Steve Chen Visits Campus
Steve Chen asked his audience, “Did you use YouTube today as a dating site? That's what we thought YouTube was going to be.” And he would know.
In 1999, Steve Chen left the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was studying computer science, taking a one-way trip to Silicon Valley. He went to work for a start-up called PayPal. While there, he and two co-workers started YouTube.
On the afternoon of August 27, 2024, students, staff, and faculty lined up to see Chen make his first visit to campus in 25 years. An audience of 900 people in the Campus Instructional Facility and 200 viewers on a YouTube livestream watched his conversation with Grainger College of Engineering Dean Rashid Bashir.
The limited beta version of YouTube went online in May 2005 and was soon attracting around 30,000 viewers a day. When YouTube officially launched on December 15, 2005, there were more than two million video views daily. People weren’t looking for dates. Chen explained, “After a week, we started seeing that people started embedding on MySpace, the predecessor to Facebook. They allowed the ability to use HTML embeds that allowed you to take videos you found on YouTube and then put them into a profile page.
“If there's something out there, at least one time in your career, if you have an idea, do it and try it. If it works out, that’s great. Even if it doesn't work out, it will create an unforgettable experience.”
Steve Chen, Founder, YouTube
It wasn’t so much a video you uploaded and created yourself; it was something you found funny and put on your profile.”
He faced challenges as CTO. YouTube began before cloud computing and large data centers. Chen recalled, “Waiting at the parking lots for 42 racks of machines, figuring out how much power will be used in each and how much bandwidth was needed when YouTube used up something like 20% of the internet. Pulling out your credit card, bringing each machine up to the second floor, and plugging everything in.”
Summarizing those early days, Chen said, “Looking back, I think many startups all go through changes. It’s good to have the confidence to build something, but it’s also good to have the openness to think about needing to change.”
Flexibility was handy as more content arrived with legal issues around rights management, like excerpts of movies or television shows, music, international content, and commercials. Chen described “flying up to Oregon” after a Nike commercial went viral “to meet up because they wanted to talk further. I remember before that flight, we received a call from their legal department telling us to take it down. They thought somebody had stolen their intellectual property.”
Chen also answered the questions many people had. When was the first cat video posted? What was the cat’s name? The first cat video on YouTube “was my video. The cat’s name was Pajamas. He was born in Illinois.”
Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. Chen resides in Taiwan, where he is active in the tech start-up ecosystem. He said, “As I’ve returned to Chicago, I’ve gained more and more optimism and positive feedback. I think that greater things are coming. Spending three days up there, Chicago’s changed a lot. We visited a few of the sites where there are startups and incubators, which I thought was missing in all previous trips back.”
Dean Bashir formally presented Chen with a plaque celebrating his 2022 induction into the Grainger Engineering Hall of Fame in “recognition of his entrepreneurial spirit and for internet technology innovations.”
Grainger Engineering Conversations:
An Evening with Steve Chen