David Karp, (born July 6, 1986, New York, New York, U.S.), American Web developer and entrepreneur who based the running a blog website Tumblr.
Karp grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the elder of two sons of a trainer and a composer. He turned interested by know-how and programming at a younger age, educating himself HTML at 11. When he was 15, he left the distinguished Bronx High School of Science and started homeschooling along with his mom with a purpose to pursue an internship alternative with an animation firm, Frederator Studios, that did a lot of its work on-line. Through connections at Frederator he quickly secured a place doing Web creating for UrbanBaby, a message-board website on which oldsters may ask questions and talk about youngster rearing. Karp did a lot of his work remotely, and at age 17 he moved by himself to Japan for a short interval to develop into immersed in that nation’s know-how. He ultimately returned to New York and have become chief know-how officer of UrbanBaby. When the location was bought to a different firm in 2006, he raised some capital to put money into his personal consultancy, Davidville. He continued to construct the enterprise, hiring programmer Marco Arment to assist.
While Davidville was experiencing some downtime, Karp urged Arment to help him in constructing a running a blog website he had envisioned. The website, Tumblr, was launched in non-public beta in 2006 and to the general public in early 2007. It hosted “tumblelogs,” or short-form blogs, of textual content and numerous different varieties of media. Users may make specifically formatted posts for images, movies, audio clips, hyperlinks, quotes, and chat logs with the clicking of a button. They had the selection of modifying their weblog’s theme personally, making use of one in every of a handful of default themes, or buying a premade theme—one of many website’s solely avenues of revenue. The website additionally made cash by partnering with corporations to construct efficient Tumblr feeds for advertising and marketing. Tumblr blogs, like accounts on social media website Twitter, might be “followed” by customers, with new posts by adopted blogs exhibiting up in a consumer’s “dashboard” stream. Unlike different blogs, Tumblr didn't make use of a outstanding remark characteristic, partially due to Karp’s want to discourage vandalism and mean-spiritedness. However, customers had the choice to “reblog” posts from different customers and add feedback for their very own followers to see. Ease of use and a optimistic atmosphere fostered by way of phrases similar to fan mail as an alternative of messaging and a coronary heart button to point out assist for a given submit contributed to the location’s reputation. Some 5 years after its public debut, Tumblr, with headquarters in New York City, hosted greater than 70 million blogs and employed some 100 folks.
In 2013 Yahoo! bought Tumblr for greater than $1 billion, although Karp continued as CEO. The acquisition was largely seen as a disappointment, nevertheless. Tumblr failed to satisfy income expectations, and Yahoo! subsequently devalued the corporate to lower than half its buy worth. In 2017 Tumblr turned a part of Oath, a subsidiary shaped after the sale of Yahoo! to Verizon. Later that yr Karp introduced that he was resigning from Tumblr.