YouTube turns 20: What happened to Jawed Karim, founder and author of the first video?
Two decades after creating the video platform, little is known about his life. Originally from Germany and naturalized as an American, his first clip marked a before and after in the history of the internet
The first video in YouTube history lasts just 19 seconds. In 2005, Jawed Karim, co-founder of the platform with Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, stood in front of a camera at the San Diego Zoo to talk about the trunks of the park’s elephants. Although the original idea was to set up a platform for romantic dates, homemade clips proved to have another kind of potential. At least, that’s what Google thought. The technology company acquired the platform for $1.65 billion a year later, and Time magazine lauded it as the great invention of the time. On the 20th anniversary of its launch, YouTube continues to enjoy huge popularity that translates into earnings that exceeded $50 billion in 2024, thanks to advertising and the more than 114 million channels it currently has.
The first face — and perhaps the first YouTuber — that marked a before and after in the annals of the history of the internet is also one of the most reclusive. Little is known about the life of Karim, a 45-year-old computer engineer who arrived in the United States in the early 1990s with his parents from the former German Democratic Republic. He was present at the creation of the platform and contributed some crucial ideas to transform YouTube from a simple repository of amateur videos into the largest audiovisual content platform and the second-most visited website in the world, only behind Google.
Since the first video, Me at the Zoo, YouTube has grown exponentially into what it is today, a place where millions of strangers gather to create and watch content. The computer engineer met his partners when all three were working at PayPal in 1999. They often held informal meetings at coffee shops, Karim’s apartment, or Hurley’s garage in Menlo Park, California. From there, the twenty-somethings registered YouTube in Silicon Valley on Valentine’s Day 2005. Although all three are listed as co-founders of the company, Karim was credited as an outside advisor.
While his partners built the company and became internet and print celebrities, he went back to taking classes and worked toward a degree in computer science, a degree he had left unfinished at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign after taking correspondence classes. Roelof Botha, the Sequoia Capital partner who led the investment that catapulted the site to stardom, told The New York Times that he would have preferred Karim to stay: “He was very, very creative. We did everything we could to convince him to put the contract on hold.”
For Karim, the academic world apparently held more appeal than running a business that has had to navigate a path littered with copyright complaints and issues with content regulation. YouTube has also survived the rise of other social networks such as Instagram and TikTok. He now lives in Palo Alto and rarely makes public appearances.
Karim took a different route out of the media spotlight. He put his graduate studies at Stanford University ahead of running one of the largest tech companies in the world, which now has more than 122 million monthly active users. Karim occasionally edits the description of the video Me at the Zoo to express his opinions — in a nonconformist way — about the platform or other issues. He did so in 2013, when YouTube announced it would use Google Plus to drive comments. At that time, Karim changed the text to read: “Why the hell do I need a Google+ account to comment on a video?” Its current description refers to the danger of microplastics in the brain.
In 2021, YouTube decided to hide dislikes on all of its videos, leaving that number visible to the content creator but not to users. According to statements collected by The Verge, Karim argued that the decision could destroy the platform. “The ability to easily and quickly identify inappropriate content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform. Why? Because not all user-generated content is good,” he wrote.
Karim’s discretion did not keep him away from the world of technology entirely. After working at YouTube, in 2008 he launched a venture fund called Youniversity Ventures with partners Keith Rabois and Kevin Hartz, whose purpose is to finance projects by entrepreneurial university students. Through this fund, Karim was one of the first investors in Airbnb, the popular application dedicated to offering accommodation to individuals and tourists, which is now valued at $85 billion.
The essential tool
In addition to becoming a partner at Sequoia Capital (the same company that launched YouTube), Karim has provided advisory services to the sales site Milo Inc (later purchased by eBay) and Eventbrite, a site for organizing web-based events.
“YouTube is the backbone of everything that moves in video on the internet,” says Borja González, CEO of Séntisis Intelligence. Few platforms are so universal because they are consumed by a wide target of users: from young to old. “The level of contribution it has had from the point of view of content consumption has been huge,” he adds.
For some people, such as Manuel Moreno, social media expert and director of Trecebits, the idea of these young people is an essential tool for making himself known. “It serves as a channel for me to reach new audiences and improve my personal brand. It is my fundamental professional strategy,” Moreno says.
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