https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Karp

This young man founded a very popular social media website called Tumblr back in 2007. It is crazy to think that he started this company when he had not even obtained a high school diploma yet. He grew up in the Upper West side of Manhattan, New York and had a strong interest in technology and computer programming and began using them when he was 11 years old. The social media platform included blogs, photos, audio clips, videos, quotes, and many other things that were involved. I was never a user of Tumblr, but I had heard about it all the time as I was growing up and I especially knew it for the aesthetics that were created on people’s profiles. Design was a primary feature that users could explore and mess around with in this platform which put it on the map. Something I find interesting is that Tumblr used the term “fan mail” when getting in touch with other users on the site instead of “messaging” in order to promote a positivity on the app where people are lifting each other up instead of cyberbullying or commenting negative things. That being said, they never implemented any sort of commenting option on the app to help prevent this also. The company is praised because of how easy the platform is to use as well as the efforts they make to maintain a positive environment for users. In 2013 Yahoo bought Tumblr for about $1 billion. However, the company did not do well after this switch because it could not meet the revenue it was expecting to and Yahoo ended up devaluing the company to less than half of the price they purchased it for. Tumblr was never really able to bounce back after this and the David Karp ended up resigning from the company.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mark-Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg is arguably one of the most successful young entrepreneurs there has been. He is the founder and CEO of Facebook which he started in 2004 and is a social media app that has gained a wide following and has become widely popular over the years. Zuckerberg started this business while he was attending college at Harvard University and had seen it quickly gain popularity considering that half of the student body had signed up for thefacebook.com (which what it was originally called before he changed it to Facebook). Facebook differed from other social media networks in the sense that the information input into it had to be real (it was a trustworthy source) and that it had a large focus on networking. In 2005 they had received their first venture capital of $12.7 million. In 2007 Facebook made a deal with Microsoft (after rejecting a deal with Yahoo) and they had a 1.6% stake of the company for $240 million and in 2009, Facebook made a deal with Digital Sky Technologies that had a 1.96% of the company for $200 million. The business has grown so much that its current estimated net worth resides at about $527 billion. As of 2020, there is an estimated total of about 2.7 billion active monthly users on Facebook which is a substantial number when considering that the world population is about 7.6 billion. While I personally am not a member of Facebook because I prefer other social medias, almost everyone I know is and I am aware of its mark on the world. However, I have recently watched the documentary on Netflix called “The Social Dilemma” and there are a lot of points in it that describe why social media is harmful and the truth behind what actually goes on at big technology and social media companies. That being said, they discuss Facebook a LOT and it makes me question whether it is a beneficial platform for people or if it is harming them in ways they cannot even comprehend or are aware of.