| Jawed Karim | |
|---|---|
Jawed Karim in 2008 |
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| Born | 1979 (age 32–33) Merseburg, East Germany |
| Ethnicity | German American/ Bangladeshi American |
| Alma mater | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Stanford University |
| Known for | co-founder of YouTube |
| Website | |
| www.jawed.com | |
Jawed Karim (Bangla: জাওয়েদ করিম, born in 1979, East Germany) is a Bangladeshi German American technologist and co-founder of the popular video sharing website YouTube. Many of the core components of PayPal, including its real-time anti-fraud system, were also designed and implemented by Karim.
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Karim was born in East Germany, but crossed the Berlin Wall and grew up in West Germany. He moved to the United States with his family in 1992, two years after German reunification. He graduated from Central High School in Minnesota and he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[1] He left campus prior to graduating to become an early employee at PayPal, but continued his coursework, earning his Bachelor of Science 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.[2] YouTube's first video, Me at the zoo, was uploaded by Karim on April 23, 2005.[3]
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.[4] When YouTube was acquired by Google, Karim received 137,443 shares of stock, worth about $64 million based on Google's closing stock price at the time.[5]
In October 2006, Karim gave a lecture about the history of YouTube at the University of Illinois' annual ACM Conference entitled YouTube: From Concept to Hyper-growth.[6] The lecture material also contained pictures and videos of Karim, Hurley, and Chen from the garage days of YouTube. Karim returned again to the University of Illinois in May 2007 as the speaker at the university's 136th commencement, at which he explained his career path.[7]
More recently, Karim has launched a venture fund called Youniversity Ventures, with the goal of helping current and former university students to develop and launch their business ideas.
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 German scientist and research associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Minnesota.[8][9] The name "Jawed" is of Old Persian origin meaning "eternal".[10][11][12][13]
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