Jawed Karim

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Jawed Karim

Jawed Karim, 2005
Born 1979
Merseburg, East Germany
Occupation Graduate student, Stanford University
Website
www.jawed.com

Jawed Karim (Bengali: জাওয়েদ করিম) is a co-founder of the popular video sharing website YouTube.

Karim was born in Merseburg, East Germany, in 1979 and moved to West Germany in 1980. 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][3]

Karim grew up in Germany, and his family moved to the United States in 1992. He graduated from Central High School (Saint Paul, Minnesota) and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[4] 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.[5] 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 advisor to YouTube.[6] When YouTube was acquired by Google, Karim received 137,443 shares of stock, worth about $64 million as of Google's closing stock price at the time.[7]

Jawed Karim, Steve and Chad at Youtube Headquarters
Jawed Karim, Steve and Chad at Youtube Headquarters

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. The lecture material also contained pictures and videos of Jawed, Chad and Steve from the early garage days of YouTube. Jawed returned again to the University of Illinois in May 2007 as the 136th and youngest Commencement Speaker in the school's history.[8][9]

More recently, Jawed has launched a venture fund called Youniversity Ventures, with the goal of helping current and former university students to launch their business ideas.

[edit] Trivia

Jawed uploaded YouTube's first video on April 23, 2005.[10]

[edit] References

  1. ^ With YouTube, Student Hits Jackpot Again, The New York Times, October 12, 2006.
  2. ^ Surprise! There's a third YouTube co-founder, USA Today, October 11, 2006.
  3. ^ Christine Karim, Ph.D
  4. ^ YouTube: OurGuys, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Computer Science
  5. ^ Video websites pop up, invite postings, USA Today, November 21, 2005
  6. ^ YouTube Founders, YouTube.com
  7. ^ New York Times: YouTube’s Payoff: Hundreds of Millions for the Founders, The New York Times, February 7, 2007.
  8. ^ Welcome to Engineering at Illinois, University of Illinois
  9. ^ 136th Commencement Address, University of Illinois, May 13, 2007.
  10. ^ jawed.com

[edit] External links