With YouTube, Student Hits Jackpot Again
or Jawed Karim, the $100,000 or so he would have to spend on a master’s degree at Stanford was never daunting. He hit an Internet jackpot in 2002 when PayPal, the online payment company he had joined early on, was bought by eBay.
On Monday, still early in his studies for the fall term, he got lucky again. This time he may have hit the Internet equivalent of the multistate PowerBall.
Mr. Karim is the third of the three founders of the video site YouTube, which Google has agreed to buy for $1.65 billion. He was present at YouTube’s creation, contributing some crucial ideas about a Web site where users could share video. But academia had more allure than the details of turning that idea into a business.
So while his partners Chad Hurley and Steven Chen built the company and went on to become Internet and media celebrities, he quietly went back to class, working toward a degree in computer science.
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.
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.
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