In an interview Thursday with Charlie Rose, Tumblr founder David Karp
opened up about the $ 1.1 billion acquisition everyone’s talking about.
Inc. users have been getting to know
David Karp since Tumblr burst on the scene a few years ago: His prodigious worth ethic;
his favorite Tumblr;
and even his modeling career.
Now that he has sold Tumblr to Yahoo, his is in demand everywhere. On Thursday,
he sat down with Bloomberg TV's Charlie Rose Thursday night to discuss Yahoo's
$1.1 billion acquisition, why he dropped out of high school, and how he plans
to preserve Tumblr's authenticity.
Here are some of the highlights.
On how
Tumblr got involved with Yahoo in the first place:
"We started conversations about working with Yahoo in November of last
year. After a few months, we knew there was a lot we were going to be doing
together, regardless. We knew we were going to be working together. That's when
Marissa [Mayer] showed up in New York and started to walk me through a story of
how we could do even more together."
Why Yahoo is
a good fit for Tumblr:
"[Yahoo] was a company with a legacy doing exactly the same kind of stuff
we're hinging our business on--creative brand advertising. They were the
original digital media company. They took a different approach to media. They
approached media as an editorial team that created content and built creative brand
advertising on top of that content. That's a big part of the future of Tumblr's
business. That's something they've built out technology for and something they
have advertiser relationships around and something they have a whole big
honking salesforce for. What Marissa showed me and what their team showed us
was an opportunity for Yahoo to help us fuel in a huge way the development of
that network and the development of our ad business."
Tumblr's
introduction of ads:
"It's very native advertising. The advertisements fit into spots where we
already promote content. We already promote the best of Tumblr and use that as
a place for people to discover things they wouldn't have seen otherwise. We'll
roll in advertisements into those spots where we promote organic content."
Why it was
the right time to sell:
"I was not expecting to sell the company this year, certainly wasn't
looking to sell the company. This was a really, really remarkable opportunity
that presented itself. This was an unbelievable opportunity to shortcut a lot
of the very hard things that we're about to be going through."
Why he
dropped out of high school:
"[Computer programming] wasn't in academia, and that was really the reason
for me to drop out of school. It wasn't, 'Screw this.' It wasn't that I was
bored. It wasn't that my friends were so lame. I was really enjoying school,
but back in 1997 and 2000, when I was in high school, there wasn't computer
science education in high schools in New York."
On the
future of Tumblr:
"Hopefully we get this right, and Tumblr will be home to the most aspiring
and talented creators all over the world. That's something we've already
started to do. Regular people in the world, right now, they spend a huge amount
of time in front of their televisions consuming premium content, some would
call it, stuff produced by publishers, networks, studios. If we're not already
there today, certainly five years from now, I expect the vast majority of the
content we enjoy not to be produced only by a handful of creators who are
selected and supported by those big studios."
Courtesy: www.inc.com
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