PayPal employed all three YouTube founders—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—before they created YouTube.
The founders met through their work at PayPal, where Hurley worked as a designer and Chen and Karim were engineers. After eBay acquired PayPal in 2002, the three became part of the early Silicon Valley network often associated with former PayPal employees.
YouTube was founded in February 2005. Its original concept was reportedly a video-dating service, but the founders soon broadened it into a general video-sharing platform. The first public video, “Me at the zoo,” was uploaded in April 2005.
A common mix-up is eBay: eBay acquired PayPal, but it did not employ the three founders before YouTube. Google also came later, purchasing YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion.