Scribd should win some award for being the most counterintuitive successful startup. It's hard to imagine that computer science majors came up with this idea!
youtube doesn't do much besides make a few things easy: make a file web accessible and convert to another format and provide comments and some text people can paste to embed it, and i guess favorites and a bit more -- all the kinds of things scribd has i think. plus give away free storage space and bandwidth, which scribd does too.
