What separates a true north from just a direction you happen to be going is this: Will you follow it even if it hurts—even if it means you fail? If you'd rather go under than violate your first principles, you know they're guiding you true.

The key to navigating uncharted territory is, if you don't have a map, use a compass. For companies, it's the same. When there is no map, use your compass—the one that points true north to your founding principles.

Right now, YouTube sees two billion active users per month. That represents about a third of users across the entire Internet. Over 50 million of those users are contributors to the platform.

Keeping true north isn't one single decision [or] one set of navigations; it's many, many micro-decisions along the way. The direction may be clear, but you'll still need to course-correct often, especially when you make a wrong turn.

Defining true north for your organization, especially as it scales, gives everyone on your extended team a way to communicate and to agree on what's most important.

This is a key point and central to YouTube's true north: Not everyone is an expert, but anyone can be, and if your expertise is valued, the public and your viewer count will let you know.

At the time, it was unclear that Google was going to be successful because there were so many other search engines—none of which really did a good job, but it was a very crowded space. Nobody thought there was actually any money in search.

The missions of YouTube and Google naturally aligned because both were about increasing access to the world's information. Searchable video was a huge component of that.