YouTube co-founder Steve Chen returns to Taiwan to tap tech talent, link island with Silicon Valley

After decades in California, Steve Chen, the multimillionaire co-founder of YouTube, has returned to his birthplace of Taiwan with plans to harvest the island’s untapped tech talent by forging connections with Silicon Valley.

Chen is putting together a project to support Taiwanese people to hatch mega-companies he says could grow quickly with Silicon Valley’s relationships, capital and know-how.

“Some of these people are going to come back to Taiwan and the number of Taiwanese going to the US is going to grow,” Chen said. “Hopefully we spawn a cycle that goes up and up.

“The dream is they’d all be unicorns,” Chen added, using an industry term for an unlisted start-up valued at more than US$1 billion.

But people with the requisite knowledge often lack the international exposure or foreign connections that are useful for building a business that can grow outside Taiwan, Chen said.

“It’s not an easy place to start a Silicon Valley mega company,” he said. “Most of Taiwan’s 23 million people don’t have enough external exposure.”

Chen co-founded YouTube with former PayPal colleagues Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim in 2005. Chen and Hurley sold YouTube to Google in 2006 for US$1.65 billion. He became an entrepreneur-in-residence at Google Ventures from 2014 to 2018 and moved back to Taiwan the following year.

The “batting average” for those start-up teams would be rate of acceptance into a Silicon Valley accelerator, Chen said. Accelerators help start-ups grow through mentoring and education aimed at raising money and launching products.

He has found 40 or 50 gold-card expatriates who may be able to “foster some ideas” and pair up with Taiwanese engineers to start businesses. This method of matching would serve as substitute for the