"We're starting to see that anyone with an internet connection, a digital camera and computer can become a star overnight."
- Steve Chen
With less to no idea that it would turn out to be such a revolutionary force and community-creating phenomenon, Steve Chen and his fellow colleagues founded the most revolutionary video sharing website, YouTube.
YouTube that was a product created out of a garage in Menlo Park, currently holds a third of all video viewed on the web with more than 60 hours of footage uploaded into it every minute.
The acquisition of YouTube by Google has written the web's biggest success story for years.
Early Life
Steven Shih "Steve" Chen (traditional Chinese: 陳士駿; simplified Chinese: 陈士骏; pinyin: Chén Shìjùn) was born on August 18th, 1978. He is a Taiwanese-born American raised in Taipei, Taiwan.
When he was fifteen years old, Chen and his family immigrated to the Chicago, United States. Chen went to John Hersey High School in Arlington Heights and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studying computer science.
Chen was a gifted student who earned money working at the local 7-11 store and Jewel/Osco supermarket during his early years in the United States.
When he attended university, several of his friends in the computer science program headed to the West Coast in 1998 in order to launch the company that eventually became PayPal. The online payment service provider grew so quickly that one of the founders began to hire his former computer-science classmates at the University of Illinois; Chen was one of the recruits, and quit his studies just a few credits short of his degree.
Career And YouTube
Steve Chen worked at PayPal, Inc. as an early employee, where he met Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. Out of Hurley's garage in Menlo Park, in February 2005, the three founded YouTube, a website designed to simplify video sharing online in which users can upload, view and share videos.
Chen was also an early employee at Japanimation before he left after several months working to start YouTube.
The founders acquired the domain name www.youtube.com and activated it on February 14, 2005. Over the subsequent months, the website was developed.
Steve Chen and the co-founders had little idea that the video-sharing website they created would turn out to be such a revolutionary force and community-creating phenomenon. A few months after its launch, 100 million videos are uploaded in its searchable archive, with new ones added at a rate of 65,000 daily.
A year after its launch, YouTube that had its early headquarters situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California, was ranked as the 10th most popular website.
Their biggest expense at that time was paying for bandwidth capabilities that would allow its rapidly increasing users to visit the site simultaneously without making it crash. Initially, they used some of their own personal lines of credit to pay before their former employers at PayPal and Sequoia Capital agreed to fund a $3.5 million check.
With the increase of maintenance expense, the issue of revenue proved to be their biggest challenge. With the doubt that they can gain revenue by selling ad spaces, web traffic surveyors like Alexa that began to see a spike in visitors to YouTube led advertisers to the site.
Steve Chen that has previously held the position of Chief Technology Officer at YouTube, helped lead YouTube, LLC through the Google acquisition for $1.65 billion in October 2006, making the former co-workers millionaires overnight.
YouTube currently holds a third of all video viewed on the web with more than 80 hours of footage uploaded into it every minute.
Chen received 625,366 shares of Google and an additional 68,721 in a trust as part of the sale. The Google shares that he received were worth $350 million at Google's October 30, 2007 closing stock price. Chen and Chad Hurley have now started AVOS Systems, an internet company which has acquired Delicious from Yahoo! Inc.
Personal Life And Awards
In the year 2009, Steve Chen married Park Ji-hyun (Jamie Chen), a Google Korea product marketing manager. Chen met Ji-hyun when he visited Korea in March 2008. They live in San Francisco with one son who was born in July 2010.
Steve and Jamie Chen are the major supporters of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco where Jamie was appointed a trustee in July 2012.
In June 2006, Steve Chen was named to 2006's "The 50 People Who Matter Now" list by Business 2.0 magazine, a few months before Google bought YouTube.