Steve Chen

About

Steve Chen is a Taiwanese-American Internet entrepreneur and software engineer best known as the co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer of YouTube, the world's leading video-sharing platform. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Chen immigrated with his family to the United States at the age of eight, settling in Illinois. He attended the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy and studied computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign before leaving in 1999 to join PayPal as an early engineer. At PayPal, Chen collaborated with colleagues Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, with whom he went on to launch YouTube in February 2005. As Chief Technology Officer, Chen engineered the infrastructure that allowed YouTube to scale rapidly during its early growth phase. In 2006, just twenty months after its founding, YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in stock. Following the acquisition, Chen continued to contribute to YouTube before co-founding AVOS Systems in 2011, a technology incubator that acquired Delicious and developed the video app MixBit. In 2014, he joined Google Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence to advise emerging technology startups. In 2019, Chen relocated to Taipei, Taiwan, becoming the first recipient of the Employment Gold Card under Taiwan's Foreign Talents Act, where he actively invests in and mentors local startup founders.

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