Jawed Karim is a German-American internet businessman, technologist, and co-founder of the famous American video-sharing website, YouTube, which currently works as a subsidiary of Google. Earlier, Karim was an employee of PayPal and co-founded YouTube with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. He was also the first person to upload a video on YouTube that was named ‘Me at the zoo.’ The nineteen-second video that featured Karim at the San Diego Zoo has collected over 130 million views as of December 14, 2020. 

While serving at PayPal, Karim created numerous core elements, which included its real-time anti-internet fraud system. After YouTube was launched, Karim became an informal adviser of the site rather than an employee and shifted his focus on further education while taking a relatively lower share in the company than other co-founders. YouTube was later taken by Google and Karim got 137,443 shares of the stock. His other endeavors include launching Youniversity Ventures, a venture fund with Kevin Hartz and Keith Rabois, and investing in Airbnb, Inc. 

Early Life & Childhood   

Jawed was born on October 28, 1979, in Merseburg, East Germany to Christine Karim and Naimul Karim. His father is a researcher from Bangladesh while his mother is a German scientist affiliated with the University of Minnesota as a research professor of biochemistry. He has a sister, Ilias.  

During the early 1980s, he relocated to West Germany with his family and was brought up in Neuss. In 1992, his family moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota, US, where he attended Saint Paul Central High School.  

He registered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, in the department of computer science. He joined PayPal and dropped the university campus before finishing his graduation. He was one of PayPal’s initial employees. He continued to complete his course and received a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2004. Thereafter, he joined Stanford University and received a master’s degree in computer science. 

Career: 

Karim completed his Internship in 1998 with the American high-performance computing manufacturing company Silicon Graphics Inc. that creates both computer hardware and software. There he had to work on 3D voxel data management for huge data sets for volume rendering.  

He was one of the earliest employees of PayPal, an American company that works an online payments system worldwide. There he grew his link with two other early employees of the company, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. In 2005, the three founded the video-sharing website, YouTube. Karim designed and implemented numerous core components of PayPal which included a real-time anti-fraud system.  

According to Karim, the inspiration for developing YouTube came when he could not get video clips of two events easily. These included the clips of the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy involving Janet Jackson and that of Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, both occurred in 2004. Hurley and Chen mentioned that the idea of creating YouTube was formerly inspired by the dating site, Hot or Not.  

On February 14, 2005, the domain name of YouTube was activated while the site was slowly developed in the next few months. It started as a venture capital-funded technology startup company with initial investments of $11.5 million from American venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital, and $8 million from Artis Capital Management. Formerly the headquarters of the company was established in San Mateo, California, above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant.  

while working for PayPal Jawed met Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, guys with whom he later created YouTube on April 23, 2005, he created his YouTube channel by the name of ‘jawed’ and uploaded the first video on the video-sharing website. The video titled ‘Me at the zoo’ was filmed by his high school friend Yakov Lapitsky and featured Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video has already earned over 130 million views while his channel has over 1.41 M subscribers.  

Following the creation and development of YouTube with Chen and Hurley, Karim became an adviser to the company. Meantime, he resumed completing his studies and registered at Stanford University to complete his graduation in computer science. To focus on his studies, Karim became an informal adviser of the company rather than an employee at the time of launch of the website, in February 2005.  

Due to such a smaller role in YouTube, Karim not only got a much lower share in the company compared to the other two co-founders but also remained mostly unrecognized and out of the public popularity as the third founder of YouTube till the time Google bought the website for US$1.65 billion in November 2006. Karim received 137,443 shares of stock, which, based on the closing stock price of Google at that time, amounted to approximately $64 million.  

Meanwhile, he delivered a lecture at the annual ACM Conference of the University of Illinois on the history of YouTube in October 2006. During the lecture titled ‘YouTube: From Concept to Hyper-growth,’ Karim tagged Wikipedia as an innovative social experiment. In May 2007, he became the youngest Commencement Speaker (and the 136th) in the history of the University of Illinois.  

He partnered with Kevin Hartz and Keith Rabois to launch Youniversity Ventures, a venture fund in March 2008.  

In April 2009, he invested in the initial Seed round of the San Francisco based company called Airbnb, Inc., which operates as an online marketplace and hospitality service. With this, he became one of the primary investors of the company that was established in August 2008.  

When YouTube made it compulsory that all comments on the videos of the website will be through a Google+ account, it faced with extensive opposition from the YouTube community. More than 240K signatories made an online petition for the reversion of this move. Karim also showed his rejection of this change by writing “why the ….do I need a Google+ account to comment on a video?” on his YouTube account. He also went on to update the video description of ‘Me at the zoo’ … ‘I can’t comment here anymore, since I don’t want a Google+ account.’  

Several of Karim’s articles on programming has been printed in the United Business Media published US monthly journal, Dr. Dobb’s Journal (DDJ). 

Jawed Karim’s Career After YouTube

After Jawed and his friends sold YouTube, Jawed established Youniversity Ventures (Y Ventures) which is a venture fund.  

He was one of the first to invest money in Airbnb. He also invested in Reddit and several other startups.  

Now Jawed Kerim is running the venture fund with Kevin Hartz and Keith Rabois. 

Personal Life 

Jawed Karim keeps his private life away from the media. He even does not own any social media accounts, so there is no information available about his girlfriend or wife.  

Still, there were some rumors that he is dating Kia Abdullah who is a novelist from the United Kingdom. 

Net Worth of Jawed Karim

Jawed Karim’s net worth is estimated at $140 million. 

 
Jawed Karim’s quotes

  • Now it’s hard to pick up any copy of ‘Wired’ that doesn’t mention YouTube. 
  • Silicon Valley has a lot of noise, a lot of hype. People are very excited about all of the Facebook stuff, Facebook applications. It’s just been a huge hype over the last year when actually… there isn’t really that much value 
  • Our users were one step ahead of us. They began using YouTube to share videos of all kinds. Their dogs, vacations, anything. We found this very interesting. We said, ‘Why not let the users define what YouTube is all about?’ 
  • I was incredibly impressed with HOTorNOT, because it was the first time that someone had designed a website where anyone could upload content that everyone else could view. That was a new concept because up until that point, it was always the people who owned the website who would provide the content. 
  • It wasn’t like I wanted to be the next Marc Andreessen, but it would be cool to be in the same place. 

Trivia facts about Jawed Karim 

  • The first video ever on YouTube: Jawed Karim posted the first video ever on YouTube. The video is named “Me at the zoo” and got over 70 million views since it was posted on April 23, 2005. 
  • Jobs before the fame: Jawed Karim was one of the first PayPal’s employees before he launched YouTube. 
  • Famous for: Creating YouTube. 
  • Years active: Since 2005 
  • Citizenship: Jawed Karim has American citizenship. 
  • Religion: / Islam 
  • Eye color: Brown 
  • Hair color: Black. 
  • YouTube views: Jawed Karim’s YouTube channel has over 130 million views, although he posted only one video! 
  • Pets: Jawed Karim didn’t post any photos with his pets on the web yet. 

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