CTO/Entrepreneur, AVOS
Steve Chen co-founded the company in 2005 after he and Chad Hurley resolved to provide a more simple way to share videos online. Steve has been instrumental in building YouTube 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. As the company’s key technologist, Steve is credited with developing the company’s massive data centers and helping build YouTube into a premier entertainment destination and one of the most popular Web sites on the Internet today. He oversees all areas of both engineering and product development, including managing site operations, and developing features and services that are compelling and easy to use for everyone. Since the rise in popularity of YouTube, the site has been awarded “Best Invention of the Year” by Time magazine and was the first Web site to receive “Entertainer of the Year” by Entertainment Weekly. 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. Before YouTube, Steve was one of the first product engineers at PayPal. He led development efforts and served as an engineering manager on a variety of critical projects.
Steve studied computer science at the University of Illinois.
