Chad Meredith Hurley

Co-founder and former CEO of the popular video sharing website YouTube, Hurley is also known for co-founding MixBit. In June 2006, he was voted 28th on Business 2.0's "50 People Who Matter Now" list. Hurley grew up near Birdsboro, Pennsylvania and from childhood showed extreme interest in the arts, but later became interested in computers and electronic media during high school. He was a stand-out runner for Twin Valley High School's cross-country program, which won two of its PIAA State titles with him as a member in 1992 and 1994.

He was also a member of the Technology Student Association during high school. Hurley graduated from Twin Valley High School (Pennsylvania), Elverson in 1995 and went on to receive his B.A. degree in Fine Arts in 1999 from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, USA. After college, he worked at eBay's PayPal division, where one of his tasks involved designing the original PayPal logo. It was there that he met Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, with whom he founded YouTube.com, a video-sharing website, in 2005.

Hurley was primarily responsible for the tagging and video sharing aspects of YouTube. In information systems, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file) which helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system.

On October 16, 2006, Hurley and Chen sold YouTube to Google, Inc. for $1.65 billion. It was reported in the Wall Street Journal that his share was $345.6M at Google's February 7, 2007 closing stock price of $470.01. He received 694,087 Google shares directly and another 41,232 shares in a trust. YouTube's 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 the SEC filed on February 7, 2007.

Hurley stepped down as CEO of YouTube in October 2010, stating that he would stay on as an advisor of YouTube, allowing Salar Kamangar to take over the CEO position. In 2011, he and Chen founded Avos Systems for the purpose of giving both the freedom to pursue multiple projects. The incubator ran similarly to an Expa or betaworks in that the projects were chosen by them and stayed within a relatively closed environment. Avos was also unique in that it used a ready-made base of APIs and code snippets to help entrepreneurs get off the ground faster.

At Avos, Hurley and Chen began working on a single product: MixBit, a mobile-first video platform. It focused on editing and putting an individual's video clips together to create a medium-length video. Videos ranged from a few seconds to 68 minutes, and everyone could reuse someone else's content to create a brand new video. In June 2014, he and Chen decided to part ways, and since MixBit had been his bailiwick from the beginning, he continued on there while Chen moved over to Google Ventures as an entrepreneur in residence.