Ethan Anderson

Did that piss you off?

I mean, you've been working on putting your heart and soul into Google Video.

I was devastated.

It's one of the reasons why I didn't go to YouTube to work there and internationalize that product.

Instead, I left and went to Google Image Search.

One of my colleagues, Hunter Walk,

actually did extremely well by leaving the Google Video team and going to be a product management director at YouTube.

But for me, emotionally, I couldn't walk away from a year of combating YouTube and just start working for them.

I just wasn't ready to do that right away.

No, they were unrelated.

I worked on image search for a while before starting Red Beacon.

The story behind Red Beacon is I went to my Harvard Business School five-year reunion.

I was super excited to see my classmates from five years ago.

And I had amazing people in my class.

Sal Khan had started Khan Academy.

Chris Dixon had started two startups and was on his way to Andreessen Horowitz as a partner.

And there were several other stories.

And I was just thinking, you know, I need to go make my place in the world.

It's not enough for me to be a product manager, even at a great company like Google.

I need to go start my own thing.