Despite what critics may say, Tumblr is undeniably a grand success story. In only 6 years it went from a small blogging platform, to being acquired by Yahoo! for $1.1 billion. Throughout it’s journey one thing has remained unchanging about Tumblr; its’ CEO David Karp.
Karp got a leg up in the internet business from an extremely young age. He learned how to write HTML at age 11, dropped out of high school, and continued to work hard on his own to participate in as many extra curricular activities as he could. At age 14 he began interning with tech companies, and at 17 he moved to Tokyo by himself for 5 months. David had been interested in short blogs (called tumble-blogs) for quite some time, but had never taken action with the idea. After years or waiting, he finally took the first steps in making his idea a reality. Finally, on February 2007, he launched Tumblr. As of this August, Tumblr hosts over 350 million blogs, and is a pop culture staple. Tumblr’s success can solely be attributed to David’s passion from even the younger years of his life. While not everyone has learned HTML by the time they are 11, it does not mean that you are in any way handicapped from being an entrepreneur. If you have passion, drive, and the ability to put the rubber to the road you ARE an entrepreneur.
It is incredible how even though he had really no formal education, he was able to become incredibly successful! This is such a neat story because he took something he was passionate about which most of the rest of the world probably didn’t even know that much about and he made it a global phenomenon.