Mr. David Karp

An American web developer and entrepreneur, he is the founder and CEO of the short-form blogging platform Tumblr. According to Forbes, his net worth exceeds $200 million, and Tumblr has been valued at $800 million. On May 20, 2013, it was announced that Yahoo! and Tumblr had reached an agreement for Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion where he will remain as CEO of the company. Born and raised in New York City, he grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He attended The Calhoun School from age 3 through 8th grade, where his mother teaches science. At 11, he began learning HTML and was soon designing websites for local businesses. He went on to attend Bronx Science for one year before dropping out at the age of 15 and started homeschooling. At the time, he had aspirations of getting into a college in New York or MIT and saw homeschooling and doing other projects on the side as a way to impress the colleges. He never returned to high school nor has he earned his high school diploma. His career began at age 14 as an intern under Fred Seibert founder of animation company Frederator Studios. His mother had taught Seibert's children at the Calhoun School and was friends with his wife. He was fascinated with the work of Frederator's computer engineers and his visits became regular. After he started homeschooling, he also began taking Japanese classes at the Japan Society and saw a math tutor, with whom he worked on writing software for winning at blackjack and poker. When entrepreneur John Maloney sought technical help with UrbanBaby, an online parenting forum, a Frederator employee recommended him for the job. He completed the project (which had to be done in a couple of days) within four hours. Maloney made him UrbanBaby's head of product and gave him a small amount of equity. At age 17, while still working for UrbanBaby, he moved alone to Tokyo for five months. It was a full three months after he had moved to Tokyo that UrbanBaby found out he wasn't in New York. He left UrbanBaby after it was sold to CNET in 2006. Using money from the sale of his shares, he started his own software consultancy company, Davidville, envisioning a mix of client work and his own products. Marco Arment joined the company as an engineer after replying to his Craigslist ad. He had been interested in tumblelogs (short-form blogs) for some time and was waiting for one of the established blogging platforms to introduce their own tumblelogging platform. As no one had done so after a year of waiting, he and Arment began working on their own tumblelogging 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, he shut down his consultancy business as 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. As of May 19, 2013, Tumblr hosts over 108 million blogs. In August 2009, he was named Best Young Tech Entrepreneur 2009 by BusinessWeek; and in 2010, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.