Steve Chen (Chinese: 陳士駿; Wade–Giles: Chen Shih-chün; born August 25, 1978) is a Taiwanese-American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur who is a co-founder and ex-CTO of YouTube. After he co-founded AVOS Systems, Inc. and built MixBit, he joined Google Ventures in 2014.
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Early life and education
Chen was born in Taipei, Taiwan. When he was seven years old, he and his family immigrated to the United States in 1986 and settled in Arlington Heights, Illinois. He went to Thomas Middle School in Arlington Heights for his middle school education and John Hersey High School in Arlington Heights for his freshman year of high school. For his final three years of high school, he attended the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, Illinois. After graduating from high school, Chen was educated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied computer science, then decided to leave the university in 1999 in order to go to Silicon Valley.
Business career
Chen was an employee at PayPal, where he first met Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. Chen was also an early employee at Facebook, although he left after several months to start YouTube.