David Karp

Karp - a high school dropout who taught himself how to code - had expressed grave reservations about giving up his brainchild to a Silicon Valley tech giant. Tumblr, which is a mico-blogging platform for quickly posting pictures, text and video, also functions as a social media site. Its platform manages to blend elements of all of the major social networking sites. Sharing and posting photos and simple and easy, like Instagram. Gifs moving images, pictures, and videos are all easy to share. But, users follow other Tumblr blogs and compile news feeds, making the site similar to Facebook and Twitter. It is unclear how large a stake in the company Karp maintained before the Yahoo deal. In 2008, he sold a 25percent stake to investors for $750,000 Karp grew up on Manhattan's tony Upper West Side, the son of a music composer father who wrote songs for films and TV shows and a mother who was a teacher. He taught himself how to code HTML at age 11 and began setting up his own consulting business shortly thereafter. His parents allowed him to drop out of high school at age 15 and complete the remainder of his education by homeschooling. At age 17, he moved to Japan, where he cemented his skill as a programmer and began pitching his ideas to tech companies. He moved back to New York and sold his services as a consultant. He founded Tumblr in 2007 at age 21 - and it quickly consumed all of his time. He currently lives with his girlfriend in a modest apartment in Manhattan's West Village. Rachel Eakley is a chef and a graduate student studying psychology.