Meet the duo: Why YouTube's Chad Hurley can't be the next Steve Jobs
A dynamic duo is more likely to found a hit company than a lone gunman. Hewlett and Packard, Yahoo's David Filo and Jerry Yang, Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, — even Steve Jobs had his Steve Wozniak. The character of the company, then, lies not in one personality but the relationship between two. For YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, that relationship, according to Fortune, is the classic nerd-and-businessman pair.
Of the two, Chen is the straight-talker, but that's not surprising. His purview is technology. It's difficult to shuck and jive about bits and bytes. Hurley, on the other hand [...] is an on-message kind of guy, the kind of executive who's comfortable (or at least effective) giving the same answer he's given scores of times already, no matter what question you ask him. As a result, what he says is well-coached and of limited value, a skill that should please his new masters to no end.
It's a bit like Jobs and Woz, a relationship that ended up with the former taking over, the latter getting pushed out (but not complaining about it), and one banning unauthorized biographies while the other shills his memoir on talk shows.
But could Hurley do the same to Chen? Doubtful — mainly because even in his business-bullshit moments, Hurley sounds more like the I-don't-really-mean-it Gen Yers in a typical homemade YouTube video than a mini-Jobs full of pseudo-inspirational aphorisms. Look closer at his BS: It's just normal business stuff. In fact, has Hurley ever spouted a Jobs line like "I want to put a ding in the universe"?
