For YouTube, which had Roelof Botha as its first investor, the “Why now?” was a confluence of factors and breakout successes that tend to be born during these perfect storms. First, bandwidth costs plummeted after the dot-com crash. Second, storage costs were dropping due to this new thing called cloud computing. Third, blogging was taking off. Millions of folks were writing tens of millions of posts every week and YouTube offered a clever way to embed their videos on other people’s sites—reaching a massive audience for free.
