David Karp never imagined building “the easiest way to share yourself” platform that supports small bits of every type of media, albeit as an experimental challenge, would win him laurels today.
In 2010, this technology keen boy was among the top 35 innovators in the world in the under-35 age group on the MIT Technology Review TR35 list. And he was just 24 then. Today at 35, David Karp is worth $200 million. He struck gold after Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) acquired Tumblr – Karp founded – for $1.1 billion.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go as per plan and after a year since struggling Yahoo! sold itself to Verizon in mid-2016 David Karp also decided to leave Tumblr in November 2017. In the absence of any leadership, Tumblr started slowly turning into a joyless black hole for many.
However, in 2019, Verizon decided to get rid of it and sold it for a throwaway price of just $3 million to Automatic, the owner of WordPress.
Name: David Karp
Date Of Birth: July 06, 1986
Occupation: Founder & Former CEO – Tumblr
It all began in 2005 when David stumbled upon Projectionist, a tumblelog that was at that time tracking all tumblelogs and provided a brilliantly aesthetic alternative while solving the tedious adoption problems of WordPress. And some of these features were videos in their own nice frame, blurbs in nice little bubbles and the ability to make gorgeous typography quotes.
It was no hasty decision. He sat a year and a half on that idea and then one fine day in 2006, he got in Marco Arment and went “Let’s see if we can build this thing“.
There are more amazing things he has to his credit. Let’s check the interesting ones out there.
1. At the age of 11, he was learning HTML and was designing websites for local businesses.
2. At 14, he was interning at Frederator animation Studios where he built his first blogging platform and conceived, wrote, and edited their first internet video network called Channel Frederator. This internship came to him, thanks to his mother who used to teach Fred Seibert’s children as their science teacher.
3. Age 15, he dropped out of high school and was homeschooled on New York’s Upper West Side.
4. By 17, he had learnt Japanese and moved to Tokyo to work for UrbanBaby, an online parenting advice site with highly trafficked message boards full of urban-dwelling moms and dads.
5. Pleased by his work, the owners of UrbanBaby.com, gave him equity and made him the CTO, which CNET bought out in 2006.
6. The first version of Tumblr was coded by David and Macro in just two weeks. And when they rolled it out to tumblelog users, 30,000 users registered overnight.
7. Even in 2008, when quizzed by MediaBistro, David had no plans to sell Tumblr. However, May 17, 2013, saw Yahoo officially buying out Tumblr for $1.1million while retaining David as CEO.
8. Mr. Karp was also named Best Young Entrepreneur 2009 by BusinessWeek, in August 2009.
9. David Karp was on the Top 30 under 30 Forbes list published in the Forbes January 2013 magazine.
10. David Karp’s Tumblr hosts over 417.1 million blogs. counting in 162.3 billion posts in total.
In November 2017, Karp decided to move on. After serving Tumblr for 11 years Karp resigned from the post and left the company for reasons unknown.
Since then David Karp decided to lay low and keep making personal investments in various startups, including Superpedestrian, Inc., Sherpaa, Inc., Splash, from time to time.
Having achieved so much in so little time, we wish this 1986 born technology maverick and innovator, many more wonderful birthdays to come and all the better to make a lot more happen and change the world.
The post is a part of a B’day Series where we celebrate the birthday of renowned personalities from Tech Industry, very frequently. The series includes Entrepreneurs, C-level Executives, innovators or a renewed leaders who moved the industry with his exponential skill set and vision. The intent is to highlight the person’s achievements and touch base the little known, but interesting, part of his life. You can see the list of all earlier celebrated tech personalities, including Mark Zuckerberg, Marrisa Mayor, Sean Parker, Andy Rubin, Julian Assange, by following this link or subscribe to your daily newsletter.
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