Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Great. Google buys it for $1.65 billion. Interestingly, Shishir Mehrotra this week went on the Grit podcast, the Kleiner Perkins podcast, and laid out a bunch of data on this. I actually didn’t have a chance to reach out to Shishir yet because it just came out. But a lot of this is from that conversation. After the acquisition, he said, and Shishir was the head of product and basically the CPO/CTO at YouTube, not right after the acquisition, but within a year came in for four or five years. After the acquisition, he said it was doing about $30 million in revenue. So they did have revenue. I believe, just to foreshadow our next chapter, that was in the form of programmatic advertising that was on the Doubleclick ad exchange that they were using to make money. They were losing about a billion dollars a year run rate on $30 million in revenue. The amount of money they lost was almost exactly equal to a penny per view. Just imagine every time you loaded YouTube in those years, Google would just flush a penny down the drain. They got to figure out something to do about this. For the first couple of years, the CFO at the time was terrified of it scaling. like please don’t scale in its current state. But of course there’s nothing they can do. The cat’s out of the bag, it’s scaling. The CFO was exploring, hey, can we sell this to one of the other companies who was bidding on it? That’s right because Yahoo and the media companies also wanted to buy YouTube.…

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