What is Jawed Karim’s net worth?
Jawed Karim, co-founder of YouTube, has a net worth of $300 million. He is an internet entrepreneur who launched a venture capital fund after the sale of YouTube to Google.
Karim’s fund has made successful investments, including being one of the first outside investors in Airbnb’s initial seed round in April 2009.
Early Life and Education
Jawed Karim was born in East Germany in 1979 to Bangladeshi parents who fled the country’s communist regime when he was two years old. In 1992, his family moved to the United States, where his father worked at 3M and his mother became a professor at the University of Minnesota. Karim attended Central High School in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and later studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
During his time at the university, Karim dropped out in his junior year to take a job at PayPal, one of Silicon Valley’s early startups. He continued his coursework by taking online classes and additional in-person classes at Santa Clara University.
Jawed Karim’s Role in the Founding of YouTube
Jawed Karim, a former employee at PayPal along with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, made several million from the sale of PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in cash. In 2005, the trio began meeting at a local coffee shop called Max’s Opera Cafe to brainstorm business ideas. It was Jawed who pitched the initial idea for a website where people could upload and share videos, which eventually led to the founding of YouTube.
Jawed Karim’s Youtube Legacy
Jawed Karim created and coded the first version of Youtube, which launched in February 2005. He also starred in the first video ever uploaded to the site, “Me at the zoo”, shot by his friend Yakov Lapitsky during a visit to the San Diego Zoo. The video, uploaded by the username “Jawed”, shows him standing in front of elephants and briefly describing their trunks. It was uploaded on April 23, 2005 at 8:27 pm.
Jawed Karim Net Worth Summary
Jawed Karim, one of the co-founders of YouTube, has an estimated net worth of $140 million. He is also known for being an angel investor in several successful startups, including Airbnb and Palantir Technologies.
Karim’s wealth comes primarily from his early involvement in YouTube. He co-founded the company in 2005 alongside Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, and Karim reportedly received a 137,443 share payout as a result.
Since then, Karim has largely stayed out of the public eye and focused on investing in tech startups. He has been particularly interested in companies that are working on artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Jawed Karim’s Stake in YouTube and Google
After co-founding YouTube, Jawed Karim decided to leave the startup to pursue graduate school at Stanford University. As a result, he received a smaller equity stake compared to his co-founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
Despite leaving the company, Karim still owned a significant percentage of YouTube when it was sold to Google for $1.65 billion worth of stock. He received 137,443 shares of Google, which were worth $64 million on the day the deal closed. Today, those shares are worth more than $350 million, assuming he hasn’t sold any shares.
Meanwhile, Hurley and Chen 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 they had not sold any shares.
Jawed Karim’s Venture Capital Fund
Jawed Karim, along with Keith Rabois and Kevin Hartz, launched a venture capital fund named Youniversity Ventures in March 2008. The fund, also known as YVentures, participated in Airbnb’s seed investment round in April 2009 and has invested in other successful startups like Reddit, Eventbrite and Palantir.
The photo of Jawed Karim used on this page was taken by Robin Brown and made Public Domain by Jawed himself via Wikimedia Creative Commons.
