Olivier Poitrey
Dailymotion

Olivier Poitrey is the co-founder and CTO of Dailymotion, the second-largest video site in the world after YouTube. Before starting Dailymotion, he worked as a systems architect for Lycos Europe. Dailymotion is headquartered in Paris, France. As of May 2011, the site experienced more than 114 million unique visitors every month and is in the top 30 most visited websites worldwide (source: ComScore). In January 2011, it sold 49 percent of its shares to Orange, the key brand of France Telecom, for €58 million.

Pedro Santos: How did Dailymotion start?

Oliver Poitrey: Benjamin Bejbaum—my associate—travelled to New York for the holidays and came back to Paris with a bunch of photos and videos on his new digital camera. He wanted to share those souvenirs with friends and family. He used Flickr for the photos but he couldn’t find any online service offering an easy way to share of videos. Having a technical background, he managed to encode the videos and post them on a web site. But even for him it this was very time consuming. It was obvious that the web was lacking a proper service for this purpose. We were already working together at that time: I was helping him to scale the architectures of the most demanding customers of his web company (IguaneStudio).