Jawed Karim is one of the most popular and richest Entrepreneur who was born on October 28, 1979 in Merseburg, Germany. Co-founder of YouTube who became the first ever person to upload a video via the popular video-sharing platform.
His site allowed aspiring entertainers like Kevin Wu to find a platform to show their talents to the world.
Jawed Karim (Bengali: জাভেদ করিম ; born 28 October 1979) is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur of Bangladeshi-German descent. He is the co-founder of YouTube and the first person to upload a video to the site. This inaugural video, titled Me at the zoo uploaded on 23 April 2005, has been viewed about 96,567,542 times as of May 2020. During Karim’s time working at PayPal, where he met the fellow YouTube co-founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley, he had designed many of the core components including its real-time anti-Internet-fraud system.
After co-founding the company and developing the YouTube concept and website with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, Karim enrolled as a graduate student in computer science at Stanford University while acting as an adviser to YouTube. When the site was introduced in February 2005, Karim agreed not to be an employee and simply be an informal adviser, and that he was focusing on his studies. As a result, he took a much lower share in the company compared to Hurley and Chen. Because of his smaller role in the company, Karim was mostly unknown to the public as the third founder until YouTube was acquired by Google in 2006. Despite his lower share in the company, the purchase was still large enough that he received 137,443 shares of stock, worth about $64 million based on Google’s closing stock price at the time.
He was born in East Germany, but his family braved the Berlin Wall crossing and made it into West Germany. His mother was a professor of biochemistry at the University of Minnesota. He has a sister named Ilias.
