•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   
•    EYEWITNESS   

Youtube and Delicious may be household names among most Indonesian techies, but less than a decade ago the bright minds behind these multimillion-dollar empires were struggling just to pay their bills.

Brent Hurley, who was part of YouTube’s founding team, knows this well. He visited Jakarta last week as a speaker at the Boost Technology Start-up Conference, held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Central Jakarta, and shared his entrepreneurial tales from the Internet giant and other projects.

The 33-year-old Californian was YouTube’s first full-time employee when brother Chad Hurley and co-founders Jawen Karim and Steve Chen began building the video-sharing Web site in 2005.

The conference, attended by 300 tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, brought together successful tech entrepreneurs from Indonesia and overseas for two days.

Hurley said he saw his participation in the conference as an effort to build a relationship and ongoing dialogue with Indonesians.

“At the Valley, we have entrepreneurs and advisers who were previously successful entrepreneurs and venture capitals to provide the money,” he said. “The pieces are all here in Indonesia, but there are not as many venture capitalists and advisers to help create the cycle.”

Hurley discussed tech start-ups as solutions for user problems, and he emphasized the importance of frugal marketing in the company’s early stages as well as the importance of giving users an understanding of what the product can offer.

“When they get to your Web site, they need to be able to get what it offers in five seconds,” he said. “If you get a $10 profit, you must spend the remaining $9.99 on gaining new users.”

When YouTube began, it could only afford a meager $500 to build viral hooks. Major corporations ignored YouTube’s attempts to attract advertising, so it ended up giving iPods away to users. The strategy the entrepreneurs used was rather different. It was based on the idea that the cheapest way to advertise was to make YouTube more visible across the Web by offering embedding codes. It worked.

Although Hurley is generally associated with YouTube, his first experience with a tech startup was interning at PayPal in January 2000, which at the time had 20 employees. Hurley was then a senior at Albright College in Pennsylvania. He and his brother, who was also interning at PayPal at the same time, marketed a trust validation system to other companies; eBay, now the world’s biggest online auction site, was among them.

“They offered me a full-time job, but I turned it down because they were really small back then and I had one more year to finish school,” he said.

The following summer, Hurley came back to PayPal for a second internship. By that time, the company had grown to 200 employees. Realizing he had missed a chance to work at a promising global e-commerce company, Hurley went to work as a stock broker for Fisher Investments.

After a few years, Hurley decided to quit and start something new. He teamed up with his brother Chad, Chen and Karim, both early PayPal employees like Hurley, and created YouTube.

Hurley thought he was taking a big risk on the startup.

“I could get my MBA and spend thousand of dollars, or I could save that money and join this company without getting anything,” he said. “If things don’t work out, I’ll just go find another job.”

YouTube went live in February 2005. In addition to the three founders, the company also took on a few part-time staff members.

Hurley’s first job at YouTube was to take care of everything beyond the engineering. He juggled tasks such as customer support, promotion, luring MySpace users into embedding YouTube videos on their profile pages and meeting with investors to raise funding.

Engaging with brands and finding advertisers was a more difficult task. “People who responded thought I was talking about U2 the band, not YouTube,” he said.

Although YouTube was always a self-funded startup, with the founding team putting hosting bills on their credit cards, Hurley didn’t wait long to start payroll. In November 2005, the site started hiring full-time staff after an injection of funds by Sequoia Capital.

It was time for Hurley to start focusing on financial matters. “Once the money is raised, it’s all about managing and limiting the cash to burn,” he said.

YouTube started building its own hosting to cut third-party hosting costs. The company grew rapidly and continued hiring staff.

By July 2006, YouTube already had 100 million video views per day. To fight YouTube clones, Hurley said it tried to stay one step ahead of competitors and roll out new features periodically. It was aware it was not the first video search and sharing service, so it tried to be the fastest to come up with new features.

In October 2006, Google expressed interest in acquiring YouTube, which by then had 70 employees. The following month a deal was sealed for a selling price of $1.65 billion.

“No one expected it,” Hurley said. “Every time we added servers, the number of users and video views would go up. The work is never-ending in a race against video loading and uploading times.”

Hurley moved from being the finance director to strategic partner development manager. He closed more than 50 deals with consumer electronics companies such as Apple, Adobe, Sony and Samsung.

“It’s a rocket ship and you just have to hang on and roll with all the punches,” he said.

Four years later, he resigned to focus on co-chairing the investment subcommittee at his old school, Albright College. Later, he would also work as a summer associate at SV Angel LLC, a Silicon Valley-based angel fund, for four months.

Apart from his association with YouTube, Hurley is now quietly setting up a new start-up. His team is developing a tool to enhance conversation, and he plans to launch it later this year.

He is also helping his brother and Chen’s company, Avos Systems, with financing and by reviving the vision for their most famous acquisition, the social bookmarking service Delicious.com.

Delicious was founded in 2003 by Joshua Schachter, who then sold it to Yahoo in 2005. But the Internet giant stopped investing in Delicious after the acquisition, to the point that it even considered shutting it down before Avos bought it last year. Schachter resigned from Yahoo in 2008. A newly designed Delicious was launched with a new feature called Stack, a fold function for every image and link that is collected.

“We thought the only way to bring it back is to turn it into a social discovery and curation Web site, so we tried to get people to collect images online,” Hurley said.

He said it had been a challenge to breathe new life into Delicious, with some users upset with the changes. According to Hurley, however, the company believes in its small but loyal user base.

For him, it is an exciting new project to deal with as it tries to make it as successful as YouTube has become.

The fact that they have to change the concept, rewrite all codes and redesign the whole service makes it thrilling.

“Just by being around, that experience alone is very valuable if you want to start a new company, so you can plan a better growth,” he said.