Jawed karim

Jawed Karim is an entrepreneur, who worked at Paypal and is the co-founder of the YouTube website , as well as being the author of the first video posted on that platform.

Biography of Jawed Karim

He was born on October 28, 1979, in Merseburg , in the German Democratic Republic. His parents are Naimul Karin, a researcher, a native of Bangladesh, and Christine, a German professor and scientist, an adjunct researcher in biochemistry at the University of Minnesota .

In 1980, his family crossed the border and began to settle in Neuss, West Germany . In 1992 they settled in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

He studied at Saint Paul Central High School and later went on to study at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois.

Parallel to his studies, he started working at Paypal. After his undergraduate degree, he began a master’s degree in computer science at Stanford University .

He met Steve Chen and Chad Hurley at Paypal, and together with them they started the project of a platform where users could upload their files to the cloud. They registered the domain on February 15, 2005 and on April 23, Jawed Karim uploaded the first video titled: “Me at the zoo”.

Just a year after its inception, they sold the company to Google. They received 137,443 shares with an estimated value of approximately $ 1.6 billion.

In 2008 he created the company Youniversity Ventures to collaborate with university students who wanted to start their business ideas.

He was one of the first investors in Airbnb and has been an advisor to numerous companies whose means of contact with their users is through the Internet.

YouTube creation

YouTube was founded in February 2005, in California , by Jawed Karim, Steve Chen, and Chad Hurley . The three met while working at Paypal.

According to a simplified version of the initial idea, YouTube would have emerged as a simple way to share videos. Which was not an easy task at the time. According to some versions, the initial idea was to create a dating page where people would rate themselves according to the videos they posted.

The domain began operating on February 15, 2005. The first video was uploaded to the platform on April 23 of the same year, corresponding to a visit that Karim made to the zoo .

Traffic skyrocketed as users began placing YouTube links on their MySpace pages . Which motivated the arrival of institutional investors. Soon the hiring of their spaces for the placement of propaganda began.

In December 2005, less than a year after its creation, the video on YouTube were visited some 50 million times a day. However, this figure was surpassed a few months later and in May 2006 it reached 2 billion views per day.

Rumors of the purchase by another company began to grow, until it was acquired by Google in exchange for shares that would have an approximate value of 1.6 billion dollars. The part that corresponded to Jawed was 137.443 shares that would correspond to about 64 million.

At the time of its purchase, the company had a total of 67 employees. He had signed agreements with companies as large as Warner and Sony for the distribution of music videos, paying the corresponding royalties.

Precisely the issue of copyright generated multiple legal problems, generating litigation and lawsuits that were resolved in various ways, through various agreements and modifications in the operation of the website and its policies for users .

Currently, YouTube is available in more than 90 countries and in 80 languages. It has more than one billion users. Every day, its users watch more than one billion hours of videos . It is estimated that more than half of the views correspond to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets .

Definitely, the purchase made by Google was a great success.

Personal life of Jawed Karim

Jawed Karim prefers a low profile, with little media exposure. After the sale of YouTube, he has dedicated himself to his personal projects.

In 2008 he founded the company Youniversity Ventures with the aim of helping university students launch their business ideas, both as a sponsor as well as a financier of the ideas that seem most interesting to them.

Importance

In addition to his fundamental role in the creation of YouTube , Jawed Karim has been the promoter and advisor of numerous initiatives such as the online sales firm Milo.com Inc. which was bought in 2010 by eBay , and for Eventbrite Inc. which designed a platform for the creation of academic, artistic, social and other events online via the Internet.

Acknowledgments

Due to his low profile and rare public appearances, Karim is not very fond of accolades. However, due to the popularity of the website he helped create, he has been invited to countless events where he has been applauded by the attending public.

Phrases

There are no known phrases attributable to Jawed Karim.

Curiosities about Jawed Karim

In addition to being the protagonist of the first video uploaded to YouTube, Jawed Karim wanted the domain name to be HotorNot.com

The first video published on YouTube, starring Jawed has accumulated more than 48 million views to date. That video is the only one featured on his channel. He did not put any other videos back on his account.

In the beginning, the only thing that the founders of YouTube wanted was to share videos easily with their friends and the general public . According to legend, everything arose from the difficulty of sharing videos recorded at a party attended by all three.