Google Gave YouTube Entrepreneurial Autonomy

(p. 250) But after the purchase [of YouTube], Google did something very smart. Almost as if acknowledging that overattention from the top had hobbled Google’s original video effort, the company made a conscious decision not to integrate YouTube. “They were edgy and small, and we were getting big,” says Drummond. “We didn’t want to screw them up.” (Google was also smarting from its $ 900 million acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting, a company dealing in radio advertising, which had not gone well. “They had tried more of a top-down approach with dMarc and considered that a disaster,” says Hurley.) YouTube would keep its brand and even stay in the building it had recently occupied in San Bruno, a former headquarters of the Gap.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: bracketed words added.)

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