The
plucky, 26-year-old Tumblr founder has sold his popular blogging platform to
tech behemoth Yahoo for an amazing $1.1 billion, news site AllThingsD reported
Sunday.
The
deal is bound to make boatloads of dough for the native New Yorker and high
school dropout, while cementing his place among the growing pantheon of
celebrated tech entrepreneurs, like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“This
is obviously a validation of David’s efforts,” said Sree Sreenivasan, the chief
digital officer at Columbia University. “It’s also a validation of New York as
an environment to nurture and grow start-ups.”
The
move also appears to reflect a change of heart for the budding tech maven, who
until last year publicly opposed peddling his social media site to turn a quick
buck.
Karp,
who grew up on the upper West Side, began noodling with computer code when he
was 11 and launched his own consulting business soon thereafter.
The
boy wonder spent only one year at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science
and thumbed his nose at attending college.
After
bouncing around Japan, Karp began tinkering with Tumblr inside his mother’s
tiny apartment in 2007. His office has since moved to the Flatiron District.
Karp,
an avid Vespa rider, nested with his girlfriend Rachel Eakley, a grad student
and chef, in a modest West Village apartment until last year. But he now lives
in a luxury $1.6 million loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Apparently,
it’s not cluttered. “I don’t have any books. I don’t have many clothes,” Karp
told Forbes. “I’m always so surprised when people fill their homes up with
stuff,” Karp told Forbes.
His
micro blogging site — which allows users to quickly post pictures, text and
video — has surged to more than 100 million users, who upload 90 million posts
per day.
It
is especially popular among a younger demographic — making Tumblr attractive to
Yahoo.
With
a value of around $800 million, Tumblr trails far behind Facebook, whose
elusive value is somewhere in the tens of billions of dollars.
Still,
the deal marks the biggest acquisition for Yahoo since CEO Marissa Mayer took
the helm of the company last year. The web pioneer has gobbled up several other
small start-ups, including Propeld, Summly and OnTheAir
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