David Karp

David Karp

David Karp is an American entrepreneur who developed the short-form blogging platform ‘Tumblr’. According to the MIT Technology Review TR35 he was amongst the 35 highest ranking innovators of the world below the age of 35. With a net personal wealth of $200 million and his company valuing at $800 million, Karp is one of the richest entrepreneur under 30.

Karp was born on 6th July 1986 in New York City. He went to the Calhoun School till 8th grade and from the age of 11 started learning HTML and it was not long before he was designing websites for small local businesses. He studied at the Bronx Science for a year but dropped out after a year to begin homeschooling. At that time Karp wanted to go to MIT however he did not go back to high school nor did he get a high school diploma. He was interested in computers since his childhood. He did an internship at Frederator Studios as an animation producer where he was captivated by the computer engineers works.

Karp started working for John Maloney’s UrbanBaby, an online parenting forum when a Frederator employee recommended him. David Karp completed his first project which was to be done in some days in just a few hours. Maloney was very impressed with him and made him the head of product along with equity. Karp left UrbanBaby in 2006 when it was sold to CNET. He used the money that he got from his share of sale to establish his software consultancy firm named Davidville. Karp was very interested in short form blogging platforms but was only waiting for someone established to start their own platform. However when nothing like that happened, he started working on a tumble logging platform with Marco Arment. They launched Tumblr in February 2007. It is a social networking and micro blogging website. Two weeks after its launch, it had 75000 users.

In October of 2007, Karp closed down his consultancy company because he felt it was interfering with his clientele. He changed the name Davidville to Tumblr, Inc. He sold 25% of the company to some investors. Since 2013 Tumblr is host to more than 87 million blogs. According to Quantcast, Tumblr has the 11th largest internet traffic. David Karp mixed the right ingredients into making this world famous website; an awesome design, a clear and concise pitch, a ‘cool’ name and a useful purpose. It was the first blogging website that was different from the editorial magazine column presentation and was less effusive. Karp has kept a very cozy environment at his office which is in Downtown New York. There is no conference table, just a couch and some chairs. Karp also doesn’t like to keep a strict schedule to things but instead keeps it light and easy. He does not believe in doing any marketing or advertisement for the company because he feels there is no need for it.

Currently David Karp, who is the youngest techie of New York, resides in a condo in the tony Esquire loft building in Brooklyn worth $1.6 million.