大卫•卡普被誉为青年乔布斯

    David Karp, 26, just sold his company Tumblr to Yahoo for US$1.1 billion in an all-cash deal.

    Karp never finished high school or enrolled in college. After dropping out and working for a time in small New York tech outfits, Karp made his way to Tokyo, where he worked for several months for a startup. 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 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 — the microblogging site was founded in 2007 from the back bedroom of his mother’s modest Manhattan apartment.

    What’s the founder really like?

    According to close friend and Tumblr’s first employee, Marco Arment, Karp is a lot like Steve Jobs was.

    “David has a lot of Steve Jobs-like qualities, and like many people who worked for Steve, I look back on Tumblr’s crunch times with mixed feelings: I don’t want to return to that stress level, but David pushed me to do amazing work that I didn’t think was possible,” Arment writes. Arment is also the founder of Instapaper, a read-it-later app that Betaworks recently acquired.

    “I’ve only seen one other ‘product person’ as good as David, and that was Steve Jobs. Believe me, there are many parallels,” he continues. “David has an impeccable sense of what’s best for Tumblr, and he doesn’t need anyone else telling him what’s best for the product. Many people, myself included, have tried to convince him to go different directions, and we’ve been proven wrong every time.”

    Like Steve Jobs, Karp can be stubborn. It’s something he’s cognizant — but not proud — of.

    “If there are moments I’ve been stubborn in my life, it was because I was really, really believing in something that I wanted to see become a reality,” Karp told Forbes in January. “I’ve been rewarded a few times for being stubborn. It’s not something I necessarily appreciate about myself.”

    Friends and colleagues also describe Karp as “polite.” And anyone who reads Karp’s tumblr, Davidslog.com, can see a deeply caring person with a keen sense of humor.(SD-Agencies)