Jawed Karim, the Bangla-American cofounder of YouTube, which was just acquired by Google, was already a PayPal millionaire (thanks, Sree):

He hit an Internet jackpot in 2002 when PayPal, the online payment company he had joined early on, was bought by eBay. [Link]

His cofounders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley were the main contributors, and Karim was like the fifth Beatle:

He was present at YouTube’s creation, contributing some crucial ideas… Mr. Karim said he pitched the idea of a video-sharing Web site to the group. But he made it clear that contributions from Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley were essential…

As early as February 2005, when the site was introduced, Mr. Karim said he and his partners had agreed that he would not become an employee, but rather an informal adviser to YouTube. He did not take a salary, benefits or even a formal title. “I was focused on school,” he said. [Link]

Karim will reportedly be paid with half the Google shares which Chen and Hurley receive:

The decision meant that his stake in the company would be reduced, Mr. Karim said. “We negotiated something that we thought was fair.” [Link]

Key advisor Jawed Karim, 27… retained a 10 per cent stake. [Link]

Karim says YouTube was originally his idea:

Still, Karim, 27, would like more people to know that he was YouTube’s third co-founder - and, he says, the guy who first suggested the idea that became the company… [Link]

The driving factors behind YouTube were, as always, sex and death:

… his idea for what became YouTube sprang from two very different events in 2004: Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” during a Super Bowl show, and the Asian tsunami… Karim recalled the difficulty involved in finding and watching videos online of Jackson accidentally baring her breast during the Super Bowl show. The same was true with the many amateur videos made of that winter’s devastating tsunami… [Link]

YouTube is the second business they tried:

YouTube fizzled in an early version, Karim says: A dating site called Tune In Hook Up drew little interest. [Link]

They called in a friend to invest:

Roelof Botha was chief financial officer [of PayPal] when the YouTube three worked there, and went on to become a partner in Sequoia Capital. At Botha’s suggestion, Sequoia in November 2005 gave YouTube its first venture capital… [Link]

Karim’s main interest is professorship:

… academia had more allure than the details of turning that idea into a business… he quietly went back to class, working toward a degree in computer science… mostly he just wants to be a professor. He said he simply hopes to follow in the footsteps of other Stanford academics who struck it rich in Silicon Valley and went back to teaching. “There’s a few billionaires in that building,” he said, standing in front of the William Gates Computer Science Building. [Link]

He was born in communist Germany, and his parents are both technical:

Mr. Karim was born in East Germany in 1979. The family moved to West Germany a year later and to St. Paul, Minn., in 1992. His father, Naimul Karim, is a researcher at 3M and his mother, Christine Karim, is a research assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Minnesota. [Link]

He was a dot com dropout before becoming a grad student:

In 2000, during his junior year, he dropped out to head to Silicon Valley, where he joined PayPal. He later finished his undergraduate degree by taking some courses online and some at Santa Clara University. [Link]

Hurley was actually a graphic designer before becoming the face of YouTube:

“He took graphic arts and print media typesetting courses, and he also took classes on Web design — this during the early stages of Web design in the late 1990s…” Hurley’s gift for design was evident at [Indiana University of Pennsylvania]. He designed the T-shirts for his teammates on the track and cross country teams… [Link]

Related post: The Bangla Sabeer Bhatia