Jawed Karim

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Jawed Karim, 2005

Jawed Karim (born 1979) is the co-founder of the popular video sharing website YouTube.

Karim was born in Merseburg, East Germany in 1979 and moved to West Germany in 1982. His father, Naimul Karim, is a Bangladeshi researcher at 3M. His mother, Christine Karim, is a research assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Minnesota.^[1] ^[2]

Karim grew up in Germany, but his family moved to the United States in 1992. He graduated from Central High School (Saint Paul, Minnesota), and went on to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.^[3] He left campus prior to graduating to become an early employee at PayPal, but continued his coursework, earning his bachelor's degree in computer science in 2004.

While working at PayPal, he met Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The three later founded the YouTube video sharing website in 2005.^[4] After co-founding the company, Karim opted out of full-time involvement and acted as an advisor to YouTube. He then enrolled as a graduate student in computer science at Stanford University.^[5]

In October 2006, Jawed gave a lecture about the history of YouTube at the University of Illinois' annual ACM Conference entitled YouTube: From Concept to Hyper-growth. In his lecture he mentioned Wikipedia as being an innovative social experiment and added that he created the Air Force One article in 2002.

[edit] Trivia

Jawed uploaded YouTube's first video when he launched the website with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen on April 23rd 2005.^[6]

Jawed is also a long-term (if rather occasional) user of Wikipedia.[1] In his 2006 YouTube: From Concept to Hyper-growth he expressed his original skepticism of Wikipedia, not knowing if people would contribute very much for free. He's since changed his mind, relating an early screen shot of an Air Force One Wikipedia article, which was just a couple paragraphs, in comparison to the current exhaustive article.