Chad and Steve in 2007 interview
My attorneys prepare the “amended complaint”
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE WESTERN DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA
Chad’s Nascar A-No-Go
Why would Chad Hurley jump from drawing logos to building Nascar teams? My theory is that he's been stalking my old employers, and their continuing efforts with Synthetic Interview. This isn't the first time Synthetic Interview has found its way into Nascar. The SI crowd first started chatting about Nascar as far back as 1998. Ironically, Chad seems to think swiping the YouTube logo, concept and strategy wasn't enough: he has to mimic everything I've done or my mentors have done in the video space. I say it, Chad says it. It's a fun copy-cat game we've got going on here.
The response to our interrogatories from Chad Hurley and Steve Chen
We receive our responses to the written questions. This is our first pass to see what information we can pick from Chad and Steve about the foundation myth. The questions deal primarily with their personal cellphone and office numbers, so we can proceed with subpoenas once we enter the phase where they can be issued. We never got a chance to enter that phase because of the Rule 11 threat from Google's attorney.
Attorney Monts, my lead counsel, imagined David Kramer telling them each to answer like 1 question each (the minimum requirement), and then objecting systematically to every single question after that. Read the documents yourself by clicking the links at the bottom of this post.
What did my legal team take away from this?
1) Steve Chen admits there is a valid range for discovery regarding telephone conversations.
2) Chad says he wasn't at PayPal after "early 2003", so he couldn't possibly have been there in 2004 when I allegedly called with the YouTube idea. Later, as the case is dismissed without prejudice, Chad asserts in a sworn declaration that he had no contact with the company in any form after the sale to eBay in early 2003. Anyone who has read about YouTube's founding knows that this could not be true. See the NPC post titled "Chad Hurley's Perjury" for more specifics.
What we sent them:
Plaintiff Herbert Elwood Gilliland III's First Set of Interrogatories to Steve Chen, Defendant
We sent almost the exact same questions to Chad.
What they sent us:
Objections and Responses to Plaintiff's Interrogatories (Chad Hurley)
Objections and Responses to Plaintiff's Interrogatories (Steve Chen)
Chad Hurley’s Perjury
The supplemental sworn declaration provided by Chad Hurley after Attorney Monts haggled with Google's legal team over court costs. The case was heading toward Google's standard "Rule 11" filing which had been promised by David Kramer, the lead counsel for Google. My attorney called it a "lawyer's trick" - essentially it made further discovery impossible until the Rule 11 motion was dealt with. They've used this in several cases. See other posts about the case and our strategy, as well as the Google defense strategy and the special privileges the judge allowed Google.
This document was required by Google's attorney at Chad's request (most likely) to have the case dismissed without prejudice (dismissed such that both parties paid their respective costs). In other words, to get the case dismissed without costing us for the Google legal team, we had to permit Chad to lie. So, here is the document and the reasoning behind it being a contrivance:
Note the highlighted text above where Chad states he had no connection to the company after 2002. We all know the famous Foundation Myth about how "three former PayPal employees" started the company, but Steve Chen in the interrogatories as part of our case stated that he was still at PayPal in 2005. If Steve worked at PayPal in 2005, how did Chad start a company with him without interacting with at least 1 employee of PayPal?
Here is an excerpt from a Fortune article entitled "The PayPal Mafia" published in 2007:
"And then things got interesting. The eBay deal, remarkable only because it happened in the bleakness of 2002, wasn't so much an exit as an explosion. Most of PayPal's key employees left eBay, but they stayed in touch. They even have a name for themselves: the PayPal mafia. And the mafiosi have been busy."
Chad and Steve went to Sequoia Capital and Roelof Botha is reported as advisor and integral in securing $3.5M in funding for YouTube when it was still in its infancy. Since Botha was a founder of PayPal, and Steve was an employee, how could it be true that Chad Hurley had absolutely no connection to PayPal whatsoever after 2002?
Anticipating this, our discovery team (read as: me, myself and I) contacted PayPal to "dig" around and see what could be found out about transferring calls. Why? Because a PayPal manager transferred me to a switchboard operator in November 2004 (or possibly, January 2005, we'll never know without discovery of evidence [subpoenas] which will never happen), who in turn transferred me to Chad Hurley's personal telephone contact number. This is when I told him about the YouTube domain name. Later, in 2005, I received a call back from Steve Chen (via either Hurley's, Chen's [most likely] or Jawed's cellphone). How did he get my number? Chad must have written it down when we talked the first time.
Someone flagged the Carson video above <g> .. it was a famous Carson bomb where he grabs the boom mic and says "Attention K-mart shoppers ..."
Here's another one -> Mel Blanc on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, most likely from the 1980s: