Biography
Jawed Karim (Born 28 October 1979) is a Bangladeshi -German-American Internet
entrepreneur. He is best known for being a co-founder of YouTube and the first person to upload a video on it. The video he has released
was named 'Me at the zoo' and as of 2016 has reached 33 million views. Many of the core
components of PayPal, including its real-time anti-internet fraud system, were also designed and implemented by Karim.
Personal life :
Karim was born in Merseburg, East Germany. Karim’s father,
Naimul Karim, is a Bangladeshi American researcher at 3M. His mother, Christine
Karim, is a German scientist and research associate professor of biochemistry
at the University of Minnesota.[3] He crossed the inner German border with his family in 1981, growing up in Neuss, West Germany. Karim grew up in
Germany and the family moved to Saint Paul,
Minnesota in 1992. Karim graduated from Saint Paul Central
High School and later attended
the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign Department of Computer Science. 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. He subsequently
earned a master's degree in computer science
from Stanford University.
Career
In 1998 Jawed served
an Internship at Silicon Graphics Inc. where he worked
on 3D voxel data management for very large data sets for volume rendering,
including the data for the Visible Human Project.
While working at PayPal, he met Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The three later
founded the YouTube video sharing website in 2005. You Tube's first-ever video, Me at the zoo, was uploaded by
Karim on 23 April 2005.
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.
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. In his lecture he mentioned Wikipedia as being an
innovative social experiment. Karim returned again to the University of
Illinois in May 2007 as the 136th and youngest Commencement Speaker in the
school's history.
In March 2008, Karim
launched a venture fund called Youniversity Ventures, with the goal of helping
current and former university students to develop and launch their business
ideas.
Response to Google+ integration
On 6 November 2013,
YouTube began requiring that commenting on its videos be done via a Google+
account, a move that was widely opposed by the YouTube community. An online
petition to revert the change garnered over 240,000 signatures.
In response to
Google requiring YouTube members to use Google+ for its comment
system, Karim wrote on his YouTube account, "why the fuck do i need a
google+ account to comment on a video?", and updated the video description
on his first video titled 'Me at the zoo' to: I can't comment here anymore, since i don't want a google+ account. In response to pressure from the YouTube
community, Google publicly apologized for forcing Google+ users to use their
real names, which was one of the reasons the Google+ integration was unpopular
with YouTube users. Google subsequently
dropped its Google+ requirement across all products, beginning with YouTube.
Publications
Karim has published articles on programming in Dr. Dobbs Journal, including one on
loading rendering and animating Quake models.
Jawed
Karim : Minutes with YouTube co-founder :