Academic

Jawed Karim

American entrepreneur and software engineer (born 1979)

Life: 1979 – present
Born: October 28, 1979
Nationality: United States, Germany

Jawed Karim is a Bengali-origin German-American software engineer and internet entrepreneur. He is one of the co-founders 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 391 million times as of May 2026. During Karim's time working at PayPal, where he met fellow YouTube co-founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, he designed many of its core components, including its real-