Steve Chen (1978) is an American businessman known for being one of the founders of YouTube. His computer innovations have managed to permanently transform the way we communicate and have revolutionized the viral video model. Since YouTube's inception in 2005, the portal has been highly successful and ranked as the 10th most popular website on the internet, just one year after its launch.
Chen served as the Chief Technology Officer at YouTube and in June 2006 was named by Business 2.0 magazine as one of the 50 Most Influential People in the Business World. That same year, Google bought YouTube for $ 1.64 billion in stock.
Steve Chen. By Rico Shen
He later co-founded AVOS Systems, Inc. and created MixBit, a video sharing application. His role in cutting-edge technology has kept him an important figure a decade after his appearance.
His knowledge of finance has made him a successful businessman. In addition to knowing how to reinvest your earnings, you also donate to charities and other entities.
Biography
Early years
Steven Shih Chen was born on August 18, 1978, in Taipei, Taiwan. In 1993, when he was eight years old, he and his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Prospect Heights, Illinois.
He attended River Trails College in Mount Prospect for his elementary education and later John Hersey High School, a public high school located in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
The last three years of high school he spent at the Illinois Academy of Mathematics and Sciences in Aurora.
Studies
After completing his high school studies, he enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and studied computer science. She graduated in 2002 with a degree in computer science.
Some of his colleagues from the computer science program headed to the West Coast of the United States in 1998 to launch a company that eventually became PayPal.
This online payment service provider grew so fast that one of the founders, Max Levchin, began hiring his former computer science classmates from the University of Illinois. Chen was one of them and dropped out of college while he still had a few credits to complete.
Career
Youtube
Chen was working at PayPal when he met Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, the other two founders of YouTube. In addition, Chen was one of the first employees of Facebook, a company that he left several months later to found YouTube.
Hurley and Chen worked together for the next three years, until eBay bought PayPal in October 2002 for $ 1.5 billion. Chen stayed another two years to help launch PayPal in China.
In January 2005, Chen hosted a dinner at his home in San Francisco, along with other PayPal employees. Hurley and Chen recorded some moments with a digital camera, but they found it difficult to share the videos with other guests via email.
Realizing that digital photos were easier to share thanks to new websites like Flickr, they thought it might be a good idea to create a similar video sharing website.
In 2005, Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Chen founded YouTube. Chen served as Chief Technology Officer. In a few months, the web grew rapidly and they announced that they received 100 million video views a day. In addition, 65,000 new videos were published every day.
In 2006, the site was ranked as the 10th most popular website. In June, they entered into a marketing partnership with NBC. That same year, Chen and Hurley sold YouTube to Google for $ 1.65 billion in stock.
Chen received 625,366 Google shares and an additional 68,721 in trust as part of the sale. As of 2018, Google's shares are valued at $ 729 million.
Other companies
Together with Chad Hurley and Vijay Karunamurthy, Chen founded another Internet company, AVOS Systems, Inc. In April 2011, AVOS bought Delicious from Yahoo, a social bookmarking website.
In May 2011 they bought Tap 11, a social analytics company, which they sold shortly after. The sole focus of AVOS as a company at the moment is MixBit, an application that allows you to create and share short videos. It is in direct competition with Instagram and Vine.
In March 2016, Chen and Vijay Karunamurthy created Nom.com. Chen was chief technology officer, while Vijay Karunamurthy, YouTube's former chief engineering officer, was chief executive officer.
However, in 2017 this streaming network closed, his Twitter account became private and his Facebook account was inactive since March 2017.
Personal life
In 2009, Chen married Park Ji-hyun, now known as Jamie Chen, a product marketing manager for Google Korea. They live in San Francisco with their two children.
He currently works with Google Ventures, a Google subsidiary that provides financing to technology companies at all stages of development. They invest in startups in a wide variety of fields: from computer software to healthcare.
Recognitions
In 2005, Chen was named one of the 50 Most Influential People in the Business World by Business 2.0 magazine. He and his partner were praised for their humility and for transforming the audiovisual content distribution industry with the viral video model.
In 2008, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley received the Producers Guild Vanguard Award, which is given to those who achieve great achievements in new media and technology formats.
On May 15, 2011, Steve Chen was listed as the Top 15 Asian Scientists by Asian Scientist Magazine.
References
- Christensen, C. (2007). YouTube: The evolution of media? Screen Education, (45), 36. Retrieved from search.informit.org
- Moscaritolo, BA, August 8, 2013 10:30 AM EST & August 8, 2. YouTube founders launch new video-sharing app MixBit. Retrieved from pcmag.com
- Steve chen. Retrieved from biography.com
- Steve chen (YouTube). Retrieved from esacademic.com
- Steve chen archives> the immigrant learning center. Retrieved from ilctr.org