How to Tumble into a $B

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

As a Teenager, Tumblr CEO David Karp would canvass the streets of NYC’s Upper West Side, offering to build websites for local businesses. After his freshman year of high school, the precocious, computer-savvy kid decided to drop out of school altogether, to devote more time to his passion for technology.

A few years later, David built Tumblr — the wildly popular blogging forum — from his tiny childhood bedroom, hunched over his laptop with bags of Tostitos. And on Saturday, the 26-year-old technology wunderkind returned home to inform his mother that, in a game-changing transaction, Yahoo was buying Tumblr for $1.1 Billion.

“A lot of Excitement, a few tears and lots of hugs, ,” said his mother, Barbara Ackerman. “This is something that he built — it’s his baby — and it’s emotional.”

The deal was a transcendent moment for David, who created one of the World’s busiest Websites. It boasts 75 million daily posts and a user base that’s loyal, young & hip. While Facebook has morphed into a mainstream social network where grandparents talk golf, Tumblr is still that little corner of the Internet where the cool kids hang out.

Same cool David. True to the company’s laid-back, jeans-and-sneakers culture, David’s wry sense of humor remained intact on Monday morning, when all employees were summoned to a meeting in Tumblr’s NYC headquarters. Cognizant of media reports that Tumblr was on the verge of a sale, everyone waited with bated breath as David kicked off the meeting with a tongue-in-cheek announcement: It was time to formulate a new “dog policy.” “We have gone above & beyond with our dog policy,” he told them. “There is now one dog for every five people in the office at Tumblr at any given time. So we are needing to figure out a better bathroom situation.”

With only 6 yrs of Tumblr’s existence under his belt, David told this Reporter that he still considers himself to be a “green” executive (as in new, not eco-friendly). But he’s learning that he can no longer play the same role that he did in the early days, when he spent most of his time writing computer code. “Now the team that I work with, writes much better than me,” he said.

(Continued in Premium Content)