Jawed Karim

Jawed Karim is a German and American software engineer and internet entrepreneur of Bangladeshi descent who co-founded YouTube and was the first person to upload a video to it. He was born in 1979 in Merseburg in East Germany, grew up in Neuss in West Germany, and moved with his family to Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1992. He studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later earned a master degree at Stanford University. While an early employee at PayPal he designed core components, including its real-time anti-fraud system, and met Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, with whom he founded YouTube in 2005. He uploaded the first video on the site, Me at the zoo, on 23 April 2005, but acted only as an informal adviser while he studied, so he held a much smaller share than the other founders. When Google acquired YouTube in 2006 he received shares worth about 64 million dollars. In 2008 he launched the venture fund Youniversity Ventures, now YVentures, an early investor in Airbnb.