During a panel at today's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, John Battelle asked the panelists what was the biggest mistake they had made over the past year. Most panelists speaking in front of hundreds of people would have responded with a self-serving answer. But not Dmitry Shapiro. The CEO of Veoh Networks told the truth.

He explained that despite launching the online video sharing startup before YouTube, it was YouTube that received a $1.65 billion buyout offer from Google. It's an obvious observation, but Shapiro explained that the reason for Veoh's slower start was the fact that it spent a lot of its time focused on solving the hard problem of moving large pieces of video data instead of doing what YouTube did, which was to focus on allowing its users to upload and share short clips. "We should have focused on the bigger problem later," he said.

Veoh isn't alone. YouTube was the one able to build a 46% market share in the online video segment while its closest startup competitors could only muster 1% or 2%. But it bodes well for Voeh and the investors that poured $14.75 million into it that Shapiro recognizes the company's past failures and is doing something about it now.

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Tags: veoh, web2, video, web20summit, web20summit06, vc, venture+capital