A 20-something startup founder of popular micro-blogging site, Tumblr, is very happy and wealthy man as of Sunday. Yahoo's board has approved a $1.1 billion cash deal to purchase Tumblr, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Yahoo was expected to announce the acquisition during tomorrow's NYC media event on Monday in which invites sent out to reporters say "Join us as we share something special."
David Karp, the 26-year-old founder Tumblr, looks poised to make a lot of money agreed to sell to Yahoo, even though he was publicly opposed to selling the company he founded out of his mother's small Manhattan apartment in 2007.
In a 2012 interview with the Guardian, he said he had been swatting away buy-out requests for years.
"Particularly in the first three years, there were a lot of (mergers and acquisitions) people who would pull you aside and you'd think "Well, s***, I could be a pretty rich 23-year-old with very little effort,"' he said.
"We stuck it out. I won't say I really knew why."
He must certainly be glad he waited for a better deal to come along. The company has not generated much income - with only $13million last year which was only made possible after $125million in capital investments. It is still unclear how Yahoo plans to integrate Tumblr into its current company model.
Tumblr platform works as a mico-blogging platform for posting pictures, text and video, also works as a social media site - with Tumblr users following other Tumblr blogs and compiling a news feed, similar to the Facebook feature.
Citing a person familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer will unveil updates to its Flickr photo-sharing service. Mayer has spent a lot of time revamping Yahoo's most popular services like its home page, email client and weather service, as well as culling less successful products like its BlackBerry app.
