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YouTube Founder Married Korean Woman

(Above picture: In this undated photo Steve Chen cooks with his wife Park Ji-hyun at a culinary school in Paris. It is uncertain whether the photo was taken before they wed or after. /From the website of Promenades Gourmandes)

Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, tied the knot with a former Google Korea employee back in 2009, it was belatedly revealed here.

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Chen visited Korea in March of 2008 to promote the video-sharing website here and met Park Ji-hyun (36), who was then working as a product marketing manager at Google Korea. Chen apparently fell in love with Park at first sight and proposed to her after a whirlwind courtship.

Park studied Korean language and literature at Seoul's Yonsei University and worked as an advertising copywriter at Cheil Communications after graduating in 2000. She later took a job with Google Korea in 2007. The couple, who live in San Francisco, had a son in July 2010. Park now goes by the name Jamie Chen.

Steve Chen is a Taiwanese-American who moved to the U.S. with his parents when he was eight. He attended the prestigious Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, and dropped out of the University of Illinois when he was a senior majoring in computer science. He then began working for PayPal as one of its founding members. In May of 2005, Chen founded YouTube with coworker Chad Hurley and turned the website into the world's largest video-sharing site.

In 2006, Chen was named one of The 50 Who Matter Now by Business 2.0 magazine. In November of that year, he sold YouTube to Google for US$1.65 billion and received 700,000 Google shares worth W290 billion (US$1=W1,142). Chen and Hurley co-founded the Internet company AVOS and acquired the bookmark service Delicious from Yahoo last April.

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