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It was 1999, and we were building a way for college kids to create online profiles for the purpose of sharing... with employers. Oops. I vividly remember the moment I realized my company was going to fail. My co-founder and I were at our wits' end. By 2001, the dot-com bubble had burst, and we had spent all our money.

I founded Netflix. I've built it steadily over 12 years now, first with DVD becoming profitable in 2002, a head-to-head ferocious battle with Blockbuster and evolving the company toward streaming.

I was one of the first artists to have a YouTube account, if not the first. I joined two months after the site launched.

Eight years ago, if I wanted to do a YouTube video, I broke out my camera and filmed everything myself and learned how to edit and kind of become a one-woman studio. But we're living in an era now, thanks to ICON, where any creator who is online, they can create in their own space.

When I started half.com, our three biggest competitors were Borders, Tower Records and Blockbuster Video.

I was very lucky. I started my own commercial company.

We started on April 1, 2003. So long ago, you couldn't watch video in a web browser; you had to watch it in a different player, like in Quicktime player or something like that.

We started about three years before YouTube existed, so we had to host all the videos on our own servers at a co-location facility. When we got so many hits on our first few videos, and we estimated our bandwidth bill was going to be about $12,000 a month, we knew that we had to establish a business model ASAP.

I started buying on the Internet quite rapidly, as early as 1995.