As you may have heard, there’s this little company thingy called YouTube that’s gotten a little popular lately, and then there were all these big companies that got interested in getting some of that popularity for themselves, because, like, they thought that it could make them some money, and, like, open up glorious new ways of communicating. And then this other company called Google got interested, and… well, 1.65 billion dollars and a lunch at Denny’s later, you know the rest.
I saw a bit of that video — on YouTube, natch — where founders Chad Hurley and Steven Chen get a little gloat on, calling the union of YouTube and Google that of “two kings.” But there’s long been rumored to be — OK, reported and confirmed — a Third Man behind the video site sensation, and of course, that man is desi.
At least from this New York Times profile, Jawed Karim, 27, sounds like a thoroughly nice guy and likeable nerd, and one with a knack for good ideas and an appetite for seeing them enacted. He was already an early participant in PayPal. But through his rise as an Internet multi-millionaire his chief focus has been academia.
Mr. Karim said he might keep a hand in entrepreneurship, and he dreams of having an impact on the way people use the Internet something he has already done. Philanthropy may have some appeal, down the road. But 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. …
David L. Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford, said Mr. Karims choice was unusual.
Im impressed that given his success in business he decided to do the masters program here, Mr. Dill said. The tradition here has been in the other direction, he said, pointing to the founders of Google and Yahoo, who left Stanford for the business world.
So it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, and here’s a round of Sepia congratulations to Jawed. (No word on whether he’s single.) Beyond that, I’m curious about what all you tech and media macacas out there think of the whole YouTube thing. Obviously, it’s viral as a mofo and pretty fun to surf around. But do folks consistently use it to post their own content? Is it just a library of pre-existing content that at some point will find an intellectual-property arrangement with original providers and a commercial business model? Or is it a harbinger of paradigmatic change?
