Jawed Karim net worth
Number of divisions: 18
What is Jawed Karim’s net worth?
Jawed Karim is an Internet entrepreneur with a net worth of US$300 million. Jawed Karim is best known for being the co-founder of YouTube. After selling YouTube to Google, Jawed launched a venture capital fund that has made many early successful investments. Jawed was one of Airbnb’s first external investors and participated in the company’s initial seed round of financing in April 2009.
early life
Jawed Karim was born on October 28, 1979 in Merseburg, East Germany. He is from Bangladesh. When he was two years old, Javid and his family crossed the border between East and West to escape communist xenophobia.
The family moved to the United States in 1992. His father was a researcher and worked at 3M, and his mother was a scientist and became a professor at the University of Minnesota.
Jawed attended Central High School in St. Paul, Minnesota. Then he studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying computer science. Not coincidentally, it was in the same school that Marc Andreeson developed the first user-friendly web browser, which eventually became Netscape.
In his junior year, Javid dropped out and became one of the early employees of a small startup in Silicon Valley called PayPal. In fact, he continued his undergraduate courses in his free time by taking some online courses and some additional face-to-face courses at Santa Clara University.
Paypal
Jawed’s two colleagues at PayPal are Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
In August 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for US$1.5 billion in cash. Jawed made millions from sales. His bosses at PayPal, future billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, earned US$175 million and US$60 million from this transaction, respectively.
In early 2005, Jawed, Chad and Steve all left PayPal. They started meeting at a local coffee shop/deli called Max’s Opera Cafe to brainstorm ideas.
According to legend, it was Jawed who came up with the original idea of building a website where people can upload and share videos.
YouTube
Jawed developed the YouTube concept and wrote the first version of the website, which was launched in February 2005. He also starred in the first video uploaded to Youtube. This video called “I’m at the Zoo” was filmed by a friend named Yakov Lapitsky during a trip to the San Diego Zoo. This 19-second video shows Jawed standing in front of a group of elephants, briefly describing the elephant’s trunk. It was uploaded to Youtube under the username “Jawed” at 8:27 PM on Saturday, April 23, 2005:
I am at the zoo:
Google Promotion
Surprisingly, after co-founding YouTube, Javid chose to leave the startup so that he could enter the graduate school of Stanford University. As a result, he accepted a smaller shareholding compared with his co-founder.
Chad Hurley and Steve Chen began to turn Youtube into the world-changing media empire that we all know and use today.
Despite leaving the company, Javid still owned a significant percentage of YouTube when YouTube was sold to Google in October 2006. Google acquired YouTube with shares worth 1.65 billion U.S. dollars.
Jawed acquired 137,443 Google shares on the day the transaction was completed, valued at $64 million. Due to Google’s continued success and rising stock price, the pre-tax value of these stocks today exceeds $350 million…assuming he didn’t sell any stocks.
Steve Chen and Chad Hurley each acquired approximately 700,000 shares of Google stock, valued at $345 million on the day the transaction was completed. Today, if no stocks are sold, the value of these stocks will be slightly less than $2 billion.
Other investment
In March 2008, Jawed, Keith Rabois and Kevin Hartz launched a venture capital fund called Youniversity Ventures, also known as YVentures. Participated in Airbnb’s seed round of investment in April 2009 through YVentures Jawed. Their fund 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]
