David Karp

David Karp , the founder of Tumblr

Biography

David Karp was born on July 6, 1986 is an entrepreneur living in New York City. He is the founder and CEO of the short-form blogging platform, Tumblr. 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. Karp grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the son of Barbara Ackerman and Michael Karp. He attended The Calhoun Schoolfrom age 3 through 8th grade, where his mother teaches science, until high school when he attended Bronx Science for one year before dropping out at the age of 15 and started homeschooling. 

Career

Karp began as an intern as animation producer Fred Seibert at 14 years old and from there went on to work as a software consultant for UrbanBaby, an online parenting forum. Karp left UrbanBaby in 2006 and began working on Tumblr later that year. Tumblr was launched on April 27, 2007 by David Karp. Marco Arment served as the lead developer but he left the company in 2010 to focus on Instapaper. Within two weeks of its launch, the service had gained 75,000 users. With Tumblr's 2009 acquisition of Tumblerette, an Apple Inc. App Store application created by Jeff Rock and Garrett Ross, the service launched its official iPhone app. The site became available to BlackBerry smart phones on April 17, 2010 via a Mobelux application in the BlackBerry App World. In June 2012, Tumblr released a new version of its iOS app, Tumblr 3.0 allowing support for Spotify, hi-res images and offline access. In early June 2012, Tumblr featured its first major brand advertising campaign in conjunction with Adidas. Adidas launched an official soccer Tumblr blog and bought placements on the user dashboard. Tumblr's original funding came from Karp's earnings as a software consultant at parenting site UrbanBaby. Tumblr has raised funding from Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital,Martín Varsavsky, John Borthwick (Betaworks), Fred Seibert, and Sequoia Capital (among other investors). The company had $800 million valuation in August 2011. In September 2011, the company raised $85 million in a round of funding led by Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners.