Jawed Karim Net Worth

What is Jawed Karim's net worth?

Jawed Karim is an internet entrepreneur who has a net worth of $300 million. Jawed Karim is best known as one of the three co-founders of YouTube, alongside Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. He moved to the United States in the early 1990s and later studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While still a student, he took an internship at PayPal, where he met Chen and Hurley. That connection would prove pivotal.

After observing the challenges of finding and sharing video clips online, most notably the widespread difficulty accessing footage of Janet Jackson's 2004 Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction, Karim suggested the idea for a user-friendly video-sharing platform. The trio bought the domain YouTube.com on February 14, 2005, and launched the site shortly thereafter.

Karim played a critical role in shaping YouTube's concept and architecture, but he left the company early on to pursue a graduate degree at Stanford. Despite stepping away from daily operations, he remained an adviser and shareholder. When Google acquired YouTube in October 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock, Karim's relatively small stake—137,000 shares—was reportedly worth around $65 million at the time.

Notoriously private, Karim has kept a low profile ever since. His one and only YouTube upload, "Me at the Zoo," remains the first video ever posted on the platform and a symbolic cornerstone of internet history. Though less visible than his co-founders, Jawed Karim's influence on digital culture is undeniable. His simple idea—to make sharing video as easy as sending an email—helped launch a media empire that reshaped the internet forever.

After the sale of YouTube to Google, Jawed launched a venture capital fund, which has made a number of early and successful investments. Jawed was one of the first outside investors in Airbnb, participating in the company's April 2009 initial seed round.

Early Life

Jawed Karim was born on October 28, 1979, in Merseburg, East Germany. He is of Bangladeshi ethnicity. When he was two years old, Jawed and his family crossed the East-West German border to escape communist xenophobia.

In 1992, the family moved to the United States. His father, a researcher, took a job at 3M, and his mother, a scientist, became a professor at the University of Minnesota.

Jawed attended Central High School in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He then enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study Computer Science. Not coincidentally, this is the same school where Marc Andreessen developed one of the first user-friendly web browsers, which eventually became Netscape.

In his junior year, Jawed dropped out to take a job as one of the early employees of a little Silicon Valley startup called PayPal. He actually continued his undergraduate coursework in his free time by taking some online classes and some additional in-person classes at Santa Clara University.

PayPal

Two of Jawed's co-workers at PayPal were Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

In August 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in cash. Jawed made several million from the sale. His bosses at PayPal, future billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, earned $175 million and $60 million from the sale, respectively.

In early 2005, Jawed, Chad, and Steve all left PayPal. They began meeting at a local coffee shop/deli called Max's Opera Cafe to brainstorm business ideas.

According to legend, it was Jawed who pitched the initial idea for a website where people could upload and share videos.

YouTube

Jawed developed the YouTube concept and coded the first version of the website, which was launched in February 2005. He also has the distinction of starring in the very first video ever uploaded to YouTube. The video, titled "Me at the zoo", was shot by a friend named Yakov Lapitsky during a trip to the San Diego Zoo. The 19-second video shows Jawed standing in front of a group of elephants briefly describing the elephant's trunks. It was uploaded to YouTube by the username "Jawed" at 8:27 pm on Saturday, April 23, 2005:

Me At The Zoo:

Google Sale

Amazingly, just after co-founding YouTube, Jawed opted to leave the startup so he could enroll in graduate school at Stanford University. As a result, he accepted a smaller equity stake compared to his co-founders.

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen proceeded to turn YouTube into the world-changing media empire that we all know and use today.

Despite leaving the company, Jawed still owned a fairly significant percentage of YouTube by the time it was sold to Google in October 2006. Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion worth of stock.

Jawed received 137,443 shares of Google, which were worth $64 million on the day the deal closed. Thanks to Google's continued success and rising stock price, today those shares are worth more than $350 million, pre-tax, assuming he hasn't sold any shares.

Steve Chen and Chad Hurley each received roughly 700,000 shares of Google, which were worth $345 million on the day the deal closed. Today, those shares would be worth just under $2 billion if no shares were ever sold.

Other Investments

In March 2008, Jawed, Keith Rabois, and Kevin Hartz launched a venture capital fund they called Youniversity Ventures, aka YVentures. Through YVentures, Jawed participated in Airbnb's seed investment round in April 2009. Their fund has also invested in Reddit, Eventbrite, and Palantir.

[The photo of Jawed Karim used on this page was taken by Robin Brown and then made Public Domain by user Jawed via wikimedia creative commons]

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