Tumblr founder David Karp’s mother gushes over billion-dollar baby

As a teenager, Tumblr chief executive 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 US$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 humour remained intact on Monday morning, when all employees were summoned to a meeting in Tumblr’s New York headquarters. Most were aware of media reports that Tumblr was on the verge of a sale, and people 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.”