San Bruno Tutors Come To You

The biggest employer in San Bruno, California, is none other than YouTube. The company was founded in San Mateo, California, in February 2005 by three early PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen—but relocated to San Bruno soon after. Phenomenally successful, YouTube sold to Google in November 2006 for an astounding $1.65 billion in Google stock.

The instigating factors that led to the founding of the company are a bit murky but may have been related to Hurley and Chen’s difficulty in sharing videos from a dinner party. Karim, however, did not attend the party and said that the idea for a video sharing site came when video clips could not easily be obtained of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The first video uploaded was a nineteen-second video of Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The first video to reach a million views was a Nike ad in November 2005. By July 2006, 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day. In May 2011, forty-eight hours of new videos were uploaded to the site every minute, increasing to four hundred hours per minute by February 2017. With 800 million unique users a month, YouTube is the second-most-visited website in the world.

In 2015, the company expanded by purchasing more office space in San Bruno’s Bayhill Office Center near the corner of El Camino Real and Interstate 380. The 900,000 square feet of buildings can accommodate up to 2,800 YouTube employees—a boon for the city’s tax dollars. YouTube has also been a good neighbor because its employees are involved in a variety of outreach efforts. During one visit from the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco, a teen asked how to secure an internship with YouTube. (Good grades, made attainable with the help of San Bruno tutors, is a good place to start!) YouTube employees explained they looked for “Googlieness” in their new hires—a made-up term describing a “combination of passion and drive that is hard to define but easy to spot.” A BGCSF staff member noted that some of the teens were already acting “Googly” by learning about technology on their own initiative. Another demonstration of Googlieness might be to work with a San Bruno tutor to earn a high GPA.

The YouTube website gives support to many charities. A study found that people who donated were likely to first watch videos on YouTube related to the charity and its mission. Although views did not always result in donations, about 25 percent of views led people to actions such as signing up for an email list, sometimes the first thing signaling a donor’s interest. YouTube also publishes a playbook guide called “YouTube for Good” that helps nonprofits with their storytelling as part of their campaigns, and the company provides online donation cards that allow viewers to donate directly to charities.