Ian Hecox

Ian Hecox was an American YouTube personality who rose to prominence in the mid-2000s as one-half the creative mind behind the popular Internet comedy duo Smosh. Born and raised in Sacramento County, California, Hecox always had a desire to make people laugh. As a young boy, he would often entertain friends and classmates, and found that he had a knack for it. When he was in the sixth grade, Hecox met Anthony Padilla, who had just built a comedy website called Smosh.com. The two young boys found that they had similar comedic tastes, and began working on funny animated videos together. Although the animation was rudimentary, the videos displayed a mainstream comedic sensibility that would serve the duo later on in all of their creative pursuits. With the launch of YouTube in 2005, Hecox and Padilla saw an opportunity to have their videos seen by a wider audience. They started recording themselves lip-synching the themes to popular TV shows, including the Japanese anime show Pokémon, and quickly uploaded them to the site. The videos were a hit with viewers, especially the Pokémon video. Hecox and Padilla started referring to themselves as Smosh, and soon began posting more funny videos to YouTube. Over time Smosh's YouTube channel earned millions of subscribers, while Hecox and Padilla became household names among digital-savvy Millennials. With their subscriber base growing by the day, Hecox and Padilla branched out in 2012 with three new YouTube channels, thus expanding their audience by the millions. As Smosh, Hecox and Padilla released their first film called "Smosh: The Movie" in 2015, as well as their first TV show called "Part Timers" in early 2016. By July of 2016 Smosh had over 22 million subscribers on YouTube, making Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla two of the most-viewed personalities on the popular video upload site.