David Karp and Tumblr: Vision, Networking, and Change

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 as a child, 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 and Early Career

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 is one he met with aplomb. Karp does not operate the way typical managers do, but few of the world's great business leaders or entrepreneurs play by the rules. 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's computer (Cohan, 2013). He taught himself HTML at just 11 years old and continued to be a self-taught coder with almost no formal education. One thing his formal education did provide was a foundation in the Japanese language, which Karp capitalized on for personal reasons, spontaneously moving to Japan for a year. His early obsession with learning Japanese paralleled his fascination with programming — the two went hand in hand. When he moved to Japan, he was already remotely employed in his first real tech job in New York, at UrbanBaby. Because Karp worked remotely, he was able to shift his base of operations to Japan without even informing his bosses (Cohan, 2013). His work for UrbanBaby 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 anywhere in the world — and also helped him gain a foothold 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 had 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. Karp hired Marco Arment to help with the coding, and together they expected to build their careers as web designers. However, Karp had other ideas — creative projects he was already 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. Unlike Facebook, it was not about communicating with friends. Tumble blogging was something different — something that did not yet exist. Karp recognized this gap in the market through his own passion for tumble blogging and poured all his energy into the side project that 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 hinged on several features of his personality and 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 of gaining entry into the tech world and attracting investors. Third, Karp welcomes change — in fact, his recent history shows that he actively plans for it, recognizing the need for ongoing innovation.

Challenges and How Karp Overcame Them

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 $5,000 per month to run the service. Addressing this challenge required both a commitment to making Tumblr the main event and a willingness to seek money from investors. The latter proved far simpler than the former. Almost immediately upon recognizing how popular Tumblr was becoming, Karp 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 would make money; the platform did not yet host sponsored advertisements, and it was uncertain how it would generate revenues.

Challenges kept arising as Tumblr grew and his small team and limited budget could not keep pace with the growing number of users. Karp responded professionally, continuing to seek money from investors and reinvesting that money into the business model that was working for them. Regarding the choice between Tumblr and their Davidville consultancy, Karp and Arment faced a difficult decision. Karp could have taken the safer road, focusing on building a client base for Davidville. He did not — and the reason relates directly to the second major challenge Karp faced during his early years as an entrepreneur.

That second challenge 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 promptly. However, Karp did not function that way. He is adamant about not adhering to schedules and does not prioritize returning phone calls or emails when doing so would interfere with his creative process (Welch, 2011). To overcome the challenge of not being a traditional manager or business owner, Karp carved his own path. Cohan (2013) suggests that Karp's inability to conform to typical business norms — such as arriving on time for meetings and returning phone calls — may not serve him well after the sale of Tumblr to Yahoo. Nevertheless, Karp has risen to the occasion, helping build Tumblr's brand and ensuring its growth in spite of these tendencies. His willingness to change is also one of the key reasons he succeeds in overcoming challenges.

Third, as much as his obsessiveness was a strength when he first founded Tumblr, Karp's single-mindedness initially made it difficult to develop the kinds of innovations and new products that might have generated revenue. The side projects he did pursue with Tumblr largely failed. For example, Karp attempted to launch 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 pressed on with product innovation — especially after the sale of Tumblr to Yahoo. Following the acquisition, Karp helped grow Tumblr through means he had long resisted, such as allowing revenue from sponsored advertisements, incorporating new products into Tumblr's feature set, attracting new companies and brands to the platform, and even developing new features for Yahoo under contract (O'Brien, 2014). As MacMillan (2009) also notes, Karp understood the value of celebrity endorsement, going so far as to hire an employee whose specific role was to attract high-profile users to Tumblr. Karp is no stranger to celebrity himself. Cheshire (2012) notes that when Tumblr first began to gain traction, Karp contended with the simple challenges of being young, rich, and attractive — temptations that could have caused him to lose focus, but his intense personality likely prevented any prolonged distraction.

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 his next great challenge will be in the realm of innovation. The small product features introduced over the past several years under Yahoo's ownership have been modest in comparison to the original concept behind Tumblr itself.

Furthermore, Karp's idea for Tumblr arose from a personal desire to have a tumble blog and to offer other people an easy way to create their own microblogs. The original motto of Tumblr when the platform launched in 2007 was "Blogging Made Easy." Now that Yahoo owns Tumblr, Karp must contend with the question of what comes next. His role in the Tumblr project is largely complete. The platform has been tremendously successful, attracting hundreds of millions of users and billions of page views. Karp sold the company at the right moment, and now appears to enjoy a happy personal life with his wife in New York. As he had hoped, celebrities use Tumblr — as do world leaders — retaining a core character and content that kept the product unique and distinct from competitors like Facebook. Whereas Jobs constantly innovated, Karp has yet to prove he has something else in development. 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 toward his success with Apple. Whether that obsession will produce another breakthrough product remains the central open question of Karp's entrepreneurial future.