Jawed Karim

Karim does not like to divulge much about his personal life as there is not much information available in this regard. However, according to some sources, he is dating British writer Kia Abdullah as the duo have been spotted together several times. At present Karim lives in Palo Alto, California.

Jawed was born on October 28, 1979, in Merseburg, East Germany (Present day Germany) to Christine Karim and Naimul Karim. His father is a researcher from Bangladesh while his mother is a German scientist associated with the University of Minnesota as a research professor of biochemistry. He has a sister, Ilias.

During the early 1980s, he relocated to West Germany with his family after crossing the inner German border and was raised in Neuss. In 1992, his family relocated to Saint Paul, Minnesota, US, where he attended Saint Paul Central High School.

He enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, in the department of computer science. He joined PayPal and left the university campus before completing his graduation. He was as one of PayPal’s early employees. He, however, continued to complete his course and obtained a bachelor's degree in computer science in 2004. Thereafter, he joined Stanford University and earned a master's degree in computer science.

Karim did an Internship in 1998 with the American high-performance computing manufacturer, Silicon Graphics Inc. that produces both computer hardware and software. There he had to work on 3D voxel data management for huge data sets for volume rendering.

He was one of the earliest employees of PayPal, the American company that operates an online payments system worldwide. There he came into contact with two other early employees of the company, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. In 2005, the three created the video sharing website, YouTube. Karim designed and implemented several core components of PayPal which included real-time anti-fraud system.

According to Karim, the inspiration of developing YouTube came when he could not find video clips of two events easily. These included the clips of the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy involving Janet Jackson and that of Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, both happened in 2004. Hurley and Chen mentioned that the concept of creating YouTube was originally inspired from the rating site, Hot or Not.

On February 14, 2005, the domain name of YouTube was activated while the site was gradually developed in the next few months. It commenced as a venture capital-funded technology startup company with primary investments of $11.5 million from American venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital, and an $8 million from Artis Capital Management. Originally the headquarters of the company was located in San Mateo, California, above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant.

On April 23, 2005, Karim created his YouTube channel ‘jawed’ and uploaded the first video on the video-sharing website. The video titled ‘Me at the zoo’ was recorded by his high school friend Yakov Lapitsky and featured Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video has already garnered over 54.6 million views while his channel has over 354 K subscribers.