Jawed Karim

Jawed Karim (Bengali: জাভেদ করিম; born 28 October 1979) is a German-Bengali-American internet entrepreneur and co-founder of YouTube. He was the first person to upload a video to the site. This inaugural video - titled Me at the zoo - has been viewed over 70 million times as of May 2019. During Karim's time working at PayPal, where he met the fellow YouTube co-founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley, he designed many of the core components including its real-time anti-internet-fraud system.

Karim was born the elder of two boys in Merseburg, East Germany, in 1979 to a German mother and a Bangladeshi father. He crossed the inner German border with his family in the early 1980s because of xenophobia, growing up in Neuss, West Germany. Experiencing xenophobia there as well, Karim moved with his family to Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1992. He 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's degree in computer science. He subsequently earned a master's degree in computer science from Stanford University.