Anthony Padilla

Anthony Padilla was a digital entertainer and YouTube celebrity who, together with his friend and collaborator Ian Hecox, founded the widely popular Internet comedy duo Smosh. Born and raised in Sacramento County, California, Padilla was always fascinated by tech as a young kid. Back in the mid-'90s, when the Internet was still nothing more than a minor curiosity for most Americans, Padilla was one of the first kids in his school to have an AOL connection. He quickly became intrigued by this brave new world called cyberspace, and in 2002 launched his very first website www.smosh.com. Shortly after launching smosh.com Padilla met Ian Hecox. The two young boys found that they had similar tastes in comedy, and soon began making comedy videos together. Although rudimentary in their approach, the videos, which primarily consisted of both boys lip-synching the theme songs to various TV shows, got a lot of laughs from their friends and family. Then in 2005 YouTube launched, thus giving Padilla and Hecox, who now started referring to themselves as Smosh, a digital platform to start posting their videos. They quickly uploaded all of their old videos to the site, as well as a few new ones, and within a few weeks had already earned thousands of views. Their big break came when they posted a video of the two of them lip-synching the theme to the Pokémon series. With nearly 25 million views, the video quickly became one of the most watched in the YouTube's young history, thus making Padilla and Hecox overnight stars. Over the next several years Padilla and Hecox continued making funny videos as Smosh, while growing their YouTube subscriber base by the millions. In 2015 Padilla and Hecox starred in a big screen adaptation of their web comedy sketches called "Smosh: The Movie." Furthermore, in early 2016 Padilla and Hecox also began appearing in a scripted web sitcom called "Part Timers" (YouTube, 2016-). In July of 2016 Smosh's YouTube channel had reached over 22 million subscribers, making Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox two of the most watched entertainers on the web.