No list of Illini innovators is complete without the name of a certain Taiwan-born tech whiz who gave the world one of its most popular websites.
So how exactly did Steve Chen (’02) come up with the name YouTube, anyway?
“It was Valentine´s Day — February 14, 2005,” he says. “I was with (co-founder) Chad (Hurley), talking about ideas for a new venture. After chatting about the rough idea of a video hosting service that would take video uploads, transcode the videos and make the videos playable within a browser, the conversation progressed to the naming and logo design, which we both did that night.
“The name YouTube is the conglomeration of two words. The ‘you´ part focuses on the identity of the content creator and characters in the content. The ‘tube´ was a reference to a television.”
In 2006, Chen and Hurley sold YouTube to Google for a reported $1.65 billion. These days, the Grainger College of Engineering Hall of Famer and his family live comfortably in Taiwan, where they relocated from San Francisco in 2024.
It's a few steps up from the first place he called home in Champaign-Urbana.
“My most unforgettable memory (of campus life) is the first summer of my freshman year in a rental house on Lincoln Avenue in Urbana," Chen says.
“The house was torn down the month after we occupied it. It was likely the most horrendous living quarters that I had ever resided in, but at the same time, it was also the most amount of freedom I ever had in my life.
“Decisions on exactly how to spend each minute of that summer were completely up to me. Those months were very educational about life.”
