Jawed Karim Net Worth | Celebrity Net Worth

Division: 18

What is the net worth of Jawed Karim?

Jawed Karim is an internet entrepreneur who has a net worth of $300 million. Jawed Karim is best known for being the co-founder of YouTube, following the sale of YouTube to Google, Jawed launched a venture capital fund, which has made several early and successful investments. Jawad was one of the first outside investors in Airbnb to participate in the company’s April 2009 initial seed round.

early life

Jawad Karim was born on 28 October 1979 in Merseburg, East Germany. He is of Bangladeshi ethnicity. When he was two years old, Jawad and his family crossed the East-West German border to escape communist xenophobia.

The family moved to the United States in 1992. His father, a researcher, took a job at 3M and his mother, a scientist, became a professor at the University of Minnesota.

Javed attended Central High School in St. Paul, Minnesota. He then enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study computer science. Not coincidentally, this is the same school where Mark Andreesson developed one of the first user-friendly web browsers, which eventually became Netscape.

In his junior year, Jawad left his job as one of the early employees of a small Silicon Valley startup called PayPal. He actually continued his undergraduate course in his spare time by taking some online classes and some additional in-person classes at Santa Clara University.

paypal

Two of Jawad’s coworkers at PayPal were Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

In August 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in cash. Jawad earned several million from sales. His bosses at PayPal, future billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, earned $175 million and $60 million, respectively, from the sale.

In early 2005, Jawad, Chad and Steve all left PayPal. They started meeting at a local coffee shop/deli called Max’s Opera Café to brainstorm business ideas.

According to legend, it was Jawad who laid the initial idea for a website where people could upload and share videos.

youtube

Jawad developed the YouTube concept and coded the first version of the website which was launched in February 2005. He also has the distinction of starring in the first video uploaded to Youtube. The video, titled “Me at the Zoo,” was shot by a friend named Yakov Lapitsky during a visit to the San Diego Zoo. In the 19-second video, Javed briefly describes the trunk of an elephant standing in front of a group of elephants. This was uploaded to Youtube on Saturday, April 23rd, 2005 at 8:27 pm with the username “javed”:

me at the zoo

google sale

Amazingly, after co-founding YouTube, Jawed chose to leave the startup so that he could attend graduate school at Stanford University. As a result, he accepted a smaller equity stake than his co-founders.

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen turned YouTube into the world-changing media empire we all know and use today.

Despite leaving the company, Jaw still owned a significant percentage of YouTube by the time it was sold to Google in October 2006. Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.

Javed received 137,443 shares of Google, worth $64 million on the day of the close of the deal. Thanks to Google’s continued success and rising stock price, those shares are worth more than $350 million today, pre-tax… assuming they haven’t sold any shares.

Steve Chen and Chad Hurley each received approximately 700,000 shares of Google, valued at $345 million on the day the deal closed. Today those shares would be worth just under $2 billion if no shares were ever sold.

other investments

In March 2008, Jawad, Keith Rabois and Kevin Hertz launched a venture capital fund they called University Ventures, aka YVentures. Jawad, through YVentures, participated in Airbnb’s seed investment round in April 2009. His fund has 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]