Today is the fifth anniversary of YouTube's first video upload. On April 23rd, 2005 at 8:27pm (a Saturday night—nerd!) this video of YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim sparked an internet revolution. Fittingly for the site, he's at a zoo. [Mashabale]
For proof that Silicon Valley is home to an especially clubby concentration of wealth, just take a short walk down a stretch of Palo Alto road. The one where Facebook's young paper billionaire lives next to a young YouTube millionaire.
The other YouTube cofounder, Jawed Karim, has all the good ideas. First, according to an interview Karim gave the New York Times in 2006, he was the one came up with the idea of a video-sharing site that would eventually sell to Google for $1.65 billion. Second, he's also the one who, even before collecting Google's millions, smartly realized he didn't need to stick around to see how things turned out. Karim headed back to Stanford to finish his Ph.D., which he's still working on. Now, on the side, Karim's decided to take on what his former PayPal colleague Peter Thiel calls a "cushy" profession and become a startup-seeding venture capitalist, reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Maybe Karim's idea-well has gone dry? Karim's firm, the awkwardly named Youniversity, will focus on college students in Minnesota and ignore Silicon Valley. The Valley, Jawed told the Star-Tribune, "has a lot of noise."
YouTube founder Steve Chen, on the Oprah show, recites the same old tale he and Chad Hurley have been trained to give about how YouTube got his start: Chen threw a dinner party, friends filmed each other with videocameras, and then realized the videos were hard to share. What the two didn't tell Oprah: YouTube's third cofounder, Jawed Karim, claims the dinner party never happened, and he came up with the idea for a video-sharing site.
Seen here, in YouTube founder Jawed Karim's Facebook profile page, the current Stanford grad student (and former PayPal engineer) dressed in disco-era gangster gear. The reason? Karim comments:
Remember Jawed Karim, the YouTube co-founder who went to school instead of running the company? Yeah, neither do we — we forgot him five minutes after reading his humdrum profile in the New York Times. So who told him that the talk he was about to give at Stanford would become a "massive media stampede, with television crews and reporters from across the bay area planning to attend"?
