Hunter Walk is a partner at Homebrew Ventures, a seed stage venture fund.
Over a decade ago, while Hunter was a Product Manager at Google working on the newly acquired YouTube platform, Apple had approached them before Steve Jobs had even announced the world’s first iPhone. There was no public App Store at that time, and no third party apps.
Apple wanted to have complete control over the experience and built the first video app for the iPhone that would pull YouTube content. It was a risky move, but the alternative to working with Apple was – at that time – going directly to a carrier and paying them large sums of money to include your app on all their devices.
It was an exciting but challenging time as Hunter recounts – because there were so many moving pieces and not everyone saw that smartphones were going to play such a huge role in our daily lives in just a few more years.
So if you’re a Product Manager yourself, love YouTube, or are just curious about how a startup like YouTube sold to Google for $1.65B in 2006 (the largest consumer tech acquisition at the time) and then went on to work with Apple to ensure they’d make the jump to smartphones – get ready, cause Hunter is going to share his insights and experiences into all this and more.
Hack To Start is a weekly podcast focused on interesting people and the innovative ways they achieve success hosted by @FrancoVarriano and @TylerCopeland.