At 27 years of age, David Karp does not look like a young man that would spend night after night with P.Diddy in the New York night clubs, but rather more comfortable in front of a computer.
But at the end of June this year, the CEO of Tumblr, a platform with over 108 million blogs, had to celebrate in a disco in Cannes. The reason? He sold his company, for $1.1 billion to the giant Yahoo! and its gain is estimated at $250 million dollars. Karp kept his CEO position at Tumblr.
Karp’s story begins in the Upper West Side of New York , where he spent his childhood. At 15, Karp quit school, studying at home, with the support of his parents to pursue his passion: computers.
Karp taught himself computer programming at the age of 11 and has never wanted to “sell” his intellect to any Silicon Valley giant, writes Daily Mail. In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, Karp said that he systematically rejected lots of offers over time. Also, the young man refused for a long time funding his company by equity investors.
While his colleagues graduated from high school, Karp was Head of Product at UrbanBaby, a site later bought by CNET. Karp went to Japan in 2004 at the age of 18, after he broke up with his. A year later he returned to the US and established Davidville, a consulting company and launched his own products. In 2005, he came up with the idea of setting up Tumblr as a Davidville product, after reading a report showing that more and more blogs are created each year but the number of active blogs declines. The idea of Tumblr platform was to provide a simple way for those who want to set up a blog, where they insert pictures, text or video, Karp explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Tumblr was born in 2007, and today has over 13 million users worldwide. The site provides a free service for publishing blogs on the web and mobile devices and also photo-sharing features and content on social networks.
Karp’s perseverance brought him great success. At 26 years old he sold Tumblr to Yahoo! for $1.1 billion. The transaction made Karp a multi-millionaire after he founded the company with money and experience as a software consultant for the site UrbanBaby .
For a guy who is worth millions of dollars, Karp is living now a modest live. He goes to the office with a Vespa scooter and spends free time with his girlfriend, Rachel Eakley, a psychology graduate and cook.
Reply