Link: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1544289,00.html

As some of you may know, before going to Japan I spent nearly 2 years trying to start up a dot com company called GTV.com with a guy named Ken Mayer. GTV now stands for "Global Technology Ventures" but originally it was for "Global Television". The idea was to provide a simple, easy to use service for everyday people to upload video to the net for the world to see. Does any of that sound familiar? In 2000 when we started on this venture there really weren't any other companies providing a similar service. Unfortunately, 2000 also marked the year when the dot com bubble burst and nobody was willing to invest anymore in start up companies.

So in an effort to attract investors, we had to switch the focus of GTV away from what we really wanted to do and chased after whatever seemed like it might bring in some funding. At first we looked at video conferencing, then video instant messaging, then cell phone text messaging and finally AIM-YAHOO-MSN etc. interoberable instant messaging services for companies. So essentially we switched from doing something really fun, unique and interesting to something very dry, common and dull. To a certain extent this plan worked, and while I'm no longer involved with GTV, as far as I can tell it's still around today providing instant messaging services to corporations.

So why am I writing about this now? Well as you may have heard, popular new video upload service YouTube was just purchased by Google for 1.65 billion dollars. There's no way to ever know for sure, but had GTV stayed on its original course and built the service that was in our blueprints that 1.65 billion could have quite possibly been mine! Don't believe me? Well you can still see some traces of our old prototype websites on archive.org, here and here.

Oh well, that's life I guess. I better get back to looking through the "Help Wanted" ads. Maybe there's a Denny's somewhere that needs a new waiter.