HE GOT GOOGLED

WEB-VID WHIZ'S JOURNEOctober 10, 2006 -- YouGenius.

Chad Hurley, 29, the brains behind the wildly successful video-sharing Web site YouTube, became a multimillionaire yesterday when he sold his company to Google for a cool $1.65 billion.

Incredibly, his success story began after a casual dinner party with friends in San Francisco in January 2005.

Hurley had been a guest along with former co-worker Steve Chen, a 27-year-old math whiz. They had known each other since working together for the online-payment service PayPal.

The two had been taping videos at the party and wanted to send them on to other friends.

But "when we tried to share the videos and then we tried to e-mail them back to one another, they kept bouncing back," Hurley recalled in an ABC-TV interview on Aug 9.

"And so we thought, a lot of people were gonna have the same problem. And so we started working on a solution for this problem right away."

And in classic Silicon Valley tradition, the duo found a garage - under Hurley's apartment - to set up shop.

The pair got YouTube up and running within four weeks - and it was only a matter of months before it exploded on the pop-culture scene.

For Hurley - a handsome, laid-back, blond-haired surfer dude - embarking on a new business adventure wouldn't have been out of the norm.

He'd been a promising entrepreneur since age 5, when he first peddled paintings on his parents' lawn in rural Berks County, Pa.

Hurley eventually graduated with a degree in fine arts from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, an education that would later guide him in creating YouTube's now-famous logo.

Like many new college grads, Hurley found himself gravitating to the 'Net.

He wound up working for PayPal along with Chen.

In 2002, when that company was sold to eBay, Hurley began doing design-consulting work for clients, including the producers of the indie hit "Thank You for Smoking," a satire on the tobacco industry.

Meanwhile, he and Chen - himself a renegade known for sporting two gold ear hoops - had remained good friends. When they talked after the party that fateful night in 2005, it seemed only natural that they would go into business together.Y FROM GARAGE GEEK TO $1.65 BIL MAN