Karp’s Upbringing:
Karp was born on July 6, 1986 in New York, NY. At a young age, he found a love for technology and by eighth grade he was already designing websites for local companies.
This made him drop out from school, resorting to home-schooling just so that he could
save time. He did plan on going to one of the league universities later in his life but some great opportunities came his way and changed his plans completely.
At the age of 14, Karp started interning at various software companies. A few years later, he was made the head of ‘UrbanBaby’, a parenting forum that he developed a software for. A few months after that, he took off for Tokyo to get better at his business and computer skills (which he did). Within a few years, he formed an independent consulting firm called Davidville.
Birth of Tumblr:
Karp was looking to hire some employees for Davidville so Marco Arment joined the team as an engineer after replying to Karp’s craigslist ad.
Karp had been interested in microblogging for some time and was waiting for one of the established blogging platforms to introduce their own microblogging platform. After a year of waiting, Karp and Arment began working on their own microblogging platform during a two-week gap between contracts in 2006. Tumblr was launched in February 2007 and within two weeks, the service had gained 75,000 users.
In October 2007, Karp shut down his consultancy business because his work with Tumblr was interfering with his client work. Davidville was renamed Tumblr, Inc. and 25 percent of the company was sold to a small group of investors.
On May 20, 2013, it was announced that Yahoo! and Tumblr had reached an agreement for Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion. As of November 1, 2017, Tumblr hosts over 375.4 million blogs. Karp announced in November 2017 that he would be retiring from Tumblr by the end of the year.
And that’s how the young genius, David Karp became one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the world with a net worth of $200 million (as of 2017).
The Entrepreneurial Side of Karp:
David doesn’t like to talk about his age as he isn’t entirely secure about people knowing how young he is. He doesn’t want the story of Tumblr to be “all about his youth.” He wants the story of Tumblr to be about the remarkable genius of a young boy who dared to believe and achieve.
That statement right there, “believe and achieve” is what being an entrepreneur is about. Any one can come up with an idea, but it’s the ones who believe in it and act on it that are real entrepreneurs.
Stories like this never fail to leave me speechless. I’ve never been a tech person, computer programming makes my brain melt, but I have a huge amount of respect for those that excel at it. The thought of being this capable at the age of fourteen is something that I cannot comprehend, but I think that it’s amazing that Karp could think of, create, and establish such a successful business so quickly.