David Karp Analysis of Strengths

Introduction
In many ways, the story of David Karp resembles that of any eccentric tech entrepreneur. He wears plaid shirts, eschews mainstream brands, and lives in a loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Karp was obsessed with coding when he was a kid, dropped out of school to start his own business, leveraged his social relationships, and is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. David Karp’s success can be attributed to his visionary obsession, his social networking skills, and his willingness to change.
Background
The story of David Karp’s success is replete with ups and downs, and even a few crashes, but surprisingly few burns. Every challenge that Karp has faced has been a challenge he has met with aplomb. Karp does not operate the way typical managers do, but few of the world’s great business leaders or entrepreneurs do play by the books. Like Steve Jobs and Richard Branson, David Karp has an unusual approach to doing business that is difficult, if not impossible, to imitate.
Karp’s success comes down to the primary element of dedication, which could also be construed as obsession. By the time he was in junior high, Karp was hacking into his school computer (Cohan, 2013). Karp taught himself HTML when he was just 11, and continued to be a self-taught coder with almost no formal education. One thing his formal education did provide was a foundation in Japanese language, which Karp capitalized on for personal reasons, spontaneously moving to Japan for a year. Karp’s early obsession with learning Japanese paralleled his fascination for programming. The two went hand-in-hand, too. When he moved to Japan, he was already remotely employed in his first real tech job in New York, for UrbanBaby. Because Karp worked remotely, he was able to shift his base of operations to Japan without even telling his bosses (Cohan, 2013). His work for UrbanBaby not only gave Karp his first taste of what it was like to work in an unconventional tech company, one that allowed him to set his own hours and work from wherever he was around the world, but it also helped him gain a footing in the tech community. Later, when Tumblr was gaining traction in the market, Karp hired his former boss from UrbanBaby.
When UrbanBaby was sold to CNET, Karp has become the firm’s Chief Technology Officer. He was barely 20 years old. The sale earned Karp enough money to invest in his own web consultancy firm, which he named Davidville, after himself. Karp hired Marco Arment to help with the coding and together they presumed they would build their dreams as web designers. However, Karp had other ideas, creative projects he was working on. He had always been interested in what was known as “tumble blogging,” a form of microblogging that was relatively loose and free form. Unlike long form blogging, tumble blogging was not about long blocks of analytical text. Also unlike Facebook tumble blogging was not about communicating with your friends. Tumble blogging was something different, and something that did not yet exist yet. Karp recognized this gap in the market through his own passion for tumble blogging, and he started to pour all his energy into his side project, which would become known as Tumblr.
Tumblr’s growth from a side project into a company that sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion is a remarkable story. David Karp’s success with Tumblr has hinged on several features of his personality and his vision. First is his passion, which is akin to dedication, persistence, and single-minded obsession. Second, Karp understands how to create and leverage social relationships. He was born into a family that already had connections, and Karp understood the need to use his privileged background as a means to gain entry into the tech world and attract investors. Third, Karp welcomes change. In fact, his recent history shows Karp actively plans for change, recognizing the need for innovation.
Challenges
One of the first challenges Karp encountered on his path to success was how to handle a rapid pace of growth. Even when Tumblr was still a side project, it was costing him and Arment $5000 per month to run the service. To address this challenge required both a willingness to commit to the Tumblr project as the main event, and also to be willing to ask for money from investors. The latter proved a lot simpler than the former. Almost immediately when Karp started to see how popular Tumblr was becoming he sold 25 percent of the company to venture capitalists. At that point, Tumblr was already valued at $3 million (Cheshire, 2012). Investments were even pouring in without any proof that Tumblr was going to make any money; at that point the platform did not host sponsored advertisements and it was uncertain how it would create revenues.
Challenges kept arising as Tumblr grew and his small team and their limited budget could not keep up with the growing number of users. Karp responded to this challenge professionally, by continuing to seek money from investors and pour that money into the business model that was working for them. Regarding the dedication to Tumblr over their Davidville consultancy firm, Karp and Arment had a difficult decision to make. Karp and Arment had already invested in Davidville, the web consultancy firm Karp founded with the money he made from the sale of UrbanBaby. Karp could have taken the safe road, focusing on building a client base for Davidville. He did not, and the reason he did not focus more exclusively on Davidville is related to the second major challenge Karp faced during the early years of his growth as an entrepreneur.
The second major challenge Karp faced as an entrepreneur was how to create an organizational culture that suited his personality and communication style. When Karp started Davidville, he needed to set up appointments with clients and respond to their emails immediately. However, Karp did not function that way. He is adamant about not sticking to schedules and does not care about returning phone calls or emails if it interferes with his creative process (Welch, 2011). To overcome the challenge of not being a traditional manager, or a traditional business owner, Karp carved his own path. Cohan (2013) claims that Karp’s inability to conform to the typical rules of doing business, such as making it on time for meetings and returning phone calls, is not going to bode well for his success after the sale of Tumblr to Yahoo. Karp has risen to the occasion, helping build Tumblr’s brand and ensure its growth in spite of himself. Karp’s willingness to change is also one of the reasons he is a successful entrepreneur who overcomes challenges.
Third, as much as his obsessiveness was his strength when he first founded Tumblr, Karp’s single-mindedness made it initially difficult for him to develop the types of innovations and new products that might have yielded revenue. The side projects he did start with Tumblr failed. For example, Karp had tried to start a journalism and content development project called Storyboard, but after only a year he admitted it was a failure (“David Karp’s Challenge To “Find The Formula” For Tumblr,” 2013). In spite of this setback, Karp pushed on with product innovation, especially after the sale of Tumblr to Yahoo. After the takeover, Karp helped to grow Tumblr through the means that he had resisted for years, such as allowing ad revenue from sponsored ads, incorporating new products into the Tumblr feature set, attracting new companies and new brands to Tumblr, and even developing new features for Yahoo under contract (O’Brien, 2014). As MacMillan (2009) also points out, David Karp has also understood the value of celebrity endorsement. Karp hired an employee whose actual job it was to attract high profile users to Tumblr (MacMillan, 2009). Karp is no stranger to celebrity himself. Cheshire (2012) notes that when Tumblr first started to gain traction, Karp contended with the simple challenges of being young, rich, and attractive. In particular, there were temptations that could have caused Karp to lose focus on his work but his extreme personality likely prevented him from being distracted for long.
Karp’s ability to overcome the pressures of rapid growth also depended on celebrity funding and high profile investors. Tumblr was doing well, almost too well, as the company was growing faster than their funding could match. Then Karp met Richard Branson at a conference. The meeting was described as being short, but Karp made enough of an impression on Branson that the Virgin mogul actually called the 20-something from New York to offer not just financing for Tumblr but also a ride on Virgin Galactic and a personal invitation to stay at his Virgin Island resort (Cheshire, 2012). Karp’s successful networking did not end with Richard Branson. Soon thereafter, the White House called Karp and asked him to consult with Obama’s social media team (Cheshire, 2012). Not all of Karp’s relationships with business partners have proceeded so smoothly, though. One of his greatest challenges might have been parting ways with his long-time business partner Marco Arment in 2010. Arment went on to start his own company.
Overcoming the specific technological challenges that Karp has encountered are his pride and joy. The reason why any coder codes is to solve problems. Undoubtedly Karp’s biggest technological failures became known as the “Great Tumblr Blackout of 2010,” (Cohan, 2013). For an entire weekend, Tumblr was down. Its users were angry, and Karp was himself forced to use competitor social media services to communicate with Tumblr users about updates to the site (Cohan, 2013). Not only was the Great Blackout of 2010 a technological issue, but a public relations one as well. Karp was in the position of putting out fires, and judging by the fact that Tumblr still has hundreds of millions of users, he did the job well. Karp has not faced any other public relations disaster, but it is likely he would also confidently push through it based on his responses to the 2010 outage of service. Although he is not yet 30, Karp has proven that he has what it takes to remain relevant in a highly competitive field.
Conclusion: What the Future May Bring
David Karp is unique in that he is a visionary who knew exactly what he wanted to create in a tumble blogging platform, but has yet to develop any new products of similar merit since. It is highly likely that David Karp’s next new challenge will be in the realm of innovation. The small product features that have been introduced over the past several years under Yahoo’s tutelage have been nothing compared to the original seed idea for Tumblr itself.
Furthermore, Karp’s idea for Tumblr arose out of a personal desire to have a tumble blog, and to offer other people the opportunity to create their own micro blogs in an easy way. The original motto of Tumblr when the company first launched in 2007 was “Blogging Made Easy.” Now that Yahoo owns Tumblr, Karp contends with the big question, “what next?” Karp’s role in the Tumblr project is over for the most part. The platform has been tremendously successful, leading to hundreds of millions of users and billions of page views. Karp sold the company at the right minute, and now enjoys what seems to be a happy personal life with his wife in New York. As he had hoped, celebrities use Tumblr, and so do Presidents, retaining a core character and content that kept the product unique, distinct from competitors like Facebook. Whereas Jobs did constantly innovate, Karp has yet to prove that he has something else on the stove. Yet Karp’s strengths include a single-minded pursuit of his passions, with the same type of obsessive thinking that drove the likes of Steve Jobs towards his success with Apple.








References

Cheshire, T. (2012). Tumbling on success: How Tumblr's David Karp built a £500 million empire. Wired. Retrieved online: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/tumbling-on-success
Cohan, W.D. (2013). Tumblr's boy wonder won't like grown-up world. The Sydney Morning Herald. June 3, 2013.
“David Karp’s Challenge To “Find The Formula” For Tumblr,” (2013). Fast Company. Retrieved online: https://www.fastcompany.com/3008741/david-karp-tumblr-didnt-find-formula-make-storyboard-work
MacMillan, D. (2009). Social media: The Aston Kutcher effect. Business Week, May 3, 2009. Retrieved online: http://www.brandkeys.com/archivepress/050309%20BusinessWeek%20Ashton%20Kutcher%20Effect.pdf
O’Brien, C. (2014). David Karp says Tumblr has a 'lot to prove' 18 months after Yahoo acquisition. Venture Beat. Retrieved online: https://venturebeat.com/2014/11/06/david-karp-says-tumblr-has-a-lot-to-prove-18-months-after-yahoo-acquisition/
Welch, L. (2011). David Karp, the Nonconformist Who Built Tumblr. In.c Retrieved online: https://www.inc.com/magazine/201106/the-way-i-work-david-karp-of-tumblr.html