#118 - Marques Brownlee

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Marques Brownlee. Marques is a YouTuber. He has over 8 million subscribers to his channel Mkbhd, where he reviews electronics, drives electric vehicles, and interviews people such as Kobe Bryant and Bill Gates.
You can find Marques on YouTube and on Twitter at Mkbhd.

**Marques Brownlee** (0:24)
All right, here we go.

**Craig Cannon** (0:26)
All right, Marques Brownlee, how's it going?

**Marques Brownlee** (0:28)
Good, how are you? Thank you.

**Craig Cannon** (0:29)
Doing well.
So I'm curious, I followed your channel for a while, but I definitely did not follow it in the beginning when you were reviewing software on your laptop. You've been doing it for a long time. What would you attribute your success to on YouTube?

**Marques Brownlee** (0:49)
Well, I do tech videos. So I think the obvious answer there is tech has been interesting and important for so long that just being in a tech space generally for that long has done a lot for it.
The channel itself, I mean, there's plenty of other successful tech channels, but it has its own unique style. It has a consistent voice. It's been me for 10 years. So I guess just if you combine all those factors, consistency plus tech staying interesting, that's mainly it.

**Craig Cannon** (1:19)
Was there any particular inflection point where it really took off?

**Marques Brownlee** (1:23)
No, I get asked that a lot about like, can I point to a certain video or date or month or something? Like what happened to go from like nothing to where it is now? But to this day, I look back and it's mainly just like, you can look at charts even. That's just a sort of an upward slope from zero videos to a thousand videos. It's obviously when you get to certain points, like the reputability, is that a word? The reputability of the channel becomes more significant. So you're more likely to subscribe to a tech guy with a million subscribers talking about something you should buy than a guy with a hundred.
So that's helped, but I feel like consistency again is major.

**Craig Cannon** (2:06)
Really? Because yeah, I mean, I follow a couple subreddits on like weird YouTube channels.
And there are people that have a thousand videos reviewing elevators, like simple boring shit.

**Marques Brownlee** (2:18)
Well, I mean, there's always gonna be like niche stuff which people will get really into. But I think like when it comes to something as personal as a tech product, you kind of want some sort of history to go on or sort of a reputation to look back on when it's like a thousand, phones are $1,000 now. So yeah, I think that's helped being able to have a history of stuff.

**Craig Cannon** (2:38)
Hmm, and because in the beginning you were just doing software, right? For the most part.

**Marques Brownlee** (2:43)
Free software.

**Craig Cannon** (2:44)
Yeah, and then did you start getting phones sent to you in like the early days of influencer culture?

**Marques Brownlee** (2:50)
I remember early days pretty well. Look, it was, I'd started with all this laptop stuff. So the first stuff that got sent to me was laptop accessories, a mouse, a keyboard, that kind of stuff, some paid software. I would get like a key for $30 off a $50 piece of software and I could have that access. So that was awesome.
Phone stuff didn't happen till much later. I remember the first event I ever went to was a Samsung event in New York City where I met a YouTuber for the first time. That was probably like six years in.

**Craig Cannon** (3:26)
You were in it for a while.

**Marques Brownlee** (3:27)
Yeah.

**Craig Cannon** (3:28)
You know, I grew up getting like pirated keys off of LimeWire and all that kind of stuff. Did you ever dip into that and think like, man, maybe I should review Final Cut Pro on my channel.

**Marques Brownlee** (3:39)
Oh man. At one point, I definitely did a whole Hackintosh thing.

**Craig Cannon** (3:43)
Oh, you did?

**Marques Brownlee** (3:43)
Which was definitely not, you know, kosher, I guess, but you know, Hackintosh world as a whole world. So I was curious about it and I got into it.
I was never really into downloading pirated music or any of that stuff, but I could imagine that was its own world for a long time.

**Craig Cannon** (4:01)
Yeah, yeah. Cause I was curious, cause as a kid, you have no money when you're starting out your channel. And I wonder if you grew up with that hacker ethos, like have you done a tear down video before or anything like that?