Tumblr.

“Mr. Karp is tall and skinny, with unflinching blue eyes and a mop of brown hair. He speaks incredibly fast and incomplete paragraphs.” 

                                                                   — NY Observer

In 2007, when others his age were studying for midterms and living on dorm food, David Karp was busy launching Tumblr, an easy-to-use micro blogging platform that now hosts 17.5 million blogs and receives about 1.5 billion page views per week. The company has also attracted some $40 million in venture funding.

“It was a really selfish thing in the beginning,” Mr. Karp said. “I wanted a tumblelog and nobody had it.” And so in many ways Tumblr is an embodiment of Mr. Karp’s personality.

When the 24-year-old Internet entrepreneur David Karp was 17, he moved himself to Tokyo for five months—he prepaid the rent on his apartment because he was under 18—where he continued working as the chief technology officer of UrbanBaby, the New York-based message board and e-mail list for overprotective parents with a lot of disposable income and free time on their hands. He had been home-schooled since he was 15, after dropping out of Bronx Science, and had been taking Japanese classes at the Japan Society on 47th Street.


Even in a world of Internet business precocity, Mr. Karp stands out. He started interning for the animation producer Fred Seibert when he was 14 (Tumblr currently sublets office space from Mr. Seibert, who runs an online animation company called Frederator Studios).


By the time Mr. Karp was 19, a new word had entered the lexicon: “tumblelog,” which referred to short-form blogging. (That is, even shorter than regular blogging—many “tumblelog” posts were no longer than a sentence.) Fascinated by this new form of blogging, Mr. Karp says he “kept waiting” for one of the established blog platform players to set up a platform for tumblelogging. When, after a year, that hadn’t happened, Mr. Karp decided to do it himself. 

“I’ve seen friends and colleagues start blogs and then abandon them because they’re too difficult to use or they create a type of publishing system where you feel that you really have to write something profound every day.” (“If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks,” according to the Tumblr website.)

And so Mr. Karp sees Tumblr as embodying a new kind of content curation, a community that affords its users access to a world of text and links and video and photos that have been carefully selected by other users whose taste they feel an affinity for.

“I want to build something I’d be happy to be employed by 10 years out,” he said. “The idea of Tumblr employing 40 people in two years is such an incredible idea.”

Karp, 24, is used to doing his own thing. At 11, he taught himself how to write code. At 15, he dropped out of high school. A year later, he got a job as CTO of UrbanBaby, a New York City parenting site. At Tumblr, Karp likes to spend his time sketching ideas in notebooks, lunching as a group with his 30 employees, and of course, perusing blogs on Tumblr. One thing he doesn't like is being pinned down. That quickly becomes clear if you try to make an appointment with him. Or happen to spot him zipping around New York City on his Vespa.

David Karp often commutes to the office in his Vespa.

He describes himself as anti schedule,giving the exception to board meetings, he doesn't really schedule anything or keep a calendar of things.I think appointments are caustic to creativity. "It's so frustrating when you're in the middle of a great conversation or work groove, and you realize, "Oh, I've got an appointment. I've got to bolt." I prefer the "let's just call each other when we need something or want to hang out" approach. That way, I never have to cancel on people, which is always a bummer. People tell me I need an assistant, but I don't want one."

Mr. Karp grew up on the Upper West Side, the older of two sons of a composer and a science teacher at his school, Calhoun, which he attended before his brief spell at Bronx Science. “He was a child who, even at a very young age, knew what he wanted to be,” said Mr. Karp’s mother, Barbara Ackerman. “He was very focused, very driven.”

Home schooling is hardly a conventional choice for parents in Manhattan. “It’s a great leap of faith to do that for any kid,” said Ms. Ackerman. “It was a huge decision, but in this particular instance it was the right one.” Likewise, the decision to go to Tokyo—alone, at 17—was one that Ms. Ackerman could only endorse. “He worked it all out. It was all paid for ahead of time—I didn’t have much to do with that decision,” she said. “He had everything lined up.”

“To have your child get on a plane and move to Japan …” Ms. Ackerman paused. “Well, he’s like a little adult..”

If Mr. Karp was a little adult at 17, at 21 he’s like a real adult. He lives alone in an apartment on West 71st Street that his parents own; he pays the maintenance. He owns a car, an Acura RSX, that he keeps in a garage. “I learned how to drive stick on that car,” he tells me proudly. “I mostly use it for weekend trips out of the city—Bear Mountain, the Palisades, that kind of thing.” During the week, though, his life consists mostly of work—he gets in around 9 or 10 and leaves around 7, walking the 40 minutes home to his apartment. “Usually I just end up crashing,” he said.

Over two iced cappuccinos and a chicken Caesar salad, Mr. Karp says, “The whole binge-drinking, staying-up-late, hipster lifestyle has never been attractive to me.


Karp’s biggest heroes are “Steve Jobs and Willy Wonka.” Jobs makes total sense. Karp grew up being “obsessed with Steve Jobs keynotes” and the art of “the reveal.” But Willy Wonka? “It’s sort of the same as Steve—the idea that there is this magical factory, and you can’t begin to imagine what went into these things,” he explains. And, by the way, he thinks “Apple is scarier” than Willy Wonka’s factory.

Recognition

• In August 2009, Tumblr's CEO, David Karp, was named Best Young Tech Entrepreneur 2009 by BusinessWeek.
• In August 2010, Tumblr was named as a finalist in Lead411's New York City Hot 125.
• Celebrities that use Tumblr include Lady Gaga, Zooey Deschanel and John Mayer.
• On October 21, 2011, Tumblr became the first blogging platform to host President Obama's blog.

“Right now, we’re going after artists,” said Mr. Karp. “Before that we were thinking students and young people, but it’s much easier to target an adult who wants to express themselves online. Artists and producers have YouTube, and musicians are relegated to MySpace. They’re the worst platforms.” Tumblr, says Mr. Karp, is a natural fit.

Then again, perhaps Tumblr makes sharing thoughts with the world almost too easy. “If every stupid thing you said ended up at the top of your Facebook profile,” Mr. Karp said, “you would probably reconsider it.”

Sources: Tumblr-Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia  Would You Take A Tumblr With This Man?-The New York Observer(Founder Stories)Tumblr's David Karp:My Heroes Are Steve Jobs and Willy Wonka