YouTube founder secretly ties the knot with Korean

Steve Chen, one of three founders of YouTube, the world’s biggest video-sharing website, secretly got married to a Korean woman in 2009, according to reports.

Chosun Ilbo, one of major dailies here, reported that the internet entrepreneur is married to a former Google Korea marketing manager Park Ji-hyun, now known as Jamie Chen in the United States.

Reports say that the two met when Chen visited Korea in early 2008 to promote YouTube here. Chen fell in love with Park at first sight during a party hosted by Google Korea and proposed to her after only three dates.

Park, 36, graduated from Yonsei University in Seoul with a major in Korean language and literature. She first worked at Cheil Communications as an advertising copywriter and then joined Google Korea in 2007. The two now live in San Francisco and had a son in 2010.

Born and raised in Taiwan, Chen and his family moved to the U.S. at the age of 15. After he dropped out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Chen worked at PayPal, a U.S.-based e-commerce business where he got friends with Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. In 2005, the three founded YouTube.

Chen,34, now serves as chief technology officer for YouTube and was named one of the “The 50 people who matter now” by Business 2.0 magazine in 2006. That year, he and Hurley sold YouTube to Google, Inc. for $1.65 billion in stock. The two also founded another internet company AVOS and acquired the bookmark service Delicious from Yahoo last April.

By Cho Chung-un (christory@heraldcorp.com)