Youtube co-founder Jawed Karim weighs in on recent platform changes

American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur Jawed Karim made his name as the co-founder of Youtube. Karim uploaded the first ever video to the website, which has since become a staple of global culture. The video has been viewed over 225 million times since that fateful day.  

Karim also heads up YVentures, becoming one of AirBnB’s first investors in 2009, as well as Palantir, Reddit and Eventbrite. 

Jawed Karim launches Youtube

While studying at university, Karim served as an intern at Silicon Graphics, a hardware and software company in Silicon Valley. Karim later managed to juggle his studies with a job at Paypal, where he designed its real-time anti-internet fraud system.  

At Paypal, Karim met his future partners Steven Chen and Chad Hurley in 2002. Three years later they launched Youtube, changing the world. Karim started the first youtube channel Jawed on April 23rd 2005 and uploaded the first video ever, Me at the zoo. Deciding to focus on his degree in Computer Science at Stanford, Karim acted only as an advisor to Youtube. As a result, he took a much lower share in the company than his partners. 

Google acquired Youtube in 2006 and Karim’s lower share in the company still came out at a massive $64 million in stock. In October of that year, Karim gave a lecture about the history of Youtube at the University of Illinois Annual ACM conference. Two years later the university invited him back, and he became the youngest commencement speaker in the school’s history.  

Jawed Karim hails from Bangladeshi-German parents

Karim was born in East Germany to a Bangladeshi father and German mother. Unfortunately, his family had to move around the country several times due to xenophobia. They eventually crossed the border over to West Germany in the 1980s to find a more peaceful home. There he grew up in the city of Neuss. 

Unable to escape prejudice in West Germany either, they moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota in the US in 1992. Karim managed to gain a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois whilst working at Paypal. Subsequently, he obtained his master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University.  

After his family’s tough experiences with immigration, Karim founded an organization called KarimImmigration. The Canadian immigration firm represents and provides counsel to clients worldwide. 

Jawed Karim’s Youtube interventions

Although Karim’s remained on the sidelines of Youtube since its launch, he’s made a number of recent important interventions. When Youtube began requiring users to comment using a Google + account, Karim took up arms. Condemning the Google + requirement to use your real name, Karim changed the description of his inaugural Youtube video. It read: “I can’t comment here anymore, since I don’t want a Google+ account.” The Google + requirement shut down in 2019. 

Karim has also disagreed with Youtube’s decision to hide dislike button counts. Youtube maintains that it eliminated the feature to help smaller, new content creators. But Karim worries that the result will be a descent into mediocrity.  

Changing the description in his Me at the zoo video again, Karim asks “Does YouTube want to become a place where everything is mediocre? Because nothing can be great if nothing is bad.” 

Follow Jawed Karim on Instagram for all his latest news.