Even the biggest companies in the world put their founders through moments of doubt over whether they’ll end up being successful.
A rare glimpse into YouTube’s earliest days reveals co-founder Steve Chen expressing genuine concern about their fledgling platform’s future. In a candid moment captured on video in 2005, Chen admits to feeling “pretty depressed” about the site’s meager content library of just 40-60 videos. The raw, unfiltered conversation between Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim offers a fascinating snapshot of entrepreneurial uncertainty at what would become one of the world’s most valuable digital platforms.
The conversation begins with Hurley making a technical observation about video file sizes. “I think videos are just gonna be just as large,” he notes, seemingly discussing the platform’s infrastructure challenges.
Chen then opens up about his growing concerns: “Well I was getting pretty depressed towards the end of last week and I was thinking, dude, we have maybe 40, 50, 60 videos on this site. If I’m actually a user of the site, I’d watch four videos because there’s just not that many videos that I want to watch.”
The self-doubt becomes even more palpable as the conversation continues. When Hurley points to their current recording as an example of the type of content they’re producing, saying “videos like this,” Karim, who was filming the session, immediately responds: “I’m not gonna put this up.”
Chen’s frustration reaches its peak with a blunt assessment: “This is lame.”
This moment of vulnerability reveals the universal struggle of early-stage entrepreneurs grappling with product-market fit and user engagement. At the time, YouTube was competing in an uncertain landscape where video sharing was still experimental, bandwidth was limited, and user-generated content was an unproven business model.
The irony is striking when viewed through today’s lens. YouTube now hosts over 2 billion logged-in monthly users and sees more than 500 hours of video uploaded every minute. The platform Google acquired for $1.65 billion in 2006 is now estimated to be worth over $180 billion. Chen, Hurley, and Karim’s early concerns about content scarcity seem almost quaint compared to YouTube’s current challenge of managing an overwhelming flood of daily uploads.
This video serves as a powerful reminder that even the most successful tech ventures often begin with founders questioning their vision. Similar moments of doubt have been documented at other major platforms—Twitter’s founders famously struggled with defining their product’s purpose, while Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg initially viewed the platform as a college networking tool with limited scope. The YouTube founders’ candid conversation underscores a crucial entrepreneurial truth: breakthrough success often emerges from periods of uncertainty and self-reflection, not unwavering confidence.