“Eat. Sleep. Exercise. Work.” I remember Jessica Livingston telling our YCombinator batch this in our first week of the Summer 2011 session. As a first time founder, I was terrified that I was expected to never see my friends or family again and that extracurricular activities of any kind had to be foresaken if I wanted any chance at being successful. Looking back, I have to laugh, because I was…
Nowadays, you can take out your phone, open a user-friendly app, capture a shockingly high-quality picture, make any corrections you need, and then send that picture to your grandma, who can see it seconds later. Consumer photography is a largely solved problem. However, the same innovations that have benefited consumers - access to high quality cameras, ease of use, rapid distribution of photos -…
The bittersweet consequence of YouTube’s incredible growth is that so many stories will be lost underneath all of the layers of new paint. This is why I wanted to tell the story of how, ten years ago, a small team of web developers conspired to kill IE6 from inside YouTube and got away with it. I do not recall the exact triggering event that led to our web development team laying out plans to kill…
Consider what taking a simple photograph meant 25 years ago. You had film cameras, negatives, dark rooms, emulsions, and paper. It would take days to produce a picture you could show to someone. Now consider what taking a photograph means today. With a smartphone that fits in our pocket, we can capture a photo, edit it, view it, and show it to anyone, all in as a little as a few seconds. These…
During a recent trip to the Disney Museum in San Francisco, I became immediately fascinated by the multiplane camera that was on display there. The gigantic machine represents so much of what I find inspiring in graphics and technology. It is fun to get lost in thought, imagining what the modern equivalent of the multiplane camera might be and how to foster the intersection of art and technology…
Three years ago, while I was a web developer at YouTube, one of the senior engineers began a rant about the page weight of the video watch page being far too large. The page had ballooned to as high as 1.2MB and dozens of requests. This engineer openly vented that “if they can write an entire Quake clone in under 100KB, we have no excuse for this!” Given that I agreed with him and I was excited to…
When I was going through YCombinator in the summer of 2011, I felt like I was the only person in the entire class who knew nothing about taking investment. I remember distinctly when Jessica Livingston announced the $150K we would be getting from SV Angel and Start Fund. When she told us the terms, the room erupted in shouting and applause. I sat there Googling nervously, trying to understand what…
In July of 2010, I made the decision to leave YouTube. The first thoughts I had were “How am I going to explain this to anyone? How will I tell mom?” To my family, I had the greatest job in the world and the amount of money I was making was unfathomable. They were certainly not wrong in thinking this. Google is absolutely the best place in the world to work and they do pay very well. It certainly…