How to Tumble into a $B

from Huff Post & AP 21 May 13 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz

Today he’s the Chief Motivator. The guy jumping around every week to make sure the employees are excited about the product we are building and the direction we are headed in,” David said.

“He’s not Pretentious or Egocentric,” said Steve Nelson, the head of The Calhoun School, a private institution David attended until the eighth grade. “He doesn’t take himself too seriously.”

Yahoo said Monday that David will remain in Control of Tumblr in an effort to retain the same “irreverence, wit and commitment to empower creators.” Tumblr, which will remain based in New York, has a minuscule 175 employees, compared with Yahoo’s 11,300.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer showered praise on her new employee, saying David possesses a rare combination of computer programming prowess and a sense of aesthetics. “He will be one the legends of his generation in terms of an entrepreneur who has really changed the way people express themselves,” Mayer said.

When he was a little boy, David showed an early fascination with electronics and liked to pull toys apart and reassemble them, his mother recalled. By age 14, he liked girls & playing video games like other teenagers, but they never fascinated him as much as the fun of computers.
“It was mostly about figuring out how to make computers do the things that I wanted to see them do,” he said.

Though he was enrolled at the Bronx HS of Science, a prestigious NYC public school, attending the school required him to make the long commute to the city’s northernmost borough every day. And he found himself wanting more freedom to explore the digital world on his own.

So his parents let him Drop out of High School. Instead, David embarked on a home-schooling regimen with the help of several tutors, learned to speak Japanese and pursued his digital interests with abandon.
“He needed the time in the day in order to create,” said his mother, who divorced when her son was a teenager. “And that’s what he is. He’s a creator.”

(Continued on Premium Content)