David Karp's Personal Interview

David Karp, founder and CEO of Tumblr, the world's most popular personal blog platform. /kloc-at the age of 0/7, he left his hometown and began to study computer programming in Tokyo in half-baked Japanese. Since then, this anxious Manhattan teenager has started a journey of self-discovery in his life. Karp said: "At that time, I was the only one on the Internet in the world I lived in." For several weeks, he kept improving his computer skills and gave up the idea of designing robots. From then on, he dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur, but he encountered a small problem-when he spoke, others knew that he was just a child.

"I'm so stupid-I want to talk to the customer on the other end of the phone in a very formal tone and keep my voice down so that I won't reveal my age by meeting them." Karp said, "I lied about my age, exaggerated the size of my team, and lied that I was experienced. I feel very embarrassed until now, and I should have realized my mistake at that time. "

Later, Karp returned to the United States with a stack of contracts drawn up by his father and a list of many executives, and then founded a consulting company called Davidville, hoping to persuade Viacom (a world-famous media group) and other companies to hire him.

In 2007, when Karp 2 1 was 0 years old, Tumblr was founded in a bedroom of new york's mother's apartment. At that time, it was called a combination of Twitter, YouTube and Wordpress. Two weeks later, Tumblr had 75,000 registered users, and now there are more than 42 million blogs on Tumblr. Blog types range from politics to music, from pictures to unclassified. Four years later, Tumblr has become the fastest growing startup on the Internet, and Karp is currently the CEO of Tumblr. A red plaid shirt with an ordinary sports sweater outside seems to be a typical costume of entrepreneurial genius. As a successful Internet entrepreneurial genius like Zuckerberg, Karp owns a startup with a valuation of $800 million. But according to Karp, the initial entrepreneurial process was not smooth sailing.

"At that time, I thought, I have such excellent products, I don't need financing at all, and I won't sell them. Because Tumblr will attract people's attention to the consulting business of building websites. " Karp said that the next few months will be the same. Karp didn't give up his original idea until the number of Tumblr users doubled every few weeks. "At that time, my clients became angry because I didn't have time to return their calls, which was really terrible. Obviously, they saw that I had completely paved Tumblr and had no time to pay attention to them. "

Since then, Karp and Tumblr began to grow rapidly. Investors began to pay attention to Tumblr, but Karp's youth refused to let Tumblr go to Silicon Valley like a startup factory. At the end of 2008, Karp sold 25% of the company's equity in exchange for the first round of financing in the past year-4.5 million US dollars. But he repeatedly refused to leave New York State and move to the competitive West Coast, because Karp said that startups there were always worried that Google and Facebook would poach their most talented engineers. Moreover, Karp thinks that new york's support policies for entrepreneurship are very good, and there are not as many temptations as Silicon Valley.

Although the valuation of Tumblr is only a fraction of Facebook's $654.38+000 billion, Karp is very optimistic about the development of Tumblr. Karp said that last year he could see the computer screens of all employees at a glance, but now, the company has nearly 100 employees, and the office alone occupies two floors. "Last year was a turning point," he said. "I didn't want Tumblr to have more than 20 employees long ago."

The important driving force of Tumblr comes from elite bloggers, such as the famous singer Lady Gaga and US President Barack Obama, who have made Tumblr a celebrity effect. But the creativity of blogs comes from loyal users, such as photographers, musicians and designers. Their blogs will attract attention, like and "forward" (derivative blogs). And 85% Tumblr users publish more than 20 blog posts every month on average.

Karp attaches great importance to the power of innovation in the conversation. He can even talk for hours at a time, but sometimes he suddenly stops before digressing. Karp said that he likes Twitter very much, but he doesn't like Google+ because he can't see its originality. For Facebook, Karp said that he is not keen on "this product". As for YouTube, he said that the original best expression tool made him sick: "They took away the most creative works of users-the movies that users spent hours and enthusiastically created-and they even put disgusting advertisements in front of them, and they tried their best to make advertisements a part of the viewing experience. I'm sure this is Google's bottom line, but I don't think it can encourage many people to make innovative things. "

Of course, if Google knew this statement, it would definitely strongly refute it. As the largest video website in the world, YouTube uploads more than 60 hours of videos every minute, which has increased by 30% in the last three months. Obviously, it will produce a lot of innovation.

But Karp is skeptical. He said: "YouTube has the opportunity to remind every inspired filmmaker that they can create great things as long as they work hard and finish their works with high quality. But YouTube encourages users to build a huge user base, publish as many movies as possible, and then calculate to get as much money as possible. "

According to the latest data of YouTube, there are 4 billion views every day. Recently, in order to improve the video quality of the website, it began to vigorously promote its cooperation plan. Karp commented: "YouTube provided this opportunity, but sacrificed these tools for such a way. YouTube was originally the most creative tool in the world, but now I think it makes innovators feel worse. " Of course, Tumblr is also making up for this loss as much as possible.

Like many popular Internet companies, Tumblr has no market-proven business model. This also made Tumblr's $85 million financing in September last year lose the participation of some major investment companies in Silicon Valley. John Maloney, president of Tumblr, said in a recent interview that Tumblr needs hundreds of millions of users to start making profits, although Karp has repeatedly stressed that Tumblr will not make any financial comparison with Facebook and Twitter.

"Tumblr will not be acquired by multinational media groups." Karp said. In 2008, when he sold 25% of the shares and got $750,000, Karp made it clear: "Tumblr doesn't want to be annexed by media companies."

Although Tumblr doesn't spread acquisition rumors as frequently as other famous Internet companies (er, recently), does David Karp still stick to his original promise in four years? "We have been going through all kinds of tests," Kapteyn said. "Especially in the first three years, many people made you feel,' Well, I can become a 23-year-old rich man with a little effort now. "Why not?" But Karp insisted on not selling the company. "We will stick to it. I don't know why I did it. "

Karp sat in a bar in West End of London and began to reflect on himself. "There are many rich people in the world, but there are few opportunities to create things that billions of people can use." He said, and finally added: "Interestingly, now we are considering which company to buy, because I heard that AOL is very cheap."