Steve Chen

30-Second Summary

Steve Chen (born 1978), born in Taipei, immigrated to the United States at age eight. In 2005, he co-founded YouTube in a garage with two former PayPal colleagues. Twenty months later, it was sold to Google for $1.65 billion, making him one of Silicon Valley's most famous Taiwanese entrepreneurs. A few months after the acquisition by Google, he was diagnosed with an aneurysm; following two craniotomies and fifteen epileptic seizures, he settled back in Taiwan with his wife and children in 2019.¹ In 2018, then-Premier Lai Ching-te personally issued him Taiwan's first "Employment Gold Card."²

Born in Taipei, Only Two Asians in School

In 1978, Steve Chen was born in Taipei. He attended Jingxin Elementary School in Taipei for two years before immigrating to the United States with his parents at age eight.

He later recounted that in American high school, he and his younger brother were the only two Asian students in the entire school.³ During that period, he loved mathematics and science and later attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to study computer science. Before graduating from his senior year, he joined PayPal, which was just starting out.

After eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion, Chen left. He briefly worked at Facebook for a few months before leaving again—he wanted to do something of his own.⁴

Garage, Credit Card, Twenty Months

In February 2005, Steve Chen began building the system in Chad Hurley's garage with former PayPal colleagues Jawed Karim and Hurley.

The initial funding was very scarce; for a period, YouTube ran on Chen’s personal credit card.⁵ He later recalled: "We paid for it ourselves; before the acquisition, I maxed out my credit card every month." He then discovered that by making several payments within a month, he could get two or three times the limit.

YouTube's original concept was a social networking site where users could upload videos to be watched by strangers. But they quickly realized that users didn't care about socializing; they just wanted a place to share videos—funny clips, home movies, music performances, anything. YouTube unexpectedly grew into something else.

It officially launched in May 2005, and the traffic grew so fast that the servers couldn't keep up. At that time, no other platform globally allowed ordinary people to upload and watch videos so easily.

On October 16, 2006, Google announced the acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 billion, which was one of the most highly anticipated mergers in internet history at the time. Chen was twenty-eight years old then and held about 17% of YouTube's shares.⁶

However, he later stated that this was not a sale they initiated.

"We were basically forced down the path to acquisition, mainly due to legal issues."
— Steve Chen, Sequoia Capital Podcast⁷

There was a large amount of copyrighted material on YouTube—content from NBC, CBS, and MTV—all uploaded without permission by users. Media companies began threatening lawsuits. The three founders could not handle this legal battle alone; Google had the capacity to negotiate. It wasn't about selling; it was about survival.

Google Employee, Brain Tumor, Will

After Google acquired YouTube, Chen remained employed at Google. In 2007, CNN approached YouTube with an unprecedented collaboration: allowing netizens to ask questions of U.S. presidential candidates.

Chen said: "I was so busy for three days and three nights without sleeping—I only fell asleep on the flight back to San Francisco—and then I had an epileptic seizure."⁸

The diagnosis from the doctor was a brain tumor, scientifically known as a giant thrombosed aneurysm. He underwent his first surgery and began long-term medication control.

But the condition was not cured. The aneurysm in his head kept growing, and this threat became more concrete after he married and had two children. In 2018, at age forty, he decided to undergo a second surgery, which both doctors warned carried extreme risks.

"I wasn't sure if my kids knew their dad was going to have brain surgery, like having your head sawed off. I also left a will for my children," he later said, "which proved that I survived the long six-hour operation."⁹

After two craniotomies and fifteen epileptic seizures, he lived.

Second Ventures: AVOS and Nom.com, Two Failures

In 2011, Chen and Hurley left Google to start AVOS Systems in San Mateo, Silicon Valley, where YouTube was founded, and also acquired the social bookmarking service Delicious from Yahoo.

This venture did not replicate the success of YouTube. In 2014, it was reported that Chen left AVOS to join Google Ventures (Google's venture capital arm).

In 2016, he co-founded Nom.com, a live-streaming food network—allowing people to cook and stream simultaneously. Nom.com closed in 2017.¹⁰

Neither of his two subsequent ventures were successful, but Chen never used the word "failure" to describe them. He said that what he wanted to do was something "never done before," and whether it succeeded or not was another matter.

Returning to Taiwan: Earthquake on Day Four

In 2019, one year after his surgery, forty-one-year-old Chen moved back to Taiwan with his Korean wife Park Ji-hyun and two children.

He said that the idea of leaving America had been around for a long time. "The guns, drugs, and safety issues on the streets of San Francisco were very serious; it was very dangerous to walk in the street at night." He wanted to give his children a different environment and have them learn Traditional Chinese and experience Taiwanese culture.

Life in Taiwan surprised him somewhat. "Taiwan is small but complete, transportation is more convenient than other countries, and people are friendly. Driving south along the coast is truly beautiful," he added. He also recalled: "I remember having an earthquake on the fourth day I returned to Taiwan."¹¹

The children adapted better than he expected. Although he was initially worried about being treated as a foreigner in Taiwan, his children quickly integrated and now speak of their American friends "as if they were foreigners."

In 2018, Premier Lai Ching-te issued the first "Employment Gold Card" in Taiwan to Steve Chen—a residency work permit established by the government to attract overseas technological talent. Minister of Science and Technology Wu Cheng-chung also issued him a VIP Black Card from the Taiwan Tech Association (TTA).²

He Says He Has No Regrets About Selling YouTube

This is his most frequently asked question.

Some friends estimate that if YouTube were still operating independently today, its valuation would be between $50 billion and $80 billion. Since Chen held 17% of the shares, the amount he could have received was many times more than $1.65 billion.

His answer is usually: no regrets. He says that YouTube became what it is today because of Google's resources and protection—without their ability to resolve copyright lawsuits, YouTube might have been sued into bankruptcy by media company lawyers long ago.¹²

Furthermore, $1.65 billion is not a small amount. At twenty-eight, he had money, time, and things he wanted to do next.

What He Said About Taiwan

In 2023, during a speech encouraging Asian youth to chase dreams in Silicon Valley, his words landed in Taiwan:

"The talent of Taiwanese people is not inferior to that of Americans. What we lack is success stories and opportunities for the world to see us."¹³

He sponsored the "Taiwan Project" at the Asia Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford University and co-hosted a forum with National Taiwan University, inviting entrepreneurs and researchers from Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and the United States to converse. He said that what he wanted to do was make Taiwanese startups visible to the world—not waiting for the world to come to Taiwan, but actively bringing Taiwan onto the stage.

A man who left at eight and returned at forty-one continues to be connected to this island in his own way.

Further Reading

• Steve Chen Interview: Surviving a Brain Tumor Crisis to Settle in Taiwan for His Children's Education (Mirror Weekly, 2021) — The most complete account of settling in Taiwan
• YouTube Founder Steve Chen: The Key to Creating 2.5 Billion Users from Zero in 18 Months (Startup Gathering, 2024) — Inside the YouTube startup and technical decisions
• Lai Ching-te Issues First Employment Gold Card to YouTube Founder Steve Chen (National Development Council, 2018) — Background on the Employment Gold Card policy
• Steve Chen's Startup in Taiwan: The Silicon Valley Golden Child Returns to Taiwan (Yahoo News, 2022) — Observations on starting a company at TTA after returning to Taiwan

References / Sources