The co-founder of YouTube and the CEO of Catcha Group partner up to discuss how entrepreneurs can disrupt the industry
There is an art to disruption and no one is more familiar with how to do so than Steve Chen and Patrick Grove.
Chen is one of the co-founders of YouTube, who also served as the video streaming platform’s CTO until 2008—even after Google acquired it in 2006 for $1.65 billion.
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Through Catcha Group, Grove and his team help other organisations scale their markets and take their companies public. He has six IPOs under his belt across three exchanges and is behind on-demand video service Iflix, which was sold to Tencent in 2020, and real estate site iProperty Group, which was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s REA Group in 2016.
On November 9, both entrepreneurs were part of a panel at the Tatler Gen.T Summit in Hong Kong. In conversation with moderator Zara Khanna, a 14-year-old tech advocate and AI researcher, they revealed insightful theories on the journey to positive disruption and the pivotal mistakes and decisions they made along the way.
On regrets and hindsight
“Seeing how big [YouTube] has grown, many people usually ask me: ‘Do you regret selling YouTube to Google?’ said Chen. “Looking back, who would have known this was going to be the trajectory it was going to go on? But in hindsight, there was no way YouTube would have been successful without the guidance and the handholding of Google. I think it was the right decision to [sell] back then.”
