 5y ago
  These very commonly considered success-probability multipliers and derisking factors -- at this stage, the makeup, expertise, and reputations of the individuals leading a company are the biggest success factors. Even if the acquisition fails, having a strong (and nearby) team adds a lot of value to the acquirer.
- wilsynet 5y ago
  I didn’t get that at all. They talked about the funding round as a signal for what the asking price might be, and then “Mike from Sequoia” because they know Mike and therefore know which partner at Sequoia to reach out to broker a conversation. As for location. Totally. It was likely critical. Disclosure: I work at Google.
- bloodyplonker22 5y ago
  This was because, in the emails at that time, they thought it would be a 10-15M acqui-hire and to "block yahoo" purchase only.
- majani 5y ago
  Yup. There are tons of brilliant Eastern European programmers who can testify to this
devops000 5y ago
How they could have such emails?
- Jxl180 5y ago
  These are in the public record from the anti-trust case against Google.
  - devops000 5y ago
    Ok, I don't know why I have been down voted for this question.
    - mkl 5y ago
      Because it says this right below the email images: "[This document is from the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee (2020).]"
ineedasername 5y ago
So basically the only reason they were considering YouTube was to either deny it to their competition, or force their competition to pay more for it. It sounds like they expected it to die on a backroom shelf somewhere if they made the purchase. This seems anti-competitive behavior even during what might otherwise be viewed as their "don't be evil" phase. They didn't see it as valuable for their own needs, they just didn't want it to grow into competition itself or via another competitor and so considered buying it to let it die.
- jasode 5y ago
  >It sounds like they expected it to die on a backroom shelf somewhere if they made the purchase. This seems anti-competitive behavior [...] They didn't see it as valuable for their own needs, I think you're reading too much conspiracy motive into Larry's terse email. Based on various interviews, Susan Wojcicki was head of Google Video at the time and she acknowledged they were losing against the upstart Youtube. She originally thought Google Video would succeed because Google was "playing nice" by negotiating legal licenses with broadcasters like NBC whereas Youtube was just a bunch of pirated content. It was a big risk to acquire Youtube because the Viacom piracy lawsuit was looming. Google decided they could handle it and went ahead with the acquisition. They saw the value in Youtube and didn't have any intention of killing it.
  - bagacrap 5y ago
    Actually it seems like gp is reading all the emails that came before Larry's
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Based on these emails, the very first consideration that sparked their interest-- no matter what came later-- was to deny it to their competition or drive up the price. Just because upon investigation, YouTube actually seemed to have some value does not negate the fact that their first motive was based upon limiting competition.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
arnaudsm 5y ago
"Their content quality is worse than ours. They seem focused on home video/community space while we want to be more like iTunes/TV" 16 years later, home video is still the core value of YouTube, yet they are still trying to push overproduced shows and TV while mistreating original creators. It's literally killing the golden goose.
- ninkendo 5y ago
  I noticed this with one of my favorite channels, Vsauce… they were one of the pilot channels to be “upgraded” to YouTube Red, back when that was a thing; the series was called “Mind Field”. I never subscribed to it when it was premium, but when YouTube Red shut down it all became free. I tried watching a few episodes of the ostensibly “higher quality” format of Mind Field, and it was demonstrably worse in most aspects. Bloated, way more filler, way more pointless behind the scenes stuff of the host interacting with the guests, and an overall much slower pace of interesting material. It felt a lot more like a cookie cutter Nat Geo show instead of the denser, faster paced material of Vsauce. Overall I think that the smaller, self-produced (or minimally produced with small teams) format is the future and I’m glad to see that YouTube is failing to change that despite their efforts.
  - JCharante 5y ago
    To be fair Vsauce ruined itself a long time ago. Obviously the next step for a popular channel is to turn it into a company that churns out content for money, but it kills the charm and quality. Should just stick to (relative to big orgs) low budget and take in those views. Phillip DeFranco's stuff was good until he started a million offshoots and it wasn't personal anymore. Then it was just mediocre unorganic (as in how pop bands are formed by talent scouts) stuff.
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
      All channels will eventually burn out and fade, but the youtube model guarantees that there will always be new shiny content.
deleted 5y ago
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habibur 5y ago
> Gustimated price tag would be $10-15m. YouTube finally sold for $1b to google. And at that time everyone felt that was an unjustifiable price for a company that was burning millions per month on bandwidth and possibly will run out of cash any time.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  And now it generates 15 billion per year.
  - pcurve 5y ago
    Considering it’s de facto global video sharing platform the fact that it’s only 15 billion per year is surprising and makes me uneasy about equity valuation in general in tech space
    - dannyw 5y ago
      Interest rates are nearly 0%, it's no surprise to see crazy multiples.
    - tehwebguy 5y ago
      Looks like it’s closer to 20B in 2020 but it’s also got a different type of competition now (tiktok, like a dozen first class streaming subscriptions & more lower tier options).
    - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
      I'm confused about why this makes you uneasy. $15B/yr (Assuming profit) is really high.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    Isn't that 15 years later with a lot of effort and google's brand and muscle? I wonder how its remaining competitors like vimeo are doing.
  - summerlight 5y ago
AlbertCory 5y ago
I was at Google during this period, and did a lot of work with YT ads, 2009-2010. Their backend was still Python then; I have no idea about now. Memory: I was over there and someone was introducing me to a group of folks and said "he's from Google." I spread my hands around and said "we're ALL from Google." She said, "No, this is YouTube."
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  At the time Google tended to destroy companies they bought by insisting they rewrite their product using Google infrastructure. By the time that was complete, the product had died. For some reason, YouTube was allowed to keep their infrastructure.
  - mattrick 5y ago
    Maybe because they were productive in their own environment (like the email mentioned)? Might be an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality, but I imagine that would've also applied to many other companies they acquired.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    I remember going to a talk by the Dodgeball founders, a recent acquisition, and thinking "these guys are never going to make it at Google." I was right. https://www.cnet.com/news/dodgeball-founders-quit-google/ https://www.cnet.com/news/dodgeball-founders-quit-google/
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    YouTube did rewrite on Google infrastructure - there was a paper they published c. 2008 about how they were leveraging Google's cloud to scale. It was largely back-end stuff; IIRC they moved from MySQL to BigTable, adopted Google's blobstore & CDN, integrated with Google's machine-learning systems, etc. They were allowed to choose which parts of Google's infrastructure they wanted, though. AFAIK the front-end was still Python when I left Google the first time in 2014, and it wouldn't surprise me if it still is now.
tomdell 5y ago
YouTube blew my mind in 2005. Obviously it isn’t practical for a business to lose money forever, but it felt so new and cool when there were no ads.
- ng12 5y ago
  Same. It's crazy to think people just a few years younger than me probably don't remember a time where there was almost no video on the web.
- TrackerFF 5y ago
  I uploaded my first video in late 2005, it's still up there. I remember Google video was up around that time, and IIRC, the only true competitor. It should be mentioned that back then, the only ting that mattered to me was whether or not you could upload videos, and the site had a video player. Pre-2005, I can honestly only remember downloading video files directly off websites, and then play them with some video player. I think I used Opera back then, and I think Opera supported some video players - but it was a real hassle, with the different video formats. I also remember that before youtube etc., unless you had your own server or paid hosting, we'd use our "free" 5/10/15 MB hosting that came your ISP gave you, or other hosting sites provided (they'd usually have some free tier with a couple of free megs). What we did, was to sign up for multiple such sites, so that we'd in effect get like 100/200 megs of hosting. Sometimes we'd have to chop up the files into multiple zip files, and distribute them over those websites. Unfortunately, a lot of these smaller hosting sites disappeared over the years, and a lot of files got lost forever. But yeah, when youtube etc. hit the scene, it was pretty much an overnight revolution. All the pains of sharing / hosting videos were gone.
capableweb 5y ago
> and were thinking about a acq with Yahoo > and it would be nice for y! not to have them > their content quality is worse than ours ... if we pick them up it would be defensive vs yahoo > I think we should talk to them, if nothing else to make it more expensive for Yahoo Holy anti-competitive moly, how can these people talk like this while (supposedly) knowing the laws in the country they operate in? In clear text emails on top of that... Google supposedly has the smartest people working there, but doesn't seem like it's true for management. I hope they get to pay for this, at least to prove that no companies are too big to get sanctioned for anti-competitive behavior. If they are not, I think we can all conclude that the government has lost all of its spine.
- afarrell 5y ago
  Do people generally know the laws of the United States? There are a lot of laws.
  - whoisburbansky 5y ago
    OP’s remarks are more accurately paraphrased as “how can the executive of a major tech company leave a paper trail of illegal-sounding things, surely someone so high up is aware of how antitrust laws work.” OP doesn’t say anything about the general public being aware of the entirety of the legal code.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    If you are in the management team working for one of the largest companies in the world, who happen to be based in the US, I sure do hope you know about things like insider trading, anti-competitive behavior and other ills described by US law, otherwise you can put your company in trouble at any time. Especially if you're in the discussions around acquiring companies. You want it to be very obvious you're not acquiring something in order to fuck it up for a competitor, you want to acquire a company in order to further yourself.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  Are defensive buys really illegal in the US in the first place?
skizm 5y ago
YouTube’s primary value add for me is music remixes and covers that can’t legally make it to Spotify / Apple music / etc., but skirt around the DMCA takedowns. I try and use it as my primary driver for music but the recommendation engine is just terrible. I listen to days of classic rock and most of my recommendations are still centered around that one EDM song I listened to a week ago. Probably because the ratio of people playing EDM videos with sexy thumbnails to people “watching” classic rock lyric videos is very high. Oh well.
- rambambram 5y ago
  Second this. Youtube works very well as my music discovery medium. The 'long tail' on there is just so rich of nice music. And indeed, I can keep clicking that scarce house song in my recommended videos, but the algo still gives me mostly melancholic Romanian deeptechno or something. Although that seems to got a little better after getting rid of all the ads - and meanwhile other tracking shit - by using uBlock.
Apocryphon 5y ago
Does anyone remember the Revver video site the emails refer to?
- xtat 5y ago
  I do. I helped build one of these sites. We actually had a "tube" domain before youtube :)
axegon_ 5y ago
Strange thought: up until 2010-11 Vimeo was a vastly superior platform in terms of service quality(then Google stepped up the game of course). But it does make me wonder what would have happened if Google had bought Vimeo instead and where would either be today
- imbnwa 5y ago
  I remember Vimeo being the service of choice for film students back around then
  - axegon_ 5y ago
    Two reasons: vimeo offered better quality and at the time youtube videos were limited to a maximum length of 10 minutes iirc.
os7borne 5y ago
"I think if we had one more good java/ui engineer we'd be kicking butt vs youtube." Unfortunately, this very attitude continues to be the bane of every large company. Thinking they can throw a body on the problem can make them invincible.
- rasz 5y ago
  I like how he says "one more" suggesting they had any. Google Video wasnt the prettiest and most usable thing to say the least.
  - PostThisTooFast 5y ago
    Google's UI is shit across the board, but that wasn't Google Video's problem. The problem was that nobody realized you could post YOUR videos to Google Video; it appeared to be simply a video-centric search engine. The fact that they didn't understand this is symptomatic of what's wrong with Google today.
privatdozent 5y ago
Should never have been allowed
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nova22033 5y ago
From Chris Sacca's reply https://twitter.com/sacca/status/1433947735640715271 https://twitter.com/sacca/status/1433947735640715271 Third, Google was often a place that ascribed little value to people who didn’t have the right degrees and right coding pedigree. For years, the company ignored @ev and the Blogger team. Hell, they still checked all of our SAT scores back then.
- Macha 5y ago
  Is the "Google Video postmortem" mentioned there public anywhere, I wonder. That would be an interesting read.
kbumsik 5y ago
This Twitter is interesting. How and where it gets such mails?
- goodgoodmike 5y ago
  They are from a document provided to the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee (2020).
  - kbumsik 5y ago
    Thank you. As an non-american it is quite interesting to see those piles of emails are disclosed publicity. I have never heard such cases in Korea.
adenozine 5y ago
I can't even figure out which email to reply to first in 4 minutes. Larry Page, wow
phkahler 5y ago
And here I thought Google used their search data to spot YouTube's relevance before anyone else. Nope. I enjoyed the one guy saying they just need one more front end guy to keep up, but they were estimating $10-15M to acquire the company. Must have been just to keep it away from Yahoo... or maybe they realized there's more to good products than throwing another developer at them. The whole thing seems so casually uninsightful.
- Craighead 5y ago
  Luck has a large impact on the flow of life.
narrator 5y ago
What's Larry up to now? Instead of using his brilliance to build some new venture he's hiding out off-grid on a private island in Fiji[1] and getting New Zealand residency[2]. Pretty weird stuff to be up to IMHO. Is he smarter than all of us and bugged out for the apocalypse now or something? [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9816787/Google-founder-Larry-Page-grid-hiding-Fijian-islands.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9816787/Google-foun... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58128475.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58128475.amp
- sgpl 5y ago
  It's his life. Google and their services are indispensable for billions. Doesn't he deserve a personal life where he can do whatever he wants to do instead of being beholden to humanity and serve it with his brilliance forever?
  - narrator 5y ago
    I'm not criticizing his morality. Billionaires like Larry Ellison buy private Hawaiian Islands, but they mostly go there on vacation and don't just disappear there for months! I'm just asking why Larry? Why are you bugging out like it's the end of the world? Is there something you know that we don't? :/
    - prawn 5y ago
      I find it strange when superrich people don't go on private vacations for months on end.

405 points by ent101 5y ago

> "I think we should talk to them, if nothing else to make it more expensive for Yahoo." Love this. Another thing: Jeff Huber thought that having 2.5 Google engineers would be enough to outcompete YouTube at the time. Given that they eventually acquired YouTube for over $1B, was that essentially paying for their ~2 best engineers?

raldi 5y ago
YouTube grew explosively between the time of these messages (Nov 2005) and their Nov 2006 acquisition. I made my Reddit account in Nov 2005, and remember for the first half of that period, YT was just one of several competing video sites, particularly in the shadow of one called throwawayyourtv.com (see https://www.reddit.com/domain/throwawayyourtv.com/ https://www.reddit.com/domain/throwawayyourtv.com/ ) Then suddenly by the end of the summer, YT was pulling away from the pack, seemingly unstoppable.
- andruby 5y ago
  Any idea why youtube was “winning” over the other sites? What did they do differently or better? Or was it just “luck” and better content being uploaded?
  - raldi 5y ago
    YT beat sites founded later because they were too late to catch up with the network effects. YT beat sites founded earlier (and there were many) because browser, codec, and bandwidth technology just wasn’t ready yet to support decent web video. YT beat contemporaneous sites, perhaps, because they were (as far as I know) the only one around in early 2006 with serious funding. ThrowAwayYourTV.com, for instance, was just one dude in his 20’s who had another day job.
  - dilap 5y ago
    I personally remember around that time that watching a video was pretty hit-or-miss, but YouTube always seemed to work. I've also heard that they focused on supporting the max possible number of codecs for upload, so uploaders were less likely to hit problems as well. I think both of those could have played a large part in their success.
  - danielrhodes 5y ago
    It was mostly better content, but also it just worked. Many of the other sites didn’t work well. Video sites are actually very complex engineering-wise and have lots of moving parts. Additionally, some turned on ads right away, which people hated. There was also YouTube embeds. The site just felt fun. By contrast, Google Video had very little good content. There wasn’t anything fun about it. Whereas YouTube had a social aspect to it, Google Video felt like a VCR.
  - blihp 5y ago
    It was trivial for authors to upload a variety of popular video formats/codecs and it 'just worked' in pretty much all web browsers for users.
  - barbecue_sauce 5y ago
    Well if the name "Throw Away Your TV".com is anything to go by... maybe syllable count.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    YouTube was the only place where I could find pirated uploads of “Lazy Sunday”, so there was that.
    - zhoujianfu 5y ago
      I believe lazy Sunday was actually the inflection point for YouTube.. the YouTube version got shared way more than other sites… and (because?) it stayed up the whole time.
  - flomo 5y ago
    Youtube's flash player was massively superior to plugin-based quicktime/windows media/mystery google thing. (Several replies and nobody has mentioned it, it was a huge factor.) Also you could just name a song and Youtube had the music video - it was the "napster" of video.
    - shp0ngle 5y ago
      Yep, the flash player just worked everywhere. YouTube was so popular on MySpace (that just allowed you to add random HTML… yeah that was a thing) that MySpace panicked for a while and added some javascript to make youtube videos not “clickable”; you could not click through to the YouTube page, just to play the video.
  - Andrex 5y ago
    From my perspective, it was their embeddable video player. You'd see it pop up in other sites, spreading the YouTube name on external sites the web-over. I remember thinking that capability was extremely cool at the time (and built off things like iframe chatboxes and embeddable hit counters.)
  - arihant 5y ago
    I my mind, YouTube did not prematurely optimize. 1. They took full advantage of DMCA and pirated videos made easy home there until copyright notice came in. No technology to try and do it before upload, no pre publish human intervention. 2. YouTube player was just better, especially with most of the globe on dial up. It would let videos buffer for hours until 100%, even if you had a disconnection it would just restart downloading as it should. Won’t just stop after some time to preserve bandwidth. Once downloaded, videos won’t restream and you could easily move on timeline so long as you kept the browser window open. None of their competitors did this as I recall and were preserving bandwidth they would never get to use.
    - deanCommie 5y ago
      > Won’t just stop after some time to preserve bandwidth. All online video players did this (continue buffer until 100%) at the time. It's the simpler and more naive option. In fact, YouTube was the first to introduce the feature that it didn't pre-buffer the whole thing to save bandwidth many years later, and it was HUGELY controversial in the geek community.
  - tomnipotent 5y ago
    > why youtube was “winning” over the other sites? MySpace. People would upload music videos and embed them on their profile, back when the "Embed HTML" feature was still novel. The player made it easy for users to copy/paste to their own profile, and then network effects kicked and the rest is history. I was at the parent company at the time and through the News Corp acquisition, and remember the shit show when MySpace first banned YT embeds in late 2005 and again in 2006 ("for security"). Lot of internal bitterness that YT was riding their coattails.
    - jbverschoor 5y ago
      Yup. The embedding market was huge. It’s funny how people forget history so quickly. Even Facebook’s story is simply forgotten. Fb does what google can’t … copy features and products, and cannibalize their own audience when a product is obsolete/outdated. Google usually tries to copy, but launches as a separate product. Or they buy and mess it up. Facebook is good at both integrating acquisitions, and at copying features and leveraging their userbase.
  - mmmmmmmike 5y ago
    One thing I distinctly remember they _weren't_ doing better was letting you just watch your video in piece. The controls were obtrusive and always visible, the background was bright white, and the suggested videos took up a huge chunk of the screen. I don't know how much that may have played to their advantage (by encouraging you to surf new videos) but I remember avoiding YouTube links in favor of basically anything else for a good long while.
    - stan_rogers 5y ago
      I'd consider all of those "bugs" to be features, myself. As they say in French, everyone has gout. The autohiding controls and loss of the always-visible time bar really ticked me off when they happened, and backgrounds other than white annoy the hell out of me.
  - markmark 5y ago
    Others mentioned it, but I think a big chunk of it was it "just worked" thanks to their flash-based video player. Everyone already had flash installed, so when they went to youtube video worked. Google video needed some other plugin installed before it would work. It's always struck me as a classic early example of someone coming up with a solution that I'm sure they thought was technically better, but users don't care about that.
- belltaco 5y ago
  I was also on Reddit at the time and noticed something funny on YouTube, it'd recommend other videos featured on Reddit because their algo saw unrelated videos being watched by the same group so thought it should recommend the others, although they were irrelevant.
Aissen 5y ago
Jeff does react about this downthread, and the feedback from Chris Sacca is also quite interesting: https://twitter.com/jhuber/status/1433863045613174784 https://twitter.com/jhuber/status/1433863045613174784
hitekker 5y ago
Jeff Huber did not think that. Peter Chane, the product manager of Google Videos, wrote the 1.5 engineers comment and "we have all of their [Youtube's] features in our q4 plan". The email thread indicates that Peter wanted Google Video to win and wasn't listening to Jeff. Jeff then raised the Youtube acquisition with his peers, and then to their CEO. A year later, Peter proposed a deal to link "Flip Video" cameras to Google Videos in the hopes of competing with Youtube's exponential video production. That gambit was squelched by his boss. https://9to5google.com/2020/07/31/google-flip-video-youtube-emails/ https://9to5google.com/2020/07/31/google-flip-video-youtube-...
- dang 5y ago
  (redacted above to help out someone who's apparently been getting spam and hate mail)

draw_down 5y ago

> they aren’t doing anything where I say “wow they have some big video brains” Sometimes I wonder what people in these big-brain companies are thinking. Ay yi yi. It’s hard to remember now, but YouTube made watching web videos not be an exercise in pain. I know I’m speaking with hindsight here but kind of an obvious value prop.

silisili 5y ago
Yeah, I'm unsure of most of the writers so want to be careful not to offend anyone, but the guy who wrote that, and also that G would be ahead of them soon and just needed Java people, AND that he didn't think much of their system and talent...did not seem in tune with reality.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  It's hard to remember that period well and put things into context, but if you were there, honestly, Google Video was pretty good. In the very early days Google Video vs YouTube could have been a toss-up. There was nothing particularly compelling about the UX on YouTube (it got much better later). Google Video wasn't amazing UX, but technically it was fine. And had the advantage of getting prime real estate in search results. YouTube's early success I suspect had a lot more to do with them paying fast and loose with enforcing IP rules. It wasn't until a bit after the Google acquisition that they started getting more serious about it. EDIT: also remember this is an era when Google was actually doing quite well shipping rather geeky and minimalistic invented-by-engineer consumer-facing things. There was no reason to assume they wouldn't do well with Google Video. They had just recently had a lot of success with Gmail. Gchat was a thing. Their calendar was good. They were making some ok stuff.
  - silisili 5y ago
    Yeah, it has been a while for sure. You make good points, and Sacca kind of touched on a similar note in his reply. Google had thus far been technically correct, and built good tools(email, search). But video is such a different realm...as he said... people just wanted to have fun. And for that technical correctness meant little... it's not a problem you can throw brains at. Even today, look at how TikTok has absolutely crushed others. Even with the power of big G, YT feels stagnant and dated in comparison.

ausudhz 5y ago

1.5 engineers?

nudpiedo 5y ago
A Person is working only 50% in That Project/Area due other responsibilities (project management, partial time, shared time with another team or whatever)
- ausudhz 5y ago
  Yes but doesn't work that way, with context switching cost and all of the rest people who are 50% in one projects are not really that effective. If anything, shows that they were not that committed to even put a resource dedicated to that project
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    It depends how granular the 50% is. I don't feel much cost from "context switching" overnight if Tuesday and Wednesday are project A time while Monday and Friday are project B time, but it gets to be a problem if I'm context switching hour by hour or taking random calls about A versus B during my normal working day.
    - ausudhz 5y ago
      Don't know where you work, but you're not switching from cooking to washing dishes. So yes there's a cost involved and is never a clear cut especially if you run projects in parallel.
      - adjkant 5y ago
        As someone who regularly works on a lot of projects at once or regularly context switching, I think this is missing the larger point here. Returns are not magically nothing for someone 50/50 on two projects, but there is of course a cost, and that cost increases with the number of projects, the complexity of the projects, and the pressure for delivery of the projects. It also varies person to person. Going back to your original post: > Yes but doesn't work that way, with context switching cost and all of the rest people who are 50% in one projects are not really that effective. Again, person dependent but missing the point. Would have it been more accurate to say they have 1.4327 engineers on the project? Probably. Is that helpful when everyone understands what 1.5 actually means? Not really. And two projects is not so unreasonable depending on the situation. > If anything, shows that they were not that committed to even put a resource dedicated to that project 100% yes to that. And as we have learned since this comment thread, it was not a 50% time situation but actually someone wearing two hats (PM and engineer): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28426523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28426523

gnodar 5y ago

Interesting, if unsurprising, to see that a large factor in the interest in YouTube was based purely on location, as well as knowledge of the people working there, their backgrounds, and who specifically they were funded by. Where you are and who you know often outweighs having the best product, features, etc.

lumost 5y ago
All else being equal, Those closest to the money stream are the most likely to succeed.
zeroxfe 5y ago
These very commonly considered success-probability multipliers and derisking factors -- at this stage, the makeup, expertise, and reputations of the individuals leading a company are the biggest success factors. Even if the acquisition fails, having a strong (and nearby) team adds a lot of value to the acquirer.
wilsynet 5y ago
I didn’t get that at all. They talked about the funding round as a signal for what the asking price might be, and then “Mike from Sequoia” because they know Mike and therefore know which partner at Sequoia to reach out to broker a conversation. As for location. Totally. It was likely critical. Disclosure: I work at Google.
bloodyplonker22 5y ago
This was because, in the emails at that time, they thought it would be a 10-15M acqui-hire and to "block yahoo" purchase only.
majani 5y ago
Yup. There are tons of brilliant Eastern European programmers who can testify to this

devops000 5y ago

How they could have such emails?

Jxl180 5y ago
These are in the public record from the anti-trust case against Google.
- devops000 5y ago
  Ok, I don't know why I have been down voted for this question.
  - mkl 5y ago
    Because it says this right below the email images: "[This document is from the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee (2020).]"

ineedasername 5y ago

So basically the only reason they were considering YouTube was to either deny it to their competition, or force their competition to pay more for it. It sounds like they expected it to die on a backroom shelf somewhere if they made the purchase. This seems anti-competitive behavior even during what might otherwise be viewed as their "don't be evil" phase. They didn't see it as valuable for their own needs, they just didn't want it to grow into competition itself or via another competitor and so considered buying it to let it die.

jasode 5y ago
>It sounds like they expected it to die on a backroom shelf somewhere if they made the purchase. This seems anti-competitive behavior [...] They didn't see it as valuable for their own needs, I think you're reading too much conspiracy motive into Larry's terse email. Based on various interviews, Susan Wojcicki was head of Google Video at the time and she acknowledged they were losing against the upstart Youtube. She originally thought Google Video would succeed because Google was "playing nice" by negotiating legal licenses with broadcasters like NBC whereas Youtube was just a bunch of pirated content. It was a big risk to acquire Youtube because the Viacom piracy lawsuit was looming. Google decided they could handle it and went ahead with the acquisition. They saw the value in Youtube and didn't have any intention of killing it.
- bagacrap 5y ago
  Actually it seems like gp is reading all the emails that came before Larry's
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Based on these emails, the very first consideration that sparked their interest-- no matter what came later-- was to deny it to their competition or drive up the price. Just because upon investigation, YouTube actually seemed to have some value does not negate the fact that their first motive was based upon limiting competition.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

arnaudsm 5y ago

"Their content quality is worse than ours. They seem focused on home video/community space while we want to be more like iTunes/TV" 16 years later, home video is still the core value of YouTube, yet they are still trying to push overproduced shows and TV while mistreating original creators. It's literally killing the golden goose.

ninkendo 5y ago
I noticed this with one of my favorite channels, Vsauce… they were one of the pilot channels to be “upgraded” to YouTube Red, back when that was a thing; the series was called “Mind Field”. I never subscribed to it when it was premium, but when YouTube Red shut down it all became free. I tried watching a few episodes of the ostensibly “higher quality” format of Mind Field, and it was demonstrably worse in most aspects. Bloated, way more filler, way more pointless behind the scenes stuff of the host interacting with the guests, and an overall much slower pace of interesting material. It felt a lot more like a cookie cutter Nat Geo show instead of the denser, faster paced material of Vsauce. Overall I think that the smaller, self-produced (or minimally produced with small teams) format is the future and I’m glad to see that YouTube is failing to change that despite their efforts.
- JCharante 5y ago
  To be fair Vsauce ruined itself a long time ago. Obviously the next step for a popular channel is to turn it into a company that churns out content for money, but it kills the charm and quality. Should just stick to (relative to big orgs) low budget and take in those views. Phillip DeFranco's stuff was good until he started a million offshoots and it wasn't personal anymore. Then it was just mediocre unorganic (as in how pop bands are formed by talent scouts) stuff.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    All channels will eventually burn out and fade, but the youtube model guarantees that there will always be new shiny content.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

habibur 5y ago

> Gustimated price tag would be $10-15m. YouTube finally sold for $1b to google. And at that time everyone felt that was an unjustifiable price for a company that was burning millions per month on bandwidth and possibly will run out of cash any time.

s1artibartfast 5y ago
And now it generates 15 billion per year.
- pcurve 5y ago
  Considering it’s de facto global video sharing platform the fact that it’s only 15 billion per year is surprising and makes me uneasy about equity valuation in general in tech space
  - dannyw 5y ago
    Interest rates are nearly 0%, it's no surprise to see crazy multiples.
  - tehwebguy 5y ago
    Looks like it’s closer to 20B in 2020 but it’s also got a different type of competition now (tiktok, like a dozen first class streaming subscriptions & more lower tier options).
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    I'm confused about why this makes you uneasy. $15B/yr (Assuming profit) is really high.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Isn't that 15 years later with a lot of effort and google's brand and muscle? I wonder how its remaining competitors like vimeo are doing.
- summerlight 5y ago

AlbertCory 5y ago

I was at Google during this period, and did a lot of work with YT ads, 2009-2010. Their backend was still Python then; I have no idea about now. Memory: I was over there and someone was introducing me to a group of folks and said "he's from Google." I spread my hands around and said "we're ALL from Google." She said, "No, this is YouTube."

BurningFrog 5y ago
At the time Google tended to destroy companies they bought by insisting they rewrite their product using Google infrastructure. By the time that was complete, the product had died. For some reason, YouTube was allowed to keep their infrastructure.
- mattrick 5y ago
  Maybe because they were productive in their own environment (like the email mentioned)? Might be an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality, but I imagine that would've also applied to many other companies they acquired.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  I remember going to a talk by the Dodgeball founders, a recent acquisition, and thinking "these guys are never going to make it at Google." I was right. https://www.cnet.com/news/dodgeball-founders-quit-google/ https://www.cnet.com/news/dodgeball-founders-quit-google/
- nostrademons 5y ago
  YouTube did rewrite on Google infrastructure - there was a paper they published c. 2008 about how they were leveraging Google's cloud to scale. It was largely back-end stuff; IIRC they moved from MySQL to BigTable, adopted Google's blobstore & CDN, integrated with Google's machine-learning systems, etc. They were allowed to choose which parts of Google's infrastructure they wanted, though. AFAIK the front-end was still Python when I left Google the first time in 2014, and it wouldn't surprise me if it still is now.

tomdell 5y ago

YouTube blew my mind in 2005. Obviously it isn’t practical for a business to lose money forever, but it felt so new and cool when there were no ads.

ng12 5y ago
Same. It's crazy to think people just a few years younger than me probably don't remember a time where there was almost no video on the web.
TrackerFF 5y ago
I uploaded my first video in late 2005, it's still up there. I remember Google video was up around that time, and IIRC, the only true competitor. It should be mentioned that back then, the only ting that mattered to me was whether or not you could upload videos, and the site had a video player. Pre-2005, I can honestly only remember downloading video files directly off websites, and then play them with some video player. I think I used Opera back then, and I think Opera supported some video players - but it was a real hassle, with the different video formats. I also remember that before youtube etc., unless you had your own server or paid hosting, we'd use our "free" 5/10/15 MB hosting that came your ISP gave you, or other hosting sites provided (they'd usually have some free tier with a couple of free megs). What we did, was to sign up for multiple such sites, so that we'd in effect get like 100/200 megs of hosting. Sometimes we'd have to chop up the files into multiple zip files, and distribute them over those websites. Unfortunately, a lot of these smaller hosting sites disappeared over the years, and a lot of files got lost forever. But yeah, when youtube etc. hit the scene, it was pretty much an overnight revolution. All the pains of sharing / hosting videos were gone.

capableweb 5y ago

> and were thinking about a acq with Yahoo > and it would be nice for y! not to have them > their content quality is worse than ours ... if we pick them up it would be defensive vs yahoo > I think we should talk to them, if nothing else to make it more expensive for Yahoo Holy anti-competitive moly, how can these people talk like this while (supposedly) knowing the laws in the country they operate in? In clear text emails on top of that... Google supposedly has the smartest people working there, but doesn't seem like it's true for management. I hope they get to pay for this, at least to prove that no companies are too big to get sanctioned for anti-competitive behavior. If they are not, I think we can all conclude that the government has lost all of its spine.

afarrell 5y ago
Do people generally know the laws of the United States? There are a lot of laws.
- whoisburbansky 5y ago
  OP’s remarks are more accurately paraphrased as “how can the executive of a major tech company leave a paper trail of illegal-sounding things, surely someone so high up is aware of how antitrust laws work.” OP doesn’t say anything about the general public being aware of the entirety of the legal code.
- capableweb 5y ago
  If you are in the management team working for one of the largest companies in the world, who happen to be based in the US, I sure do hope you know about things like insider trading, anti-competitive behavior and other ills described by US law, otherwise you can put your company in trouble at any time. Especially if you're in the discussions around acquiring companies. You want it to be very obvious you're not acquiring something in order to fuck it up for a competitor, you want to acquire a company in order to further yourself.
Tenoke 5y ago
Are defensive buys really illegal in the US in the first place?

skizm 5y ago

YouTube’s primary value add for me is music remixes and covers that can’t legally make it to Spotify / Apple music / etc., but skirt around the DMCA takedowns. I try and use it as my primary driver for music but the recommendation engine is just terrible. I listen to days of classic rock and most of my recommendations are still centered around that one EDM song I listened to a week ago. Probably because the ratio of people playing EDM videos with sexy thumbnails to people “watching” classic rock lyric videos is very high. Oh well.

rambambram 5y ago
Second this. Youtube works very well as my music discovery medium. The 'long tail' on there is just so rich of nice music. And indeed, I can keep clicking that scarce house song in my recommended videos, but the algo still gives me mostly melancholic Romanian deeptechno or something. Although that seems to got a little better after getting rid of all the ads - and meanwhile other tracking shit - by using uBlock.

Apocryphon 5y ago

Does anyone remember the Revver video site the emails refer to?

xtat 5y ago
I do. I helped build one of these sites. We actually had a "tube" domain before youtube :)

axegon_ 5y ago

Strange thought: up until 2010-11 Vimeo was a vastly superior platform in terms of service quality(then Google stepped up the game of course). But it does make me wonder what would have happened if Google had bought Vimeo instead and where would either be today

imbnwa 5y ago
I remember Vimeo being the service of choice for film students back around then
- axegon_ 5y ago
  Two reasons: vimeo offered better quality and at the time youtube videos were limited to a maximum length of 10 minutes iirc.

os7borne 5y ago

"I think if we had one more good java/ui engineer we'd be kicking butt vs youtube." Unfortunately, this very attitude continues to be the bane of every large company. Thinking they can throw a body on the problem can make them invincible.

rasz 5y ago
I like how he says "one more" suggesting they had any. Google Video wasnt the prettiest and most usable thing to say the least.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  Google's UI is shit across the board, but that wasn't Google Video's problem. The problem was that nobody realized you could post YOUR videos to Google Video; it appeared to be simply a video-centric search engine. The fact that they didn't understand this is symptomatic of what's wrong with Google today.

privatdozent 5y ago

Should never have been allowed

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nova22033 5y ago

From Chris Sacca's reply https://twitter.com/sacca/status/1433947735640715271 https://twitter.com/sacca/status/1433947735640715271 Third, Google was often a place that ascribed little value to people who didn’t have the right degrees and right coding pedigree. For years, the company ignored @ev and the Blogger team. Hell, they still checked all of our SAT scores back then.

Macha 5y ago
Is the "Google Video postmortem" mentioned there public anywhere, I wonder. That would be an interesting read.

kbumsik 5y ago

This Twitter is interesting. How and where it gets such mails?

goodgoodmike 5y ago
They are from a document provided to the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee (2020).
- kbumsik 5y ago
  Thank you. As an non-american it is quite interesting to see those piles of emails are disclosed publicity. I have never heard such cases in Korea.

adenozine 5y ago

I can't even figure out which email to reply to first in 4 minutes. Larry Page, wow

phkahler 5y ago

And here I thought Google used their search data to spot YouTube's relevance before anyone else. Nope. I enjoyed the one guy saying they just need one more front end guy to keep up, but they were estimating $10-15M to acquire the company. Must have been just to keep it away from Yahoo... or maybe they realized there's more to good products than throwing another developer at them. The whole thing seems so casually uninsightful.

Craighead 5y ago
Luck has a large impact on the flow of life.

narrator 5y ago

What's Larry up to now? Instead of using his brilliance to build some new venture he's hiding out off-grid on a private island in Fiji[1] and getting New Zealand residency[2]. Pretty weird stuff to be up to IMHO. Is he smarter than all of us and bugged out for the apocalypse now or something? [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9816787/Google-founder-Larry-Page-grid-hiding-Fijian-islands.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9816787/Google-foun... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58128475.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58128475.amp

sgpl 5y ago
It's his life. Google and their services are indispensable for billions. Doesn't he deserve a personal life where he can do whatever he wants to do instead of being beholden to humanity and serve it with his brilliance forever?
- narrator 5y ago
  I'm not criticizing his morality. Billionaires like Larry Ellison buy private Hawaiian Islands, but they mostly go there on vacation and don't just disappear there for months! I'm just asking why Larry? Why are you bugging out like it's the end of the world? Is there something you know that we don't? :/
  - prawn 5y ago
    I find it strange when superrich people don't go on private vacations for months on end.