What a horrible headline in 2015 -- but I stand behind it in 2006! The fact that YouTube exists today is a miracle, and you have to really give kudos to the te

What a horrible headline in 2015 -- but I stand behind it in 2006! The fact that YouTube exists today is a miracle, and you have to really give kudos to the team there, as well as Sequoia and Google, for literally saving this business. At the time I wrote this YouTube was not a real business, it was a very simple website built off copyright violations with unsustainable legal and bandwidth bills! The fact that they were forced to sell a business that is now worth $100-150b for $1.6b is a good indication for how close to the brink of destruction they were. Now, the important lessons here are: 1. Google made a sick, sick bet and won big. ------- Given that Napster, Kazaa and countless other "media sharing" services had been absolutely crushed, it is a true testament to Google's legal and leadership teams that they took this risk. It was not clear that they would win their cases, but they did. 2. Content ID was a brilliant innovation. -------- YouTube was able to calm down many a pissed off media holder when they showed them contentID: "look, we know this is your video so we will shut it down or let you claim it -- and the revenue from it -- for all time! what would you like us to do?" Think of how fucking brilliant that was? That's perhaps the biggest lesson: you can innovate your way out of legal trouble! 3. bloggers have no idea about where things are headed. -------- At the time I wrote this I was literally a nobody. I used to blog with recklessness because, well, I really didn't think people read much of what I wrote. Things have changed a bunch for me, and now that I'm older I actually pull many punches when writing about other founder's companies. the thing I regret most about this post is not me being so fabulously wrong, but the fact that I was a dick to three founders working really hard to battle impossible odds. Sorry to Chad, Steve and Jawed... sincerely. best @jason