Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, has quietly left the video-sharing service to pursue special projects at parent company Google, YouTube confirmed Tuesday.
Chen, who left YouTube last fall, had been responsible for the site’s technical operations since it was launched in 2005.
It is unclear what Chen’s new responsibilities at Google are. “Steve shifted his focus to help with some Google engineering projects,” YouTube spokesman Ricardo Reyes said in an e-mail. The news of his departure was first published on the blog All Things Digital.
Chen, 30, co-founded YouTube with Chad Hurley, who remains the site’s CEO, and Jawed Karim, who left the company soon after it was established to pursue graduate studies at Stanford University. The three met while working at PayPal. Chen, who had been studying computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was recruited by Max Levchin, one of PayPal’s co-founders and his former college classmate.
YouTube, which was famously conceived as a way of sharing videos taken at a small San Francisco dinner party, is now receiving more than 20 hours of video per minute from users all over the world, and its technical staff has expanded. The team is led by Louis Perrochon, founder of Google Checkout. Chen reportedly is not going to be replaced.
Google did not respond to a request for an interview with Chen.
Among other interests, Chen has invested in a building in San Francisco along with Ashwin Navin, co-founder of BitTorrent, Aber Whitcomb, a co-founder of MySpace, and Jim Young, co-founder of HotOrNot.
Navin told the Mercury News the goal of the venture is to create a co-working environment, which is a place entrepreneurs and other tech workers can work when they are in San Francisco.
Contact Elise Ackerman at eackerman@mercurynews.com or 408-271-3774. Follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/eliseackerman.
