APA Month Day 1 – YouTube co-founder Steve Chen

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, so every day this month we’ll try to profile Asian Americans and Asian American videos on the ‘Net.

The first person we are profiling is Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube. According to ComScore for Janaury 2008, 78.5 million viewers watched 3.25 billion videos on YouTube.com (41.4 videos per viewer). YouTube.com also accounted for one-third of the 9.8 billion videos viewed online in the U.S. during the month. You can also watch Steve Chen’s channel.

Steve Chen is Chief Technology Officer of YouTube and co-founded the company in 2005 after he and Chad Hurley resolved to provide a more simple way to share videos online. Steve has been instrumental in building YouTube into a viral video phenomenon and helped lead YouTube through the Google acquisition for $1.65 billion less than a year after launching the site.

As the company’s key technologist, Steve is credited with developing the company’s massive data centers and helping build YouTube into a premier entertainment destination and one of the most popular Web sites on the Internet today. He oversees all areas of both engineering and product development, including managing site operations, and developing features and services that are compelling and easy to use for everyone.

Before YouTube, Steve was one of the first product engineers at PayPal. He led development efforts and served as an engineering manager on a variety of critical projects. Steve studied computer science at the University of Illinois.

Here’s a video message from co-founders Steve Chen and Chan Hurley after Google ‘s acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 billion: