It’s been almost one year since Yahoo announced that it had acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion, and David Karp, founder and head of Tumblr, says that its new owner has “lived up to everything they promised.” Speaking in an interview with the New York Times, Karp said that Yahoo and its CEO Marissa Meyer have supported his business with additional resources — Tumblr’s roster has more than doubled to 220 staff — and have remained hands off. “We’re our own shop. We have our own leadership, and we’re doing things our own way,” Karp said.
When Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion a year ago, it sent a ripple of excitement — and anxiety — through the tech industry. Would Yahoo and its recently arrived chief executive, Marissa Mayer, breathe new life into Tumblr? Or would Yahoo smother the start-up, as it did after acquiring popular young services like GeoCities and Flickr? So far, the worst fears have begun to dissipate. Tumblr, a microblogging platform, has more than doubled its staff to 220, and its audience continues to grow, up 22 percent in the last year, according to the metrics company comScore. “The most terrifying thing to me was that this would change the company in any way,” David Karp, Tumblr’s founder and chief executive, said in a recent interview. “But almost a year in, they have lived up to everything they promised.”