I don't think so. I believe he had similar thoughts (streaming video online would be great) but immediately dismissed them as requiring too much bandwidth.
Had he had the foresight to avoid those limiting beliefs, he could have invented something like YouTube.
Thing is, a lot of people could have invented something like YouTube, and a lot of people tried. But the YouTube people had the skills to grow and scale their site in a phenomenal way, which is why they're the ones that are remembered. YouTube exemplifies the notion that ideas are worthless, execution is everything.
Right, but the article isn't really about creating youtube, it is about realizing when you've mentally added an artificial constraint and not letting it stop you.
Yeah, but in reality the ideas in the article are really more boring then the headline suggests.
He wasn't in a position to co-found youtube, not to mention there were already plenty of video sites around before and during youtube's rise to prominence.
It's a classic case of "well I had that idea I could of done it" - doing it is 99.9999% of the exercise, having the idea is 0.0001%.
They also had the connections to turn around and sell it to someone who could anchor it against the legal challenges that everyone involved knew it would have to face. Streaming video had been done before, but Youtube was the first place where you could upload your own video and show it to others without having it be manually approved by the site operator.
Given the current state of copyright law it was pretty much insane for them to expect to be anything other than a lawsuit magnet; unless they had a plan to deal with it.
Or, just as likely, on the other side of the spectrum, they tried to create the best site they could and got multiple offers on a daily basis since inception.
In other words, just because they sold to Google, doesn't mean other companies didn't also offer money that would have made the founders millionaires multiple times over if they had accepted any buyout offer in the previous 6 months to a year before that. Most any startup that sells for millions or billions of dollars didn't just accept the first buyout offer they got and it happened to be for a lot of money; no, they had been negotiating and evaluating serious offers from day one, all the while improving their software for months or years.
The main thing, IMHO, was the way it used flash/flv for video presentation and had a way to let users upload fairly arbitrary video formats and convert to flv on the back-end. I don't remember if I encountered flv video independently before I encountered youtube, but it was around the same time.
Remember the days before flash video? Remember having to use quicktime and realplayer? Those days sucked.
I'm pretty confident that before YouTube, the average non-geek did not have a way to embed videos on their personal websites. YouTube solved a simple but not easy problem: how can you let the mainstream share videos and search for videos. The server-side FLV encoding from what I've read - was groundbreaking - most previous video sharing websites either required a specific format/codec that required anyone who wanted to view it to install the codec and/or viewer.
YouTube democratized online video. The founders may have been at the right place at the right time with the right execution. However, do not discount the fact that YouTube's founders came from PayPal. I'll try to find the link later but in an interview one of the YouTube founders said being on the ground-floor at Paypal and watching them build the runway for the company to take-off inspired them because it made them believe it was possible.
I'm still to be convinced that the bandwidth and storage costs of YouTube are economically viable. If he (and many others) had 'limiting beliefs', they were in overlooking that hugely popular businesses often attract buyers even when they're haemorraging red ink.
The only people who've made money off YouTube are the founders. I'm glad Google are kindly subsidising it for us, but then I'm not a shareholder or a recently laid-off employee. As a business it's a dog.
Had he had the foresight to avoid those limiting beliefs, he could have invented something like YouTube.