Biography
While his name might not be as famous as fellow Internet innovators Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckererg , the contributions at a young age of Jawed Karim to life in the digital age are second to none. At the tender age of 26, Karim co-founded YouTube , the Internet’s premiere video-sharing website. Karim not only uploaded the website’s first video and created the first YouTube channel, but he also was the star of it. The video, a whopping 20 seconds long, showed Karim at a zoo commenting on elephants on display in the background.
Born in 1979 in Meersburg, Saxony-Anhalt, East Germany, Karim’s father is from Bangladesh and his mother from Germany. There is no shortage of brain power at work in the Karim daily. His father was a researcher for M3 and his mother a biochemistry scientist. The family struggled with prejudice in Germany and eventually relocated to Minnesota in the United States in 1992. He graduated high school five years later and headed for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Like many great engineers of the Internet age, Karim did more learning outside the classroom than in it. While enrolled at Illinois, he had an internship with Silicon Graphics, serving as a data engineer on the Visible Human Project, an effort to create an extraordinarily detailed data set of photos of cross sections of the human body. The project began in 1986 and the second of two cadavers was completed in 1995. In 2002, while still enrolled as an undergrad, he left school to work at PayPal, back in its early days under the name Confinity. He was onboard when Peter Thiel replaced Elon Musk as CEO and took the company public.
Karim continued taking classes while working at PayPal, earning a bachelor’s degree in computer science. He went on to earn a master’s degree in the same subject from Stanford. While working at PayPal in 2002, he became friends with coworkers Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. Karim and Chen had both studied at Illinois while Hurley attended Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
The three young men had all become successful when eBay bought PayPal, and dreamed of their own big site. Their first idea was an online dating service that featured a platform where users could upload videos of themselves. That idea tanked, but the easy uploading and sharing of videos stuck, especially after the infamous incident at the 2004 Super Bowl in which Justin Timberlake accidentally exposed Janet Jackson during their halftime musical performance to an audience of hundreds of millions. Karim and his two coworkers noted that it was impossible to find a video of the incident online because of censorship, and realized that there were no easy-to-use video sharing platforms online at all.
They went back to the drawing board and one year and two weeks after the Super Bowl incident, they registered the domain name “YouTube.com”. Not unlike Neil Armstrong 45 years earlier, Karim was a pioneer, becoming the website’s first user “jawed” and star of its first video, the simply named “Me at the Zoo”, which was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and remains on the site to this day.
