Steve Chen

STEVE CHEN

Place of birth : Taipei, China

Places lived : Canada

Steven Shih Chen, 32, who is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of the popular video sharing website YouTube. In 2005, the three founded YouTube. He currently holds the position of Chief Technology Officer at YouTube. Chen was also an early employee at Facebook, although he left after several months to start YouTube On October 16, 2006, Chen and Hurley sold YouTube to Google, Inc. for $1.65 billion.

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.

When YouTube was acquired by Google, Karim received 137,443 shares of stock, worth about $64 million as of Google’s closing stock price at the time. Throughout 2006, when the site got on its feet, You Tube was one of the fastest-growing and most popular websites, allowing browsers to view or upload short video clips ranging from home videos to excerpts of sitcoms or movies — but especially including “viral videos,” the sorts of videos that internet users have been sharing with each other for a decade. The site’s demographics are solidly adolescent, a group that has the most time for watching video after video, no matter how brief.

YouTube has nevertheless thrived. Google purchased the company in late 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock, making the founders multimillionaires. The company has announced the incredibly ambitious goal of hosting every music video every made, by early 2009. There are plans for sharing ad revenue with active uploaders, the people providing the content that draws users to the site.