Steve Chen

Steve Chen is best known as the co-founder and chief technology officer of YouTube. YouTube ranked as the 10th most popular website a year after its launch, and Chen was named in 2006’s “The 50 People Who Matter Now” list by Business 2.0 magazine. That same year, Google bought YouTube for $1.64 billion in stock.

Raised in Taiwan, Chen and his family immigrated to the United States when he was 15. After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Chen worked at PayPal, where he met Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. In 2005, the three founded YouTube, a website designed to simplify video sharing online. YouTube quickly became one of the web's fastest-growing sites, and today Youtube has over 1.9 billion users who upload 500 hours of video content every minute.

After selling Youtube to Google, Chen and Hurley started AVOS Systems which acquired Delicious from Yahoo! Inc. Chen was listed as one of the 15 Asian Scientists To Watch by Asian Scientist Magazine on 15 May 2011. Chen started the live streaming food network called Nom.com in 2016 along with Vijay Karunamurthy.

Chen 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.