Exactly five years ago today, we co-led the very first investment in Tumblr. The actual announcement of the round came several months later along with a product update blog post.
So much has changed since that time. For some context, when we backed the company, there was an iPhone but the app store didn’t exist. It was just two guys, ceo/founder David Karp and Marco Arment, working on the product. And it stayed that way until the next round some fifteen months later. They did it all renting a small corner of our friend Fred Seiberts office at the time. I can still remember the talks we had on that white couch and staring at all the soda cans Marco had stacked to hold up his monitor and keyboard.
It was an exciting time. Every day more users showed up. Creative content and communities were just being formed on the platform. And by the end of year 1, they signed up about 450k users. Today, that number is over 75million.
I’m so proud of how much this team accomplished and the quality of the team as they have grown from two people to over one hundred employees.
So happy anniversary Tumblr. It’s been a wonderful five years and I’m really excited about the next five.