emily: he has been called tech's boy genius. perhaps the only ceo who has a nonconformist refused to keep a schedule. david karp started tumblr before he was 20. he sold it to yahoo! before he was 30. it is now one of the most creative and social blogging platforms, all from a guy who dropped out of high school. lived in a loft, and drove a vespa. joining me on studio 1.0 now tumblr founder and ceo david , karp. thank you for joining us. david: thank you for having me. emily: thank you for having this

on the schedule. i do have a schedule now. emily: now you are part of yahoo!, you have meetings. david: we had meetings before yahoo!. this has turned into a major team of nearly 300 people. a pretty major business that we launched a year-and-a-half ago. emily: tell me about you, where you grew up. david: i was born and raised in new york city. my mom was a teacher. my dad was a composer. did a lot of work for television, particularly in news. i found myself surrounded by all of this creative technology growing up. in my dad's recording studio. in my mom's work in the recording industry, and i remember spending those nights and weekends in the recording studio. it felt like the starship enterprise. emily: when did you learn how to code? david: i learned markup

languages and i was 11 years old. when i was 13 i started to get , just enough to do a little bit of damage. one of the first things that drew me into it were these personal identities people were creating for themselves. i saw the aol profiles and away messages. i saw that in the websites that people were building and i really loved that expression, that identity. the idea this could be a place to create something that really represented you. emily: you dropped out of high school when you were how old? david: after my freshman year, when i was 15. emily: you were homeschooled. david: computer science education in new york city really did not exist. it just did not back then. it was not in high schools. now it is there in a huge way. kids are learning to code in grade school. i always insist that you stick around. if you have that stuff at your

disposal, hang out and spend time with teachers who are proficient and can help you get started. that is something i did not have. emily: i feel like i have talked to so many founders who are in your same position. they dropped out of school, made a lot of money, started big companies, and they don't recommend anybody do what they did. david: if i had access to a computer science education when i was in high school, i would have stuck around. if you can find it there, stick around. emily: you went to tokyo i yourself when you are 17. why? david: i had my heart broken and needed to get out of here. i was excited because i thought it was a future city, a place with remarkable technology and engineers. i loved japan, absolutely love tokyo. i ultimately came back to new york with a sense of american entrepreneurialism. emily: you started tumblr in

2006. tell me how it began. david: it was actually something i have been cooking for a couple of years, something i was really noodling on it for a while. coming out of a lot of selfish desires i had for something that did not really exist at the time. emily: what are you trying to create? david: the creative capabilities of the web had vaulted forward. video on youtube was possible. video is one of the hardest things to do on the internet and all of a sudden youtube unlocked , it. emily: it was the beginning of facebook. david: twitter making it easy to publish. my frustration, much of the technology was marching forward the actual services that people were building were more and more restrictive. facebook was giving you more publishing capability but the same vanilla white page everybody else had. you were forced to use the

diaspora of tools and put your photos on flickr. put your articles on word press or movable type. your videos on youtube. so you've ended up with all these different channels and your expression broken up across these disparate networks. emily: how did you decide to turn it into a business? david: it sort of decided for itself. we had a couple of weeks between contracts, my consulting company. we were waiting for the next gig. i said, let's just go for it. i feel like we can hack together the basic features pretty quickly. the basic features were the ability to post anything. tumblr was one of the first platforms that let you post a single photo, a set of photos, a link, a quote, the video you just recorded and edited. it could all go to one place, one blog that was yours. the ability to customize everything, which was also novel. emily: elon musk has said

starting a company is like falling into the abyss of death. i have heard other entrepreneurs say it is like swallowing shattered glass. here you are, 20 years old. did you have any of those moments along the way? david: of course. it was horrifying. there have been some, plenty of absolutely stomach turning moments. plenty of nights without sleep. moments where you feel like you totally screwed everything up. and it is all over now. you get pretty used to those moments though and you get through them, at least in my role, you get through them knowing the team needs you to be an optimist, to be positive. and to see through to the end of it so even when you cannot really see, you need to be the one to paint the path forward, show the team how we are going to keep going. the big moment for us, a public

when we a few years in started to get some popularity and traction. all of the sudden, the site started going down. we could not keep up with the scale or growth. the really sad and embarrassing thing for me and the team was, we thought we were really clever. we thought we had figured this out and we would scale this to infinity. little did we know what we did not know. we found ourselves underwater all of the sudden. the site is going down. we are developing a reputation for the site going down. the most stomach turning part in all of this is we had these brilliant creators, people using tumblr to do remarkable things. using it as their home, for all of their their incredible work. stuff,are taking their every time we screw up we are taking their stuff off the internet and out of the world.

that was so unforgivable. so terrible. it was crushing for me and the team to be screwing up in that way. it was exacerbated by the fact that we had not built out the big robust engineering team we needed at the time to get through to the other side. emily: you started as a teenager. you go through these highs and lows. how did you develop your own personality and style as a leader? how hard was that? david: i have been lucky to have great investors and mentors from early on. i have great partners with me to steer me to what i should have been doing with my time. for every moment in our history. the way the team has this works has changed. the people have changed.

emily: tell me about selling to yahoo! did you want to sell or did you feel like you had to? ♪

emily: tell me about selling to yahoo! how did you start talking to marissa? the conversation with marissa was a really fun one. this came at a time that we were looking for partners for strategic investment. we were in the process of raising money. more than just have an investor cut us a check. show up with some technology we can lean on, with resources, distribution, content that could make our network better. there was a time of stuff for us to be doing with yahoo! and orissa. her vision for what she was trying to do with the company. it was aligned with what we were doing with tumblr. where we were going next and

what we were going to need. the other thing was, marissa, we found an unstoppable positivity and the optimism which we had come to appreciate. it is not universal across this industry. there are plenty of cynics as well. there are plenty of people with brash personalities and occasionally an intense negativity. emily: did you want to sell or did you feel like you had to sell. david: we were not trying to sell the company. we needed to raise some money to bring us to profitability. the conversation with marissa was one of the most exciting conversations we had been having at the time. it escalated from cutting us a check and finding ways to partner together to let's make this official. we wanted to do all of it. that was something big to chew on. it was an emotional couple of

weeks but it was an incredible offer and an incredible opportunity. a year into this thing, something i can say she has lived up to. emily: what is the relationship now. tumblr is technically separate. david: we are a wholly owned subsidiary. we have our own leadership team. we have our own head of hr, sales, finance, all of that. emily: what is it like having a boss? david: not all that different than having a board. i feel like you always answer to somebody as soon as it is official. the board says goodbye. they basically say goodbye. emily: it is worse than going off to college. david: it is terrifying. these guys who had been partners, mentors of mine and the team, hugely involved. some of them for like seven years. you are now all of the sudden parting ways.

that was a really jarring moment. we are incredibly lucky that we have amazing support and an amazing mentor in marissa. emily: what does marissa want from you and tumblr? david: the thing that got her so excited and got us so excited about working with her is she saw the path we were on. emily: what have you been able to do with yahoo!? david: the big one came about six months in. we launched tumblr ad products powered by yahoo! ad tech. it was a really big deal. all of a sudden we could go to the market with robust ad technology. with this expressive canvas we had been working on for the last seven years. those two things together were a monster combination for this industry that suddenly gets to benefit from the work we had been doing. emily: fred wilson, one of your

investors recently talked about companies at some point need to turn into a real business. they need to focus on monetization and profits. he said, tumblr had to be sold even though they had huge potential. the annual burn rate was almost 50% of the entire fund. how do you respond to that? david: we were making money. it is true, we had a real burn rate. we would have been able to -- the options in front of us were raise what you call like a growth round. get somebody to cut you a big check. or find and acquire, take on the burn rate. until you cross over to profitability. emily: what about user growth? give me number is in terms of where tumblr is today. how many blogs, how many countries? david: at the time of the acquisition, we were 100 million blogs. we crossed over 200 million blogs. we reached 450 million people all over the world.

have 43alm scorsese million unique users so it looked like it did. score foruse const our advertisers. it is pretty far off our audience numbers, which are closer to a global audience of about 400 million people. they do not directly measure mobile traffic so it is very hard to get the full picture of it. emily: marissa mayer's acquisition strategy has been criticized and tumblr is her biggest acquisition so far. critics said, tumblr was not making money or growing. how do you respond? we were and are growing very fast. if she wanted to buy a profitable company, there are plenty to choose from.

she saw a real path forward and something she thought could be not just a big business by the business with a lot of alignments with yahoo! we are a year in and we are about to have a lot to brag about. emily: what is tumblr's ad strategy within yahoo!? david: we have this really novel ad platform. it is all about wide open creative expression trying to , get the most creative parts of the industry, to give them a space, a digital space where they can tell those same stories. where they can inspire us to become customers of these brands. get us to aspire to drive the beamer. yahoo! is building more and more content on top of tumblr. so there are digital magazines, yahoo! food.

and travel. those are built on tumblr. we launched the ability to take that advertising we're developing for the tumblr network, where you come to get the reach demographics and engagement of the tumblr network. you take that same content and roll it out the yahoo! network. i want to ask you about the competition, air quotes because i know there is not really any. what do you think of what they are doing? david: they have done a lot of things that nobody else is doing. they are kind of on the other side of a fight we have been fighting. giving people more identity. create something that is theirs. one of the things that drives me bonkers about medium is they try to make it a commoditized network. with lots of long articles from various people rather than a place where i can set up and have my blog. they are doing cool stuff with longform text.

vine is doing some really brilliant, novel stuff emily: with video. what about facebook? do you consider them competition? david: we are all kind of vying for attention, but it is different. i think we found our spot in the big internet. the stuff you go to see on facebook and twitter is created by people you know or celebrities you wish you knew. they are about people. tumblr on the other hand is a little bit more like your tv. it really is not about people you know, it is about the stuff you love. emily: buzz feed? david: it is cool. they are making great stuff, using tumblr to make great stuff. i was they would run it on top of tumblr. emily: there has never been a $10 billion tech company coming out of new york. why not? ♪ >> how is your life different

emily: how is your life different now that you have sold your company for $1 billion?

you are not even 30 years old. what do you like to do when you want to act your age? david: it is like, printing or drones or 3-d design. 3-d printing is one of the most interesting new creative technologies. that is the thing that gets me very energized. emily: what have you printed in 3-d? david: i am working on a chess set. a host of things from mechanical design that a chump like me can start to figure out now because the software is so good so , accessible. you can watch a five minute youtube tutorial. emily: you are doing a bit of tech investing in new york. david: mostly just in my friends' companies. just to support my friends who are doing this stuff.

emily: there has never been a $10 billion tech company coming out of new york. why not? there are several in silicon valley. david: i think it is a just a numbers game. there are more coming out of the west coast right now. we have some great ones but not nearly in the same numbers in the west coast. that's something we are working on. there is no shortage of ambition in new york. emily: what about talent and money? can you get the best talent? can you get the most funding? david: i think so. at tumblr we have done a great job of recruiting talent. we get a lot of talent from the west coast. to be a muchens better city than san francisco. emily: you do not want to go there. david: for all the things that are challenges, they only make us more hungry. we have a lot to prove that i think we will prove it. emily: how optimistic are you about yahoo!'s future? david: i'm excited to be a big part of it. i believe in marissa. i think she has built an extraordinary team. i'm excited about a lot of stuff they are doing on their own. i am hopeful and excited to be a shareholder.

emily: you do not think you will ever start another company? david: tumbler with something i really wanted that did not exist yet. it was never about doing the tech startup. emily: net neutrality is important to you and tumblr. you have a position on it. what is your position? david: it is important. we should do it right. and not set up laws or rules that stop the next generation of companies, people with ideas. that you have to worry about or spend time in courts or meetings with a handful of carriers that run the world. emily: david karp, founder and ceo of tumblr. thank you for joining us. david: thank you. this was fun. ♪

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