YouTube Founder Turns to Fashion
Four years after selling YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion, Chad Hurley is leaving his video-sharing website behind. What he really wants to do, you see, is join the fashion industry. How... refined.
Hurley, worth several hundred million dollars, will join his business partner and work full-time on his menswear label Hlaska. Hlaska, says Hurley, is a combination of "Hawaii" and "Alaska... hot and cold states, small and large, represent[ing] the last of America's expansion." Hurley wants to make more clothing in America and speed up design and production cycles.
That may sound a bit nerdy, but you can chalk it up as the latest step in Hurley's personal gentrification. The Indiana University of Pennsylvania grad, son of a financial consultant and a schoolteacher, married the daughter of legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jim Clark not long after arriving in California. Though he met Kathy Clark, six years his senior, when he was a mere web designer, he soon made his own fortune via YouTube. Witching from the grubby world of web video to fashion moves his entrepreneurial aspirations upmarket yet again — even if the apparel is fairly casual, as shown in the samples—iPad case, manpurse, travel wallet, "Apprentice" shirt—below.
[via The Cut. Photo of Hurley via Robert Scoble/Flickr. Product images via Hlaska]