Jawed Karim, one of the co-founders of YouTube, is living one of my dreams — he’s rich and spends his time studying what he loves. The New York Times’ Miguel Heft has this piece today about the lesser known of the YouTube founding trio, who’s getting his master’s degree in Computer Science at Stanford, despite the fact that even before Google bought YouTube, Karim was already worth hundreds of millions from his days working at PayPal, which was purchased by eBay for $1.5 billion.
Now he’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but is still charmingly modest.
Mr. Karim, who is 27, became visibly uncomfortable when the subject turned to money, and he would not say what he stands to make when Google’s purchase of YouTube is completed. He said only that he is one of the company’s largest individual shareholders, though he owns less of the company than his two partners, whose stakes in the company are likely to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to some estimates. The deal was so enormous, he says, that his share was still plenty big.
Karim claims he was the one who pitched the idea of a video-sharing site to the other two co-founders, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, although it sounds like the latter two put the idea into action. He chose not to be an employee or take any compensation, even after big-time VC Sequoia Capital gave the start-up the funds it needed to get going. Karim’s initial reaction to the purchase price of $1.65 billion for YouTube: “It sounded good to me.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 11:05 AM|Comments(0)
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