David Kap Brief Introduction

David Kap, the founder of Tumblr, often rides a wasp on a motorbike to work.

In 2007, when his age was eating the school cafeteria food for the midterm exam, David Kap was busy creating tumblr--, a lightweight blogging platform that had just been bought by Yahoo for 1.1 billion dollars.

24-Year-old carp is accustomed to doing his own thing. 11 years old, he learned how to write the code; 15 years old, he has dropped out of high school; a year later, he found a job at the Urbanbaby of New York to serve as CTO of the site. In Tumblr, Karp likes to spend his time in notebooks outlining ideas, having lunch with 30 employees and, of course, reviewing blogs on Tumblr. One thing he did not like was being forced to act. If you try to have a meeting with him, or just see him ride a Vespa in New York City, he will soon understand this.

I am very opposed to the schedule. In addition to the board meeting, I basically do not plan things or carry a schedule. I think dating is a mockery of creativity. When you're in a great conversation, or you're in a good position, and you suddenly realize, "Oh, I have a date, I have to go now," how depressing! I prefer to "call back when we need something or we want to go out". In this way, it has never happened to me to cancel a date with someone so unpleasant. People say I need an assistant, but I don't want it.

I live in Manhattan, about a quarter away from my office. I usually walk or ride my wasp scooter to work in the morning. I bought this car in October and loved it. I've been wanting a motorcycle for a long time, and the Wasp scooter is a good initial choice. Motorcycles can be much cheaper than a taxi in the city. You can fill it with just 5 dollars, and a box of oil can last for a week.

I usually go to the office between 9:30 A.M. and 10 and I try not to check emails until then. It feels bad and inefficient to look at your emails at home. If there's something urgent I need to do, someone will call me or send me a message.

I used to be very bad at dealing with emails. I'm going to make emails explode, miss important emails, and even forget to reply. So I set up email filtering, and the system has been working very well. Now, my inbox has only mail from my company staff and my girlfriend. Folders named robots receive messages from Non-human senders, such as bank statements and Google alerts. Most of the rest of the mail goes into the unsorted folder. I went to the office, first checking the Inbox, replying to them as soon as possible, and then browsing the Unsorted folder, but replying to only a few of the messages. I've found that if you don't respond positively to those emails, people will be "trained" to stop bothering you.

While I'm looking at the mail, I'll list the things I will do on the day in my notebook. I had a bad memory, so I became a complete note-taker. I'm using a very beautiful Action Method series notebook from Behance, which is a row of dots, not a line. I ordered a bundle of these notebooks for my group. I always write with pilot Precise V7 pen, this ink is abundant but not dirty paper. In addition to the "want to Do" list, I also sketched the idea of a new feature for Tumblr in My Notebook. This kind of notebook is very big, I need 4-6 months to be able to use up, and those used notebook I keep in the drawer.

Every Monday morning, the meeting of all the groups was held in the conference room which I had designed to be quiet and comfortable. There is no conference table, only a sofa and some comfortable chairs. Our customer support team has eight people who attend meetings in Virginia via Skype. I have been holding such meetings since January in order to enable everyone to catch up and promote the work that others are doing. The first few meetings were rather awkward, and I tended to get excited and start rambling. So I try to walk around the house and let the others talk about the projects they're working on. Still, I may have said too much.

Our office is a large and open attic, I am in the middle of this space. The engineers who made our site run away on my side, the community outreach Group-the corporate preachers who interact with our users-sit on the other side of me. Everyone was quite quiet and respectful to each other. I bring headphones when I listen to music. We communicate mainly by mail. I like this way because it won't interrupt anyone. The less distracting things are, the better.

There are two screens on my desk. One is a 30-inch Mac display, and Tumblr is often open in this machine's Web browser. The other is a vertical screen, which I use to write code. I learned a trick from Tumblr's former lead developer, Marco Arment, that most Dell or has monitors can ramp up. I like to use two screens at the same time, because if you do everything on the same monitor, eventually you need to switch between programs, which is so distracting. Now, many of our engineers are working in this mode.

I hang on the Tumblr all day. I don't keep track of a lot of people, but I'll post what I really care about or blog again. I love my blog, and most of the news I get from the Tumblr information window. I used to be a 24-hour news consumer, but now most of the reports are too bad, and technical reports are incredibly boring. I have almost given up reading any reports about Tumblr because they are often inaccurate.

I used to write code all day long, which changed after we hired engineers smarter than me. I'll still be involved in it when I need it. Help write code. Every day the engineers had a scuffle, and occasionally I would attend their seminars to see what was going on and whether I could do something about it. I'm very good at the boundary situation and the rare scripting questions, so when our engineers are describing new ways to construct something, I ask, "What if in another language?" Or "if that button had to be designed to be a different size, would it all turn into a mess?" Basically, my starting point is, which part of the method do we not consider?

11 o'clock in the morning every day, we start to change the site work. We stagger the small changes so that we can master what changes are feasible and which cannot. This time is chosen because we want the engineers to be there when the problem is discovered, and the traffic will be very smooth during this period. Basically, everything that was done the day before was pushed in the morning. Maybe it's a loophole, maybe a new language document--for example, a performance is translated into French, maybe it's a new recessive performance--the public can't see it, but we can test it.

With each new performance, I will keep a close eye on how many people are using it. If it's not popular, we'll break it and try something else. There is a maintenance cost for each performance, so keeping less performance allows us to focus on the points that we really care about and make sure they work well. Each additional new performance, we remove an old one. Many big websites don't do that, which is becoming a problem. Twitter was an excellent simple product at first, and now it is on the same path as Facebook. The motivation to innovate can seriously impair or destroy a product, and my goal is to keep Tumblr focused.

We have a hive mentality in our office. We all had lunch between 12 and 1. Usually as long as a person stands up, the rest of the people will be so. We rushed to the elevator at the same time, once we reached the street outside, we would be divided into two or three men to buy food and then bring back to the office, then we gathered together for dinner.

I always carry my camera with me. January I bought a dream camera--lycra M9. This is the smallest digital camera with a full sensor. I uploaded a huge number of photos on my blog, and I actually took most of the photos of Tumblr employees.

I don't care about hiring people anymore. Each department is responsible for hiring its own employees. I like people who can be autonomous. I hope you can start a project on your own and solve the problem of how to do it. I don't really care how things work, I just care that they are done.

Recently my attention has been on our community outreach team. This group is responsible for solving how to connect and promote people using Tumblr. I recently recruited my friend Richard Tong as our fashion editor. He created Weardrobe, now a Google fashion website. About 18% of our blogs are related to fashion, and his job is to fully extend that statistic. The result of the move is that Tumblr made a big debut in New York Fashion Week. I met with community groups at least once a week to brainstorm ways to keep in touch with users, such as hosting a literary event or organizing a gathering of Tumblr users around the world. I love this part of my job.

Usually at around 3 o'clock in the afternoon, I need a refreshing drink. A handful of us will have a cup of tea at the corner of the street. I usually order an iced tea or an American mint tea. I used to drink coffee, but that thing got on my nerves-my metabolism was so fast that I quickly went from sleepy to unbearable energy. Tea contains just the right amount of caffeine.

In the afternoon, I usually like to immerse myself in the project. Or do some random design, or write something. Recently, I have severely modified our picture setting performance, so that our users can be like a slide in the same time to put a lot of pictures. I'll probably spend a couple of hours putting my ideas together before I deliver my ideas to the product team.

One or two nights a week I would work overtime-until 8, 9 o ' clock. When I work overtime, I'd like to see who is still in the office and invite them to dinner to express my gratitude. There are a lot of big restaurants near the company, so we'll go to a good place to eat.

I hardly work on weekends unless there is a database or infrastructure emergency. The company is growing fast and some problems have been rising. At any time to increase capacity, the new space is always immediately filled. December, the site was broken a whole day. This happened in a Sunday, and there was a lot of use of scrambling to figure out what was wrong. Every aspect of the event was a terrible one.

One of my favorite things to do on weekends is road travel. I just joined the Manhattan Car Club, and a one-year fee will allow you to touch all those cool cars. My girlfriend and I picked a 96-year Porsche 993 Carrera 4S. We went to Montreal on a weekend, and the journey was wonderful! We also drove to Boston and Maine. At other times, we stepped on my little wasp and wandered around the city. We might have brunch at our favorite restaurant in the East Village, then go to our friends in Brooklyn for a little visit and then return to Union Square to see a movie.

I spend a lot of time with people who work in Tumblr, and I'm not doing enough to communicate with other people in my life. I'm trying to change that, but in all fairness, I really like to stay at home at night. My girlfriend is a great cook and usually cooks at home two or three nights a week. After that, we relax by watching TV. We use Apple TV to watch TV on itunes. We both love to see "flying out of the Future" (Futurama, with the translation of the Chinese subtitle Group-translator) This sci-fi animation, I recently made her like the BBC's car Show, "The British Crazy Car Show" (Top Gear, translated as ditto-translator).

Sleeping is very precious to me. I'd be disappointed if I didn't go to bed before midnight. We have a rule: don't bring your laptop into the bedroom. I'm sick of being consumed with the computer.