Key People

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Management

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.

Both Chad and Steve have been received several prestigious honors and acknowledgements from the business and entertainment communities including: Business 2.0's "50 Most Influential People," GQ's "Men of the Year," and Fortune's "Most Powerful People in Business." They also were prominently featured in Time magazine's "Person of the Year" issue and received credit for largely influencing the publication's unprecedented selection of "you" in a year that YouTube led the digital democracy explosion.

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.

Jawed Karim, Co-Founder

Jawed Karim is a co-founder of the popular video sharing website YouTube. While working at PayPal, he met Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The three later founded the YouTube video sharing website in 2005. After co-founding the company and developing the YouTube concept and website with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, Karim enrolled as a graduate student in computer science at Stanford University while acting as an advisor to YouTube.

Jawed has launched a venture fund called Youniversity Ventures, with the goal of helping current and former university students to launch their business ideas.

Board of Directors

Roelof Botha

Roelof Botha is a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital focusing on services and software investments. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Roelof served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal (EBAY). Earlier, he worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company. Roelof is a certified actuary (Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries), and has a BS in Actuarial Science, Economics, and Statistics from the University of Cape Town and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.