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Steve Chen is best known for co-founding YouTube in 2005 after he and Chad Hurley resolved to provide a simpler way to share videos online. Steve has been instrumental in building it into a viral video phenomenon and helped lead YouTube through the Google acquisition for $1.65 billion, less than a year after launching the site.

Chen was born in Taipei, Taiwan but when he was eight years old, he and his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Prospect Heights, Illinois. He studied computer science at the University of Illinois and graduated in 2002.

Steve was one of the early employees at PayPal, where he first met Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. Chen was also an early employee at Facebook, although he left after several months to start YouTube with Chad and Jawed.

As the key technologist, Steve developed the company’s massive data centers and helped build YouTube into a premier entertainment destination, and one of the most popular websites on the Internet today. He oversaw all areas of both engineering and product development, including managing site operations, and developing features and services that were compelling and easy to use for everyone until he left the company to pursue other projects.

Both Chad and Steve have been received several prestigious honors and acknowledgments from the business and entertainment communities including: Business 2.0’s “50 Most Influential People,” GQ’s “Men of the Year,” and Fortune’s “Most Powerful People in Business.” They also were prominently featured in Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” issue and received credit for largely influencing the publication’s unprecedented selection of “you” in a year that YouTube led the digital democracy explosion. Chen was also listed as one of the “15 Asian Scientists to Watch” by Asian Scientist Magazine in 2011. More recently, Chen has been working with Google Ventures, a venture capital funding bold new companies, and was inducted as a Laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln (the State’s highest honor) by the Governor of Illinois in 2018. Chen also received the Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 70th Annual Technology & Emmy Awards in 2019.

In late 2019, with over 20 years of Silicon Valley Experience, Chen moved back to Taiwan with a single focus on elevating the Taiwanese startup ecosystem onto the global stage.

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