German-American Jawed Karim is an online businessman, technologist, and co-founder of YouTube, a well-known American video-sharing website that is currently a division of Google. Karim joined PayPal early in his career and, along with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, co-founded YouTube. Additionally, he was the first to upload the YouTube video named “Me at the Zoo” As of September 11, 2018, over 54.6 million people had viewed the nineteen-second video that showed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. Karim invented a number of crucial elements while he was employed with PayPal, including its real-time anti-internet fraud technology. After the launch of YouTube, Karim shifted his attention to furthering his study rather than working on the website and took a far smaller ownership stake than his fellow co-founders. Google later purchased YouTube, and Karim was given 137,443 shares of the company’s equity. Along with Kevin Hartz and Keith Rabois, he co-founded Youniversity Ventures, a venture fund, and he also invested in Airbnb, Inc.
Early Childhood & Life
Christine Karim and Naimul Karim welcomed their son Jawed into the world on October 28, 1979, in Merseburg, East Germany (modern-day Germany). His mother is a German scientist who works as a research professor of biochemistry at the University of Minnesota, and his father is a researcher from Bangladesh. Ilias is his sister.
He was raised in Neuss before moving with his family across the inner German border to West Germany in the early 1980s. He attended Saint Paul Central High School after his family moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1992.
He enrolled at the computer science department of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Before completing his degree, he quit the institution and joined PayPal. He was a founding member of the PayPal staff. But he persisted in finishing his coursework, earning a bachelor’s in computer science in 2004. After that, he enrolled at Stanford University and graduated with a master’s in computer science.
The Career of Jawed Karim
In 1998, Karim completed an internship with Silicon Graphics Inc., a high-performance computing company based in the United States that makes both computer hardware and software. He was required to manage 3D voxel data for enormous data sets for volume rendering there.
He was one of the business’s first workers. PayPal is an American company that runs a global online payment system. He met Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, two other founding members of the startup, there. The three individuals founded the video-sharing website YouTube in 2005. Real-time anti-fraud technology was one of the fundamental components of PayPal that Karim conceived and built.
Karim claims that he was motivated to create YouTube because he found it difficult to locate videos of two incidents. These included video of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami as well as the Janet Jackson controversy surrounding the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Hurley and Chen stated that the idea for YouTube was first sparked by the review website Hot or Not.
The domain name for YouTube was established on February 14, 2005, and during the ensuing few months, the website was steadily built. With initial funding of $11.5 million from American venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and an additional $8 million from Artis Capital Management, it started off as a venture capital-funded technological startup company. The company’s first headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California.
Karim established the ‘jawed’ YouTube channel on April 23, 2005, and posted the website’s debut video there. Karim was filmed at the San Diego Zoo for the video “Me at the Zoo,” which Yakov Lapitsky, a friend from high school, took. While his channel has around 354 K followers, the video has already received over 54.6 million views.
Karim joined the company as an adviser after Chen Hurley and I founded and developed YouTube. He persisted in his academic pursuits and enrolled at Stanford University to get his computer science degree in the interim. At the time of the website’s launch in February 2005, Karim opted not to work for the company but instead served as an unofficial adviser so he could concentrate on his education.
Karim’s smaller role in YouTube meant that he not only received a smaller share of the company than the other two founders but also went largely unnoticed and out of the public eye as the third founder of YouTube until Google purchased the website in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion. Based on Google’s closing share price at the time, Karim received 137,443 shares of stock, or around $64 million.
In the meanwhile, he presented a talk on the background of YouTube at the University of Illinois’ annual ACM Conference in October 2006. Karim referred to Wikipedia as a creative social experiment during the lecture titled “YouTube: From Concept to Hyper-growth.” He delivered the 136th and youngest commencement address in University of Illinois history in May 2007.
In March 2008, he established Youniversity Ventures, a venture fund, in collaboration with Kevin Hartz and Keith Rabois.
He invested in San Francisco-based Airbnb, Inc.’s initial Seed round in April 2009; the company operates an online marketplace and hospitality service. With this, he joined the group of original investors for the business, which was established in August 2008.
The YouTube community voiced strong objection when YouTube made it necessary for all comments on the website’s videos to be made through a Google+ account. An online petition calling for the reversal of this decision received more than 240K signatures. Karim also expressed his displeasure with this change on his YouTube account, writing “why the….do I need a Google+ account to comment on a video?” He continued by updating the “Me at the Zoo” video description. I’m unable to remark any longer since I don’t want a Google+ account.
Several of Karim’s programming-related articles have appeared in Dr. Dobb’s Journal (DDJ), a US monthly journal published by United Business Media.
Individual Life of Jawed Karim
Karim prefers to keep his personal life private because there isn’t much information available about him. However, some media claim that he is dating British author Kia Abdullah because the two have been seen together frequently. Karim resides in Palo Alto, California, at the moment.
Estimated Net Worth of Jawed Karim
The estimated net worth of Jawed Karim is around $1 million.