David Karp's Mother Gushes Over Her Million-Dollar Baby After Yahoo Deal

NEW YORK (AP) — As a teenager, Tumblr CEO David Karp would canvass the streets of New York City'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 altogether to devote more time to his passion for technology.
A few years later, Karp 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.
"There were a few tears and lots of hugs, and a lot of excitement," 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 Karp, who created one of the world's busiest websites. It boasts 75 million daily posts and a user base that's loyal, young and 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.
True to the company's laid-back, jeans-and-sneakers culture, Karp's wry sense of humor remained intact on Monday morning, when all employees were summoned to a meeting in Tumblr's New York headquarters. Cognizant of media reports that Tumblr was on the verge of a sale, everyone waited with bated breath as Karp kicked off the meeting with a tongue-in-cheek announcement: It was time to formulate a new "dog policy."
"We have gone above and 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 just six years of Tumblr's existence under his belt, Karp told The Associated Press that he still considers himself to be a green executive. 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 get to work with writes much better than me," he said.
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," Karp said.
"He doesn't have a pretentious or egocentric bone in his body," said Steve Nelson, the head of The Calhoun School, a private institution Karp attended until the eighth grade. "He doesn't take himself too seriously."