India, June 20 -- All stories begin somewhere. Finding out where isn't always easy, and this is especially true of YouTube.

The facts are straightforward. The video-sharing platform, now believed to be the second-most-visited site in the world (after Google), was incorporated in 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim.

One could say the story began three years earlier, when eBay took over PayPal, causing a culture clash that led 38 of the original 50 PayPal employees to quit. Among these were PayPal co-founders Elon Musk and Peter Thiel; future venture capitalists David O Sacks and Roelof Botha; and the three future founders of YouTube.

One could also go further back, to 1995 and the launch of Match.com, one of the earliest da...