David Karp is an American entrepreneur and web developer known as the founder and former CEO of Tumblr, a social networking and microblogging website that allows users to post contents to a short-form blog.
Early years and education
David Karp was born on July 6, 1986 in New York city. He grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Karp attended the Calhoun School up until eighth grade, where his mother teaches science. At the age of 11, he started learning HTML and began creating websites for businesses. Karp attended The Bronx High School of Science from 2000 – 2001 but he eventually dropped out and started homeschooling. Karp did not return to highschool and did not get a highschool diploma.
Career
In 2000 – 2001, Karp worked at Tekserve in sales and then later on started as an intern for Fred Seibert, founder of Frederator Studios. He also worked on writing software for winning at blackjack and poker.
In December 2002, entrepreneur John Maloney needed technical help with the online parenting forum, UrbanBaby, so Karp took the project. He finished a supposed 2-day project within 4 hours. Maloney then made Karp head of product and gave him a share in the company. Karp worked at UrbanBaby for about 3 years until he left in 2006 after it was sold to CNET. Karp then started his own software consultancy company, Davidville, using some money from the sale of his shares. Marco Arment joined Karp as an engineer after seeing the job ad on craigslist. Karp has always had an interest in microblogging and had been looking for a platform to introduce their own microblogging platform. After one year, Karp and Arment started working together on their own microblogging platform in 2006. Davidville was renamed Tumblr and was launched in February 2007 and just within 2 weeks, Tumblr had 75,000 users.
Tumblr
In an interview, Karp mentioned that the reason why he started Tumblr is because blogging just doesn’t work for most people. He knew that people wanted to express themselves in a form of blog but the existing platforms then were just too complicated. So he created Tumblr to help people share their thoughts, images, and links in a simpler way, as quickly as possible. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Karp explained that Tumblr showcases a more expressive identity. It is a tool specifically built for creative expressions. It is built to be a place you can be proud to call your online home. Tumblr can be customized to fit the user’s personality.
In conjunction with Adidas which launched an official soccer Tumblr blog, Tumblr featured its first major brand in June 2012. In May 2013, Yahoo! Inc. acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion which did not come as a good news for Tumblr users. They started a petition that achieved nearly 170,000 signatures. David Karp still remained as Tumblr CEO after the acquisition. When the advertising sales goals were not met so in 2016 Yahoo wrote down $712 million of Tumblr’s value.
When Verizon Communications acquired Yahoo in June 2017, it placed Yahoo and Tumblr under its subsidiary Oath. In November 2017, Karp announced that he would be leaving Tumblr and Jeff D’Onofrio, who was Tumblr’s President and COO at the time, took over.