April 24th 2018 was Happy 13th birthday to the very first YouTube video.
The first YouTube video was of YouTube founder Jawed Karim with elephants at a zoo.
It showed YouTube founder Jawed Karim telling what some regard to be an off-colour “dick joke” about the length of elephant penises (though just as many regard it to be an honest observation that elephants have really long trunks!
Check out the video…
Jawed Karim actually built the first prototype for YouTube when after hearing of Janet Jackson’s garment malfunction – he googled around for the video clip of her and found it with difficulty and wondered why was it so difficult to share video and what would it take to be able to efficiently watch videos in a web browser.
It’s interesting that all three of these co-founders had been early employees of PayPal – and one of Jawed’s co-founders drew as part of his interview a logo for PayPal – which is still used as a logo by PayPal today.. at the time when both Elon Musk and Peter Thiel were part of PayPal’s founding team!
Subsequently and interestingly – after building YouTube and working with his cofounders to improve YouTube’s vitality features – he walked out of YouTube as he had gotten admission in a PhD program in a university. both his parents were professors and PhDs and they had always wanted him to do a PhD – so he decided to go and join PhD rather than lose out of the chance for admission to PhD.
Subsequently when YouTube got acquired by Google for 1.7 or 1.8 billion dollars — jawed got “only” around 65-70 million dollars – compared to the multi hundred million dollar payouts of his co-founders.
Here’s a little more about the first comment on YouTube:
Leaving you below with a screengrab from the mentioned video, showing youtube founder Jawed Karim with elephants at the Zoo!!!