Coals to Newcastle for YouTube

While the media has been going mad over Chad Hurley and Steven Chen of YouTube and the $860m paid for it by Google, they seem to have largely forgotten about Jawed Karim, YouTube’s third founder.

Born in East Germany, Karim arrived in the US aged 13. He dropped out of full-time study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to work for PayPal where he met Hurley and Chen, and where all three earned millions when the company was purchased by eBay. Karim completed his undergraduate degree via online courses as well as some at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley, located near PayPal in San Jose.

Largely eschewing the media spotlight, Karim returned to Stanford University in 2005 and is currently studying for a Masters degree. He hopes eventually to become a Professor. In the UK, when a student makes money thoughts of further study go straight out of the window - think Richard Branson at Virgin and Alex Tew of Million Dollar Home Page fame. These two examples make Karim’s choice of a career in education seem very unusual, but what this really shows is the contrast between the UK’s obsession with state-controlled education and the US model that embraces the free market as a successful partner with the state.

In the few interviews Karim has given, he has repeatedly stated that his goal is to follow in the footsteps of other Stanford academics who have also been billionaires thanks to their involvement in private sector ventures. In the UK there are a smaller number of millionaire academics (no billionaires) and unsurprisingly most, like Graham Richards, Sir Greg Winter and Steve Davies, all work in institutions that are part of the elite Russell Group.

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