The founder of Tumblr, David Karp, lived a different life than most CEO’s. Without even a high school level education, he has found new ways to get success. Born in Manhattan in 1996, David attended elementary school, then at age 11 taught himself HTML coding. At this point he was already designing websites for companies. At 15 he dropped out of high school and began homeschooling. This same year he also became an intern at a small animation company, where he grew increasingly fascinated by the work of computer engineers. His next job was at UrbanBaby, an online parenting formula.
For a while Carp had been wishing for a blogging site to start a separate microblogging site, but when none did he decided to do it himself. And so, in 2007, Tumblr was born. The company was later sold to Yahoo for 1 billion dollars. In 2017 David Karp left Tumblr. He now works at a political advocacy called future now.
David Karp’s life was obviously different than most CEO’s but the way he works is extremely different. From driving a vespa to never checking emails at his house, his work life is incredibly different than most others.
He hated schedules. Besides board meetings he tried never to schedule anything else. He said that if someone really needed to talk with him they could call him, and they could meet at their leisure. He would hang out with people whenever they both had time. This enabled him to have a more free and creative flow of life and also helped with cancellation of meetings. He also hated email, and avoided checking it at home. At first he would rarely check his email and would often forget to respond. In order to alleviate this he came up with a system to help him. He auto sorted his emails into easily understandable groups in order to help him. He also encourages the use of texting or calling since he would rather use these methods. Since Carp realized he had a bad memory he decided to start taking notes about everything.
David Carp is a great example of living a life of problem solving and creativity. He always tried to fix shortcomings in his workstyle, and without schedules he encouraged serendipitous meetings. His site, Tumblr, reached 472 million users, but is now down to over 200 million. David Carp built a successful site, and he did it in a very different way than most people would have done.
It’s amazing how people can teach themselves and be so successfull! Not everyone is structured the same and once thinking outside the box amazing things happen! Thanks for sharing