Jawed Karim

Jawed Karim
Jawed Karim in August 2008.
Born	(1979-10-28) 28 October 1979 (age 37) Merseburg, East Germany (Present day Germany)
Residence	Palo Alto, California, U.S.
Alma mater	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Stanford University
Known for	Co-founder of YouTube

Jawed Karim (born 28 October 1979) is a German-American Internet entrepreneur, who co-founded YouTube and was the first person to upload a video on it. The video he released was named 'Me at the zoo' and as of 2017 has reached 36 million views. Many of the core components of PayPal, including its real-time anti-internet fraud system, were also designed and implemented by Karim.

Karim was born in Merseburg, East Germany. He crossed the inner German border with his family in 1981, growing up in Neuss, West Germany. Karim grew up in Germany and his family moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1992. Karim graduated from Saint Paul Central High School and later attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Computer Science. He left campus prior to graduating to become an early employee at PayPal, but continued his coursework, earning his Bachelor of Science in computer science. He subsequently earned a master's degree in computer science from Stanford University.

In 1998 Jawed 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, he met Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The three later founded the YouTube video sharing website in 2005. YouTube's first-ever video, Me at the zoo, was uploaded by Karim on 23 April 2005.