Steve Chen
Steve Chen (陈士骏), born August 25, 1978, in Taipei, Taiwan, is a Taiwanese‑American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He co-founded YouTube and served as its chief technology officer. After YouTube, he co-founded AVOS Systems and helped build MixBit, and he later joined Google Ventures in 2014.
Chen moved to the United States with his family in 1986 and grew up in Arlington Heights, Illinois. He attended Thomas Middle School, John Hersey High School, and the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, then studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before leaving in 1999 to pursue opportunities in Silicon Valley. He worked at PayPal, where he met Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, and briefly at Facebook before starting YouTube in 2005 with Hurley and Karim. YouTube was sold to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, and Chen received a large stake in Google as part of the deal.
In 2009, Chen and Hurley founded AVOS Systems, which bought Delicious from Yahoo. He has been recognized as a notable tech figure, including Business 2.0’s “The 50 People Who Matter Now” list in 2006 and Asian Scientist To Watch in 2011. He launched Nom.com, a live-streaming food network, in 2016, but it shut down in 2017.
In 2018, Chen received the Order of Lincoln, Illinois’ highest honor. He married Park Ji-hyun (Jamie Chen) in 2009; they have two children, including a son born in July 2010. The Chens supported the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, where Jamie served as a trustee. The family moved to Taipei in 2019.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 14:48 (CET).