David Karp

» Matt Mullenweg on Yahoo-Tumblr

“We’re at the cusp of understanding the ultimate value of web publishing platforms, particularly ones that work cross-domain.”–Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.

Thanks to Quartz’s Zach Seward for jogging my memory about this oldie and goodie: Tumblr’s David Karp in a video interview taped in 2007, when he was 21, had 75,000 users and was talking about stuff like Digg, Flickr … and Twitter.

Karp’s interviewer is Howard Lindzon, who’s now known as the guy behind StockTwits. Assuming that the interview was taped close to the time it was published, it would have meant that the two men were talking as Karp was raising his first funding round of $750,000, led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital.

No need to say anything else:

Incorporating advertising on photo-sharing or visually-driven sites has yet to be done successfully, mostly because companies haven't been able to do it without completely disrupting the user experience.

But Tumblr, whose CEO David Karp really doesn't like advertising, is working on a way to crack the code.

We asked Rick Webb, consultant on marketing and revenue at Tumblr, how Tumblr is using advertising and if it is actually working, at our IGNITION conference last week.

Watch below.

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Kevin Systrom, of Instagram, and David Karp, of Tumblr, gave some indication of the problems they'd like their services to solve.

The latest numbers on Tumblr's About page are nothing short of impressive -- 20 billion posts on 50 million blogs.

According to The Next Web, this means the microblogging service has doubled in size in just over six months.

In order to ride this momentum, CEO David Karp said the company will go "all in" to bring new talent to Tumblr headquarters in New York. He believes it's still less than easy for new users to get up and running with their Tumblr blogs, so the major focus for the future will be simplifying the way people share their content.

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See Also:

• Tumblr Now Sponsors The Launch Pad For New York's Biggest Startups
• All Quiet On The Tumblr Front, But Not The Back End: Here's What David Karp Has Brewing
• Tumblr's Cool New York Headquarters, Where 600 Million Daily Pageviews Are Made

David Karp, the founder of the blogging platform Tumblr, was 17 when he decided to cut the apron strings and move to Tokyo. With a smattering of Japanese and a sharp eye for computer code, the impatient Manhattan teenager embarked on a period of self-discovery. “I was holed up in the middle of this world where it was just me on the internet,” Karp recalls. Within weeks, he had fine-tuned his computer skills and cooled on the idea of building robots. He wanted to be an entrepreneur. But there was one small problem: his voice. ”I was so silly – I tried to be very formal and put on a deep voice to clients over the phone so I didn’t have to meet them and give away how young I was,” he says. “I lied about my age. I lied about the size of my team. I lied about my experience. I was so terribly embarassed about it for so long. I should have just owned up.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jan/29/tumblr-david-karp-interview

On Oct. 28, 1886, the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France, was dedicated in New York Harbor by President Grover Cleveland. Oct. 28, 2011 marks the 125th anniversary of the dedication. Take a look back at the history of the statue and all “the lady” has seen in her 125 years.