The Youtube founders
Jawed Karim (born Oct 28, 1979) is a co-founder of YouTube and the first person to upload a video to the site. The site's inaugural video, "Me at the zoo", uploaded on April 23, 2005, has been viewed over 310 million times as of March 4, 2024.[2][3] During Karim's time working at PayPal, where he met fellow YouTube co-founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley, he designed many of its core components.
Steve Chen was born in Taipei, Taiwan. When he was seven years old, he and his family immigrated to the United States[3] and settled in Prospect Heights, Illinois.[4] At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he studied computer science.[5]
Chen was an employee at PayPal, where he first met Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. Chen was also an early employee at Facebook, although he left after several months to start YouTube.[6]
Chad Hurley worked in eBay's PayPal division—one of his tasks involved designing the original PayPal logo[3]—before co-founding YouTube[4] with fellow PayPal colleagues Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.[5 He studied for a B.A. in Fine Art from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.[10]
Hurley was formerly married to Kathy Clark, the daughter of Silicon Valley entrepreneur James H. Clark.
(James Henry Clark (born March 23, 1944) is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Netscape, myCFO, and Healtheon.)
Netscape Founders James H. Clark
Marc Andreessen
(Andreesen has worked at Netscape, Opsware, founded Andreessen Horowitz and invested in many successful companies including, Facebook, Foursquare, GitHub, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter).[8]
Jawed Karim was born in Merseburg, East Germany, to a Bangladeshi father and a German mother.[4] His father Naimul Karim is a Bangladeshi who is a researcher at 3M, and his mother, Christine, is a German biochemistry scientist at the University of Minnesota.[5] He crossed the inner German border with his family in the early 1980s because of xenophobia,[7] growing up in Neuss, West Germany.[note 1] Experiencing xenophobia there as well,[7] Karim moved with his family to Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1992.[8]
He graduated from Saint Paul Central High School in 1997,[9][10] and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign