Remembering Hulu
In the summer of 2007, a little video website called Hulu.com was born. 18 years later almost to the exact month, Disney announced that Hulu would no longer exist as a standalone product and be fully merged into Disney+, closing the final chapter of a product I am so proud and thankful to have been a small part of. While Hulu didn’t reach legal drinking age, it did reach legal voting age, which is no small feat for an Internet product. So to honor that product life, I wanted to share some photos I took from Year 1 (from July 2007 — July 2008) focused on what made Hulu so special: its people.
July 16th, 2007
My first day in the original Hulu office at 12312 West Olympic Blvd with Eden Li and Christina Lee. Hulu shared the building with the Chelsea Lately show, which was filmed next door. But our side of the building was almost totally empty those first few weeks.
The original Hulu Beijing office was a tiny sub 1,000 square ft space in ZhongGuanCun. From Day 1, Hulu had product and engineering resources in Beijing and grew the team about the same rate as our Los Angeles headquarters in the early years.
October 21st, 2007
A week before the Hulu private beta went live, the Hulu eng team went to Universal Studios for our first ever official morale event. After weeks of working around the clock, just getting out into the world was so much fun for us. From left to right, you have Patrick Beam, me, Andrew Lin, Eugene Wei, Christina Lee, Gavin Hewitt, Richard Tom, Kevin Seng, Rob Post, and Ilya Haykinson. 🎃
November 14th, 2007
Our first official Hulu Beijing team morale event to celebrate our beta launch. We brought t-shirts from LA for the team and went karaoke, which is what one does in Beijing. No complaints at all from me… 🎤
January 18th, 2008
Hulu won the Crunchy Award that night for Best Video Startup, which was particularly gratifying since Michael Arrington himself dubbed us ClownCo. I felt like such a returning conqueror getting to fly that beautiful statue back to Hulu HQ in LA. 🏆
January 24th, 2008
First Hulu all hands of the year. At that time, we were able to fit the entire company in a single conference room at the front of our building. Fun fact: that conference room was originally supposed to be the CEO’s office before Jason Kilar arrived and told the office manager that was ridiculous.
February 19th, 2008
Behind the scenes of a profile that Fast Company did on Hulu. I got to backup Jason in a photo shoot, and yes we are doing the “Dick in the Box” dance in between shots. 🕺
March 11th, 2008
Hulu came out of private beta on March 12th. This is the eng team in the office late at night flipping the switch to drop the login requirement.
March 24th, 2008
Two weeks later, we had our first ever company party on the beach in Malibu. There may have been significant amount of beer pong and flip cup played that evening. 🍺
April 24th, 2008
For Jason’s birthday, we decided to all dress up like him at the office (blue button down, black t-shirt, jeans). The funniest part was this wasn’t the first time one of his teams had pulled this stunt. Jason likes to wear the same thing. 👕
May 5th, 2008
Seminal moment for the company: we channeled our inner Beijing team karaoke experience and setup a PlayStation with Rock Band. 🎸
July 18th, 2008
One of my favorite traditions: we’d end ever week with Friday Wind Down, a mini all hands of sorts but more of an excuse to play foosball and drink beer. ⚽
Hulu Family
The creator of the tv show Friends (which we ironically could never get the rights to stream) described the show in their original treatment as capturing a “a time in your life when your friends are your family”. That’s exactly how I felt about the people I worked with in Year 1 at Hulu. We weren’t just co-workers and colleagues, we were friends and family. So many of us moved to LA together, went on to lived together, got married and started families together, and experienced an unforgettable moment in time together, brought together by a company whose product may no longer continue on, but whose legacy hopefully will.
