YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are parting ways. The duo worked together for 15 years, starting at PayPal, then got $1.65 billion from Google. But faced a series of missteps at their incubator Avos Systems. Now Hurley is cutting his losses and focusing on just one Avos product, MixBit, and Chen is joining Google Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence.
The last time we checked in on AVOS Systems, the company launched by YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, morale was bottoming out, the venture couldn't find its way out of the red, and a former employee called it a "gigantic waste of money." Now, the company has launched Wan-Pai, which even TechCrunch admits is a Chinese "clone" of Vine, Twitter's six-second video sharing sensation.
YouTube made Chad Hurley and Steve Chen rich as Saudi kings after they sold it off to Google. They had the chance (and money!) to build anything they wanted—and they did, a brand new company called AVOS Systems. Two years later, and it seems the YouTube duo were a one hit wonder.
