NEW YORK ¨C ¡°Steve Jobs and Willy Wonka to me were just like these brilliant people who had these magical factories where every six months they¡¯d come out with this huge show,¡± David Karp told me a few years ago. ¡°I thought that was like the coolest thing ever. That¡¯s what I wanted to do.¡± And now, it seems, he just might have done it.
Karp, of course, is the 26-year-old autodidact who founded Tumblr, the social-networking blog site that Yahoo! Inc. just scooped up for $1.1 billion. Karp stands to make $250 million from Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer¡¯s effort to make her search site relevant again.
Karp isn¡¯t your typical Internet entrepreneur. He grew up in New York, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and attended the Calhoun School, where his mother was a science teacher. His father, an award-winning composer, wrote the musical themes for ¡°Dateline NBC¡± and TV broadcasts of New York Yankees games. His maternal grandfather, Ken Ackerman, was a radio broadcaster, known as the ¡°Voice of San Francisco.¡±
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