I know that Steve Jobs has sent some very short responses before, however this from Karp shows immaturity more than anything. There are times when most of us will receive an email from a client and want to immediately tell them where to go, but the old saying to "sleep on it" really is good advice. I have sometimes waited a day before properly responding to some people and it was the best thing to do in every case. I hope that Karp realises his mistake and makes a public apology. At least this way he would look mature enough to admit his mistakes
Edit: I was about to start a personal blog on Tumblr, and I will not be now due to this article.
Oh please, get over yourself. David started a company when he was 20.... obvious proof that he's extremely mature for his age, not immature. Let me know when you're running a successful website that zoomed to the top 50 in a couple of years and which serves 5 million people every single day before your 24th birthday. Picking on him for one email instead of his very impressive life's work, and self-righteously proclaiming that you will be boycotting Tumblr because he sent one curt email, is, I'm sorry to say, kinda pathetic.
Thanks for the response, although I think that it was disproportionate response to what I was saying. Basically I believe he made a mistake and it is a measure of someone in terms of how you deal with that. I respect someone much more when they apologize for making a mistake - we're all human after all. Also, I believe my advice was sound. Sometimes you do need to think before acting. Thats the basis of what I was trying to say. I appreciate, from viewing the other responses that you have made on here, that you know David quite well and its obvious you have a strong opinion, but I can only base mine on what I have seen.
He didn't say he was immature, but that the response is. Big difference there. One's a judgement of a person, the other of an action that person took and likely regrets by now. Saying so would show maturity.
Surely you've said or done things in your adult life that were sort of juvenile. You've surely regretted some of them afterwards.
I know I'd have chose to not use your products if you'd told someone to go away when I was making a platform decision to use them or not. (Your writings positively influenced buying decisions for city desk, when it was set up against competing products at the time that were functionally quite similar).
Especially for someone at 24, expending effort to exude maturity opens doors for your company, and helps to defuse criticism of youthful inability (as has plagued Mark Zuckerberg over and over).
All the reasons you give for excusing Karp could also be used to excuse the "whiner" who sent the email. Does he not have his business to run? Is he not under pressure?
Couldnt agree more. I find it embarrassing for tumblr that all of the people involved with the company seem more interested in covering their own asses then dealing with the problems. Not a company personally i would ever want to be associated with.
I couldn't agree more - but Karp is just turning out to be really arrogant. It's a great shame as Tumblr has potential to be an amazing service if only those behind it admitted it's flaws and tried to work on them instead of denying they exist.
Bubbie, you don't know what you're talking about. Do you really think that Tumblr isn't aware of it's flaws? Are you seriously claiming that David is denying that they had a few outages? Very, very few mass services grew as quickly as Tumblr without a lot of outages. Ebay had them, Yahoo had them, Twitter had them. The idea that David is sitting in a room like Mubarak, denying the flaws and refusing to work on them, is so utterly preposterous that I don't even know where to begin, but I'll say this: I know David, and it's not true, and he's working on the flaws, and he's working on them night and day, and he's utterly the least arrogant person I've ever met, and genuinely nice, too.
As someone who uses stackoverflow almost daily im absolutely astonished at how disrespectful and frankly clueless your response is. Ive been following architecture for a long time and remember when the companies you mention had scaling issues. I dont remember them lashing out at their customers and telling them to fuck off assholes! Also when ebay and yahoo started having scaling issues THERE WERE NO CASE STUDIES IN SCALING. They had to figure it out all on their own so people gave them slack.
Now there are upteen startups that have dealt with 100 times the traffic that tumblr is dealing with. And many of them without 40 million dollars in fudning. Plus theres something called the cloud.
Its becoming obvious that egomania is becoming epidemic int eh world of tech startups. Which is just sad.
Also while the emailer was asking about scaling problems which have been going on for far too long at tumblr from what ive read, the issue here isnt with that its with the ridiculous response that the ceo sent.
Edit: I was about to start a personal blog on Tumblr, and I will not be now due to this article.