Tumblr was recently acquired by Yahoo for $1.1 billion. Which early employees hit the jackpot with their stock options?
We rounded up 14 of the earliest employees at Tumblr. They were the site's first users, template designers, and friends of David Karp's.
They didn't all have stock options that vested, but many of them did. All of them played a hand in building a hyper-growth company from the ground up. Some went on to found successful companies of their own too.
Tumblr's first employee was Marco Arment, who went on to found and sell Instapaper. Another early Tumblr employee, Jared Hecht, went on to sell a startup, GroupMe, to Skype for ~ $80 million.
See how they all fared ...
David Karp is the founder and CEO of Tumblr.
Date founded: 2006
Role and career history: David Karp is the founder and CEO of Tumblr. The acquisition will net him somewhere around $200 million.
Prior to founding Tumblr, Karp was Head of Product at Urban Baby, a site that was acquired by CNET in 2006. The money from the acquisition seeded Davidville, Karp's creative company that ultimately produced Tumblr.
Marco Arment was Tumblr's first employee. While he isn't "yacht-and-helicopter- rich," he did alright.
Date joined: 2006
Role and career history: Arment was Tumblr's first employee in 2006. He calls himself an "idea editor."
"While I wasn’t a 'founder' financially, David was generous with my employee stock options back in the day,"Arment wrote on his blog earlier this week. "I won’t make yacht-and-helicopter money from the acquisition, and I won’t be switching to dedicated day and night iPhones. But as long as I manage investments properly and don’t spend recklessly, Tumblr has given my family a strong safety net and given me the freedom to work on whatever I want."
Marc LaFountain was Tumblr's third employee and he launched their customer service office in Richmond, Virginia.
Date joined: Full time in April 2008, part time before that.
Role and career history: LaFountain was one of Tumblr's first 18,000 users. He started working part-time for Karp and joined full-time in April 2008 as Tumblr's "one-man tech support shop."
"I just wrote them and said, hey, I'm one of your earlier and most passionate users and I would really love it if you would give me the opportunity to do tech support for Tumblr. I had a bit of an IT and support background,"LaFountain told The Atlantic in 2011. He says he and Karp exchanged two emails calls and had a call that likely was shorter than ten minutes. After that, he had the job.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider