FWIW I think their reasoning must have changed drastically in the year between those initial emails and when they actually acquired Youtube. The emails suggest $10-15M as a price. They ended up paying $1.65B, which shocked everyone at the time (and now seems small). The difference is that in that year, YT grew exponentially. So this is actually an example of a high-growth win; indeed it's one of the classic examples.
Larry Page: “I think we should look into acquiring YouTube” (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28424339 - Sept 2021 (245 comments)
FWIW I think their reasoning must have changed drastically in the year between those initial emails and when they actually acquired Youtube. The emails suggest $10-15M as a price. They ended up paying $1.65B, which shocked everyone at the time (and now seems small). The difference is that in that year, YT grew exponentially. So this is actually an example of a high-growth win; indeed it's one of the classic examples.
This sequence of tweets kind of confirms that:
https://twitter.com/JGamblin/status/1433847336459964420
https://twitter.com/jhuber/status/1433863045613174784
https://twitter.com/JGamblin/status/1433865429932462083
https://twitter.com/jhuber/status/1433866494752935938
(the last one is the important one but the sequence is amusing)