Harry Jho worked out of a 10th-storey Wall Street office, in which one corner was stacked with treadmill desks and another was filled with racks of colourful costumes and a green screen for filming nursery rhymes. He worked as a securities lawyer. With his wife, Sona, Jho also ran Mother Goose Club, a YouTube media empire.
Sona had produced short children’s segments for public-access TV stations before the couple decided to branch out on their own. As educators – the Jhos once taught English in Korea – they saw television’s pedagogical flaws. To learn words, kids should see lips move, but Barney’s mouth never did. Baby Einstein mostly showed toys. The Jhos, who were Korean American, had two young children, and noticed how few faces on kids’ TV looked like theirs.
So they started Mother Goose Club, investing in a studio and hiring actors to don animal costumes and sing Incy Wincy Spider and Hickory Dickory Dock. It was like Teletubbies, only less trippy and inane. The Jhos planned to sell DVDs to parents, stirring up interest for a possible TV show. YouTube offered a convenient place to store clips, and, in 2008, Jho started an account there, not thinking much of it.
Two years in, he started checking the account’s numbers after work. One thousand views. He checked the next day. Ten thousand. He couldn’t find many other videos for kids on YouTube. Maybe, instead of television, he thought, we can be the first to do this.
It was the spring of 2011 when he received an email from someone at YouTube, a division of Google. Jho read it but did not believe it. He had long since given up on trying to speak to a human from the company. Once, at an event, an employee had handed him a business card, which he thought was a promising sign until he looked down to see the email address – – and no name. Now, a YouTube employee was extending an invitation to Google’s Manhattan office. At the meeting, they showed Jho plans for the site’s forthcoming redesign and shared some tips. Finally, Jho
