kids encyclopedia robot

Jawed Karim facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts
Quick facts for kids
Jawed Karim
Jawed Karim 2008.jpg
Karim in August 2008
Born (1979-10-28) October 28, 1979 (age 44)
Alma mater University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign (BS)
Stanford University (MS)
Occupation Software engineer
Known for
  • Co-founding YouTube
  • uploading the first video on YouTube ("Me at the zoo")
YouTube information
Years active
  • 2005–2007
  • 2010 (videos)
Genre Educational
Subscribers 4.04 million
Total views 288 million
Subscriber and view counts updated as of October 8, 2023.

Jawed Karim (born October 28, 1979) is an American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of YouTube and the first person to upload a video to the site. The site's inaugural video, "Me at the zoo", uploaded on April 23, 2005, has been viewed over 287 million times as of October 1,  2023 (2023 -10-01). During Karim's time working at PayPal, where he met fellow YouTube co-founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley, he designed many of its core components, including its real-time anti-fraud system.

Early life and education

Jawed Karim was born on October 28, 1979, in Merseburg, East Germany, to a Bangladeshi father and a German mother. His father Naimul Karim (Bengali: নাইমুল করিম) is a Bangladeshi who is a researcher at 3M, and his mother, Christine, is a German biochemistry scientist at the University of Minnesota. He was the elder of two boys. He crossed the inner German border with his family in the early 1980s because of xenophobia, growing up in Neuss, West Germany. Experiencing xenophobia there as well, Karim moved with his family to Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1992.

He graduated from Saint Paul Central High School in 1997, and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He left campus prior to graduating to become an early employee at PayPal. He continued his coursework, earning his bachelor's degree in computer science. He subsequently earned a master's degree in computer science from Stanford University. In addition to English, he speaks German and Bengali.

Career

Jawed Karim 2004
Karim in September 2004

In university, Karim 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 in 2002, he met Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Three years later, in 2005, they founded the video-sharing website YouTube. Karim created the first channel on YouTube, "jawed", on April 23, 2005 PDT (April 24, 2005 UTC), and uploaded the website's first video, "Me at the zoo", the same day.

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. Karim returned again to the University of Illinois in May 2008 as the 136th and youngest commencement speaker in the school's history.

Investments

In March 2008, Karim launched a venture fund called Youniversity Ventures (now known as YVentures) with partners Keith Rabois and Kevin Hartz. Karim is one of Airbnb's first investors, investing in the company's initial seed round in April 2009. Y Ventures has also invested in Palantir, Reddit and Eventbrite.

Responses to YouTube

Occasionally, Karim has updated the video description of "Me at the zoo" to criticize decisions made by YouTube.

On November 6, 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 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. Google announced in October 2018 its intention to permanently shut down Google+, as it had failed to achieve broad consumer or developer adoption, and because of a vulnerability. Google+ was closed for personal accounts on April 2, 2019.

In November 2021, Jawed updated the "Me at the zoo" video description to include "When every YouTuber agrees that removing dislikes is a stupid idea, it probably is. Try again, YouTube🤦‍♂️." A few days later, Karim updated the description again to a more detailed condemnation of YouTube's decision.

In early 2023, Jawed updated the description again to include the time-stamped chapters of "Me at the zoo".

See also

Kids robot.svg In Spanish: Jawed Karim para niños

kids search engine
Jawed Karim Facts for Kids. Kiddle Encyclopedia.