VLC turned down $30+ million dollars to keep VLC ad-free | Lex Fridman Podcast

The interview begins with Lex Fridman referencing the well-known Reddit meme about Jean-Baptiste Kempf (JB) turning down millions of dollars to keep VLC free. JB confirms the story, acknowledging he refused dozens of millions of dollars on multiple occasions, stating he did so because it was not moral and not the right thing to do.

JB then traces the unlikely origins of VLC back to the École Centrale Paris, an elite French engineering school whose campus was uniquely managed entirely by its students due to being owned by an alumni non-profit rather than the university itself. In the 1980s, IBM and 3Com sponsored a token ring network experiment on campus. By the mid-1990s, the slow token ring network became a problem as students wanted to play latency-sensitive games like Doom and Duke Nukem. Seeking a faster network, students approached the university and corporate partners, eventually connecting with the CIO of Bull, a French company, who suggested streaming satellite television over a fast campus network instead of installing individual dishes and decoders for each of the 1,500 students.

This led to the 'Network 2000' project, a rough but functional demo that crashed after 45 seconds and leaked memory — but the demo only needed to run for 40 seconds. The project used MPEG-2 video streamed over a newly built ATM network running at 155 Mbps, one of the fastest in Europe at the time. Though the project was considered complete, two students later revived the idea into the broader VideoLAN project, which took about three years to convince the university to release as open source due to concerns about IP and monetizing the MPEG-2 decoder.

JB joined the project in 2003, when he enrolled at the university, and subsequently created the VideoLAN non-profit organization to extract the project from the university and make it sustainable. He emphasizes that he did not create VLC — it emerged organically from the VideoLAN project — but he credits himself with keeping it alive during a near-death moment around 2005 when only two active developers remained. Under his stewardship, VLC grew from hundreds of thousands of users to what he estimates are billions of installations worldwide.

On the topic of the financial offers, JB explains that the deals presented to him were predominantly from shady advertising companies wanting to bundle spyware toolbars, change browser or search engine settings, or place ads inside VLC. He draws a distinction: he is not anti-money and has founded startups, but he believes money must be earned ethically. He notes that had a legitimate company like Netflix approached him about integration, the outcome might have been different. He also argues that accepting such deals would have killed the project within three years through community forking and loss of trust. The last offer he received was described as 'obscene,' and came with the rationalization that the money could fund new open source projects — a pitch he still rejected. His final reasoning was simple: he needs to be able to go to sleep at night feeling good about his decisions.