Jawed Karim

Karim was born the elder of two boys in Merseburg, East Germany, in 1979 to a German mother and a Bangladeshi father. He crossed the inner German border with his family in the early 1980s because of xenophobia, growing up in Neuss, West Germany. Experiencing xenophobia there as well, Karim moved with his family to Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1992. He graduated from Saint Paul Central High School and later attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Computer Science. He left campus prior to graduating to become an early employee at PayPal, but continued his coursework, earning his bachelor's degree in computer science. He subsequently earned a master's degree in computer science from Stanford University.