David Karp, Founder Of Tumblr, Dropped Out Of High School

It has recently been revealed that David Karp, the Tumblr founder whose startup was just acquired by Yahoo! for $1.1 billion, is in fact a high school dropout.

Karp was apparently persuaded by his mother to drop out of New York’s Bronx High School of Science at age 14 after she noticed the insane amount of time her son was spending in front of a computer screen.

Karp then began working for Fred Seibert, a TV producer a friend of his mother’s knew, to learn about engineering.

It wasn’t long before Karp was building a website for Seibert’s company, a web production video startup called Next New Networks.

Google bought Next New Networks for $50 million. Fred Seibert remains an active Tumblr board member to this day.

Karp then did what any young person would do with a lot of money: travel.

From The New York Times:

“After dropping out and working for a time in small New York tech outfits, Mr. Karp made his way to Tokyo, where he worked for several months for a start-up.

He returned to the United States and became the chief technology officer for UrbanBaby, an Internet message board for parents. CNET Networks bought UrbanBaby in 2006, and Mr. Karp took the several hundred thousand dollars he made from the sale to start his own company, called Davidville.

One of Davidville’s projects was a simple blogging service called Tumblr.”
Karp made sure to point out that he doesn’t want his path to success to inspire kids to drop out of school.

From the Associated Press:

“I was in a very unique position of knowing exactly what I wanted to do at a time when computer science education certainly wasn’t that good in high school in New York City.”

Karp (26) will reportedly be receiving a $250 million paycheck for the Yahoo! acquisition.