Jawed Karim Birthday

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Jawed Karim was born on 1 January, 1979

Founder of YouTube with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The three were employees at Paypal when the entrepreneurship spirit called them. Karim’s first online project was a site similar to “Hot or Not” on which visitors would rate the ‘hotness’ of others.

As per a probably apocryphal story, the need to create an online video sharing service arose when Jawed Karim couldn’t find the Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction video. On 14th February 2005, YouTube.com domain name was registered and the service was officially launched after a few days. It quickly became popular getting millions of views each day. A little more than a year later, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Jawed Karim is also the poster of the first video on YouTube on 23rd April 2005. The 18 second clip is of him at the San Diego Zoo in front of the elephant’s enclosure – Check out the original YouTube video.