Jawed Karim

Jawed Karim: Biography in Details

Who is Jawed Karim?

Jawed Karim is one of the popular German-American internet entrepreneurs, software engineers, and technologists. Working as an employee of PayPal, he co-founded YouTube with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

Moreover, he was also the first person to upload a video on YouTube that was titled ‘Me at the zoo.’

Who are the parents of Jawed Karim?

This software engineer was born on October 28, 1979, in Merseburg, East Germany (Present-day Germany). Jawed was raised along with his sister, Ilias in Neuss.

His father’s name is Naimul Karim who is a researcher from Bangladesh associated with the University of Minnesota as a research professor of biochemistry. And likely, his mother’s name is Christine Karim a German scientist.

During the early 1980s, due to xenophobia, his family relocated to West Germany after crossing the inner German border. Likely again in 1992, they relocated to Saint Minnesota, US.

Jawed holds a German-American nationality and belongs to Mixed (Bangladesh, Germany) ethnicity.

Education, University

Talking about his education, he has his schooling at Saint Paul Central High School. He then attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, in the department of computer science.

Jawed has his internship at Silicon Graphics Inc working on 3D voxel data management. Before completing his graduation, he joined PayPal.

Jawed Karim, however, continued his study later and obtained a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2004. Thereafter, he joined Stanford University and earned a master’s degree in computer science.

Jawed Karim: Career, Professional life

Youtube

Completing his internship, Jawed Karim joined a famous online payment company PayPal where he designed features such as a real-time anti-internet-fraud system. He was one of the first PayPal employees and was later joined by other employees like Steve Chen and Chad Hurley.

In the year 2005, he created a video-sharing website name YouTube along with Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. Karim also then designed and implemented several core components of PayPal. One of them includes a real-time anti-fraud system.

Karim explained that he was inspired to develop the website when he didn’t find the video clips of two events easily. The clips that he was searching for were the clips of the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy involving Janet Jackson and that of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Both these events/incidents happened in 2004.

On 14 February 2005, working more, the site gradually developed in the next few months activating the domain name YouTube. Youtube commenced as a venture capital-funded technology startup company with primary investments of $11.5 million from American venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital.

It also included $8 million from Artis Capital Management. Initially, the headquarters of the company was in San Mateo, California, above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant.

Jawed Karim created his YouTube channel ‘jawed’ on 23 April 2005. And finally, he uploaded the first video on the video-sharing website that he designed and developed. He and his high school friend, Yakov Lapitsky, recorded and featured Karim in the video titled ‘Me at the zoo’ at the San Diego Zoo. The video has already garnered over 54.6 million views while his channel has over 354 K subscribers.

After the creation and development of Youtube with Chen and Hurley, Karim became an adviser of the company. At the same time, he gave continuity to his studies. In February 2005, Karem became an informal adviser for the company. As he was also studying, he didn’t work as an employee on YouTube. Due to his lack of role in developing websites he has a low share compared to other co-founders.

Into the limelight

As he sidelined his roles at Youtube, Karim received a much lower share in the company compared to the other two co-founders. Not only that, but he also remained mostly unrecognized and out of the public glare as the third founder of YouTube.

This was the case until the time Google bought Youtube for US$1.65 billion in November 2006. At the time, Karim received 137,443 shares of stock, which amounted to around $64 million. It is based on the closing stock price of Google at that time,

In October 2006, Karim delivered a lecture at the annual ACM Conference of the University of Illinois about the history of entitling “YouTube: From Concept to Hyper-growth.’’

Further, he also mentions Wikipedia as an innovative social experiment during his lecture. Moreover, in 2007, Karim became the youngest Commencement Speaker in the history of the University of Illinois.

He was the 136th person to deliver a commencement speech at that university at that time. Karim’s articles on programming have been published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal (DDJ) in the United Business Media US monthly journal.

Youniversity Ventures

Karim alongside Keith Rabois and Kevin Hart launched a venture fund. They named it Youniversity Ventures which is now known as YVentures.

Likely, in April 2009, he was one of the first investors to invest in Airbnb Inc which runs an online marketplace and hospitality service. With this, Karim became one of the initial investors of the company which they founded in August 2008.

Ventures have also invested in Palantir, Reddit, and Eventbrite.

How much is the net worth of Jawed Karim?

Karim has an estimated net worth of $300 million as of 2022. He owns over 137,443 units of YouTube stock which is worth over $140 million due to the rise in the stock price.

Google bought the website, Youtube for US$1.65 billion in November 2006. He received 137,443 shares of stock, which, based on the closing stock price of Google at that time, amounted to around $64 million.

Jawed Karim: Rumor and Controversy

Karim is involved in controversy after his fueling and openly criticizing YouTube’s new feature in YouTube comments. He criticized Google and later it remove the Google+ feature and app also.

YouTube made it mandatory that all comments on the videos of this website will be through a Google+ account. With more than 240K signatures, people made an online petition for the reversion of this move. Karim also stated his disapproval of this change.

He displayed it by writing “why the ….do I need a Google+ account to comment on a video?” on his YouTube account. Karim 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.’

Further, he was also rumored to be in a relationship with British writer Kia Abdullah.

Body Measurement: Height, Weight

Jawed Karim seems to have an average height and weight but their exact measurements are unknown.

Further, his eyes seem to be brown, and have brown colored hair.

Social Media

Jawed Karim was the first person to upload a video on YouTube in channel jawed which has over 1.14M subscribers and his video Me at a zoo is viewed more than 113 million.

However, he doesn’t use any social media account on Facebook, Instagram, etc.

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Jawed Karim's Birthday Dates