Jawed Karim

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Jawed Karim is a German-American software engineer and internet entrepreneur who co-founded YouTube and posted the site’s very first video.

He was born on October 28, 1979, in Merseburg, East Germany, to a Bangladeshi father and a German mother. His family moved around after facing racism—living in Neuss, West Germany, before moving to Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1992. He graduated from Saint Paul Central High School in 1997 and studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a bachelor’s degree. He then earned a master's degree in computer science from Stanford University. He also interned at Silicon Graphics, working on 3D data for large projects.

Karim met Steve Chen and Chad Hurley while working at PayPal in 2002. They founded YouTube together in 2005, and Karim designed many of PayPal’s core components there. He created the first YouTube account, “jawed,” and uploaded the site’s first video, “Me at the zoo,” on April 23, 2005. He served as an informal adviser to YouTube while studying at Stanford and did not take an employee role.

When Google bought YouTube in 2006, Karim received about 137,443 Google shares, worth around $64 million at the time. He later gave a lecture on YouTube’s history at the University of Illinois and returned there as a commencement speaker in 2008. In 2008, he started a venture fund called Youniversity Ventures (now YVentures) with partners, and he became an early investor in Airbnb, as well as Palantir, Reddit, and Eventbrite.

Karim speaks German, English, and Bengali. Over the years, he has occasionally updated the description of “Me at the zoo” to comment on YouTube’s changes, including the Google+ integration in 2013 and issues discussed in 2025.