Jawed Karim

Jawed Karim is a co-founder of the popular video sharing website YouTube.

Karim was born in Merseburg, East Germany, in 1979 and moved to West Germany in 1982. His father, Naimul Karim, is a Bangladeshi researcher at 3M. His mother, Christine Karim, is a research assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Minnesota.

Karim grew up in Germany, and his family moved to the United States in 1992. He graduated from Central High School (Saint Paul, Minnesota), and went on to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He left campus prior to graduating to become an early employee at PayPal, but continued his coursework, earning his bachelor's degree in computer science in 2004.

While working at PayPal, he met Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The three later founded the YouTube video sharing website in 2005. 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 advisor to YouTube. When YouTube was acquired by Google, Karim's 137,443 shares of stock were valued at $64.6 million, while his cofounders each earned around $326 million.

In October 2006, Jawed gave a lecture about the history of YouTube at the University of Illinois' annual ACM Conference entitled YouTube: From Concept to Hyper-growth. In his lecture he mentioned Wikipedia as being an innovative social experiment and added that he created the Air Force One article in 2002. He returned again to the University of Illinois in May 2007 as the 136th and youngest Commencement Speaker in Illinois history.

More recently, Jawed has launched a venture fund called Youniversity Ventures, with the goal of helping current and former university students to launch their business ideas.

from www.wikipedia.org