Jawed Karim

Cofounder of YouTube

• Born: May 1, 1979
• Place of Birth: Merseberg, East Germany (now Germany)

Primary Company/Organization: YouTube

Introduction

Jawed Karim was one of the three cofounders of the Internet video-sharing site YouTube, credited with the initial idea for the site; he also worked on the pioneering Internet commerce site PayPal, which facilitated the exchange of money over the Internet. Although Karim became a multimillionaire when YouTube was sold to Google, he largely stayed out of the limelight and later returned to his academic studies. He cofounded a technology-focused venture capital firm.

Early Life

Jawed Karim was born in communist East Germany (now part of Germany) to a family of scientists; his father was a chemist, and his mother, a biochemist. The family moved to capitalist West Germany when Karim was one year old, and in 1992 they immigrated to the United States, where they settled in the St. Paul, Minnesota, suburb of Maplewood. In the United States, Karim's father worked for 3M, and his mother was a professor of biochemistry at the University of Minnesota. When he was a child, Karim's mother often brought him to her laboratory, so he was able to observe the process of scientific research from an early age. He showed an early interest in computers as well: at age ten, Karim began working with a Commodore computer, and while in high school he completed programming tasks for his school and for his mother's lab. In 1997, Karim began studying computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, stating that he was attracted to the school because Marc Andreessen, one of the founders of Netscape, had been a student there. However, Karim interrupted his university studies three years later so he could go to work at PayPal, in Palo Alto, California. There he met Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, the cofounders of YouTube, and after PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002, the three were looking for a new project.

Life's Work

Karim, Hurley, and Chen created YouTube as a way for users to share videos they had shot themselves. They were also inspired by Janet Jackson's “wardrobe malfunction” during the halftime show for the 2004 Super Bowl (one breast was briefly uncovered during a dance routine) and an amateur video of the Indian Ocean tsunami in the same year. In both cases, there was high viewer interest in seeing video clips of the events, yet it was difficult to locate and play such clips on the Internet. Another influence was an article Karim had read that stated that a monologue delivered by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, a satirical television news program, was seen by three times as many people online as the number who watched the original broadcast.

During the development of YouTube, Karim and Chen did most of the technical work, while Hurley designed the site's logo and user interface. Karim posted the first video clip to YouTube on April 23, 2005. It was unremarkable except for its historic significance; it lasted only eighteen seconds and showed Karim at the San Diego Zoo, standing in front of the elephant enclosure and saying a few words about it. The beta version of YouTube, then envisioned as a dating site, was launched in May 2005, financed by payouts that Karim, Hurley, and Chen had received when eBay had purchased PayPal. Only a few dozen videos were available on the site, and it attracted little attention; the videos were shot by the founders and their friends and thus held no interest for the public. One early attempt to popularize the website, an offer to pay $20 to any attractive woman who would post at least ten videos to the site, received no takers at all. The cofounders began adding videos of anything to populate the site.

Karim realized that the market for people who produced their own videos was too small to make the site popular and that the best way to attract large numbers of viewers was to provide professionally produced content. YouTube soon began adding professionally produced video, including clips from television, music videos, and other copyright-protected content, a process that brought a much-increased audience (several million daily views by December 2005) but that also attracted the attention of the copyright owners. One early YouTube hit was a clip from the NBC television program Saturday Night Live (called “Lazy Sunday”), by the comedy troupe the Lonely Island; it was viewed more than 5 million times by February 2006, when NBC demanded its removal. The widespread publicity resulting from NBC's threat to take legal action (under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) focused attention on the ability of YouTube to reach the youth audience while raising legal questions about the boundaries of copyright and the responsibility the provider of a service has for the actions of people using it. It also highlighted YouTube's role as a content aggregator, rather than as a site for amateurs to share their own videos. In October 2006, YouTube was sold to Google for $1.65 billion, making the three cofounders multimillionaires. However, Karim had already reduced his role to that of an adviser to the company and had resumed his academic studies in computer science.

Karim has stated that four key features enabled the rise of YouTube to dominate the market for video sharing: the ability to embed videos in websites, recommendations made to users of other videos they might like to see (the “related videos” list), allowing comments, and providing an e-mail link to facilitate sharing of videos; the latter two in particular helped create a community of people around videos they liked (or did not like) and also created wider audiences for individual videos because one person could easily tell his or her friends about videos he or she liked (or liked to make fun of).

After leaving the University of Illinois to work for PayPal, Karim completed his undergraduate degree in computer science by taking courses online and at Santa Clara University. Karim completed a master's degree in computer science at Stanford University in 2007. He played a key role in the creation of YouTube and remained a shareholder (he gained an estimated $66 million when the company was sold to Google) but chose the role of informal adviser, rather than employee of the company from its early days, so he could focus on his studies; in fact, when Google bought YouTube, some news stories reported with surprise that the company had three rather than two founders. Karim sold his shares in YouTube in 2013 for about $300 million. As of 2024, he continued to invest in early stage technology companies.

In Karim also cofounded Youniversity Ventures (later renamed Y Ventures) with Kevin Hartz and Keith Rabois, an investment group specializing in developing projects by students from Stanford University and the University of Illinois. As of 2023, he remained a partner there. He also served as a board member for Postmates and Eventbrite.

For his work on YouTube, Karim, along with Chen and Hurley, received an Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019.

Bibliography

Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green. YouTube. Malden: Polity, 2009. Print. Digital Media and Soc. Ser.

Helft, Miguel. “With YouTube, Student Hits Jackpot Again.” New York Times 12 Oct. 2006: C1–C4. Print.

Rathi, Rishabh and Askat Hawelia. "Jawed Karim Success Story--How Did He Found YouTube?" Startup Talky, 10 Nov. 2023, startuptalky.com/jawed-karim-youtube/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Rowell, Rebecca. YouTube: The Company and Its Founders. Edina: ABDO, 2011. Print.

Seabrook, John. “Streaming Dreams.” New Yorker 87.44 (2012): 24–30. Print.

Snickars, Pelle, and Patrick Vonderau, eds. The YouTube Reader. Stockholm: Natl. Lib. of Sweden, 2009. Print.