David Karp, CEO of Tumblr with his new iPad Mini

David Karp is the co-founder and chief executive officer of New York City-based social sharing platform, Tumblr. He was speaking speakers at our second RoadMap conference held earlier this month, where he discussed the future of his company, creativity and sharing with my colleague Mathew Ingram.

I remember meeting Karp days before he launched and it was amazing to hear that Tumblr now has 120 people. It is clocking 20 billion page views a month, has about 80.8 million blogs and over 35.7 billion total posts and gets about 165 million unique visitors every month. In between various on-stage duties, I got a chance to catch up with David and here are some notes from our conversation, mostly scribbled on my scratch pad.

Tumblr’s role in the social ecosystem

If you look at Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, you can see they are all focused on helping you find things. Instagram, YouTube and Tumblr are about helping people create things. So far, there has been a lot of emphasis on a social web that allows you to find and share things. With the new mobile hardware platforms and an app-driven creative open system, it means that we are going to see a lot more focus on platforms that help you create.

Big web companies – Facebook, Twitter, and Google are not going to put a lot of emphasis on creating. Tumblr is helping discover creators like One Direction. Just like YouTube helped create Justin Beiber.

Instagram shows you how to create good photos and share them. It is not really publishing. Tumblr is not about publishers, but it is more about creators. Classic blogging has roots in publishing.

Tumblr’s Mobile Challenge

Like pretty much every web company, the big question we wrestle with is that as mobile hardware becomes more powerful, we are forced to think about the future of websites. It is pretty clear they are less important on mobile platforms. Tumblr is focusing on mobile apps. One of the things we know is that nearly 75 percent of traffic on Tumblr is to our dashboard. So it is a top priority to make that experience beautiful on Tumblr.

[Tumblr recently upgraded its iOS app with a simplified and an elegant interface that makes it easy for folks to create from their phones. The company will continue to develop  mobile apps for multiple mobile platforms. - Ed.]

On iPad Mini

I am over laptops and the posture that comes with them. I am coding a lot less, so I use my computers a lot less. I still want to simplify even further and carry just one device. So, I want to try the iPad Mini with cellular antenna as my only device and as a phone replacement, and use Skype and/or Google Voice instead.

On his role at the company & how it has changed

I have great investors and great mentors and four years ago I listened to them a lot, because it was all new to me. I feel more confident four years later. I have not committed any code for a year, and instead I focus on giving feedback to the team in a constructive way. My role has changed from being a product director to chief motivator. I try and keep the team focused on positive things.

Most important lesson learnt

One of the big lessons I have learned as a Founder and/or CEO is that you can’t waffle or not be focused, because it weakens productivity. It defocuses the team, because they take cues from you. I have gotten better at focusing and staying on target.

Here’s Karp in conversation with Mathew Ingram at RoadMap:

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He believes that increased speed—both of the mobile broadband and the software itself— not only improves the user experience but also makes people want to use the product more. In the case of Instagram, it makes users want to take and share more photos. “We’re getting to a point where we’re understanding how to allow people to produce more content every single day,” Systrom said.

While wireless broadband and LTE are demonstrating increasingly faster speeds, for now app makers are having to compensate on the back end. Instagram moves its process along by uploading photos in the background before while users caption them.

“If you simply cut the [waiting] time in half, if you shave off a second from that time, you actually get increased usage,” he said. “Because you’re not sitting at the bus stop waiting for something to load. You can actually reliably decide to open it and have your content ready,” he said.

“When you’re ready, it’s ready.”

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 coverage here, and the full video of Systrom’s talk is available here.

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This idea struck me again as I was preparing for my talk with Tumblr founder David Karp at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference on Monday, which you can read about (and see a video clip of) here. I pulled together a lot of statistics about the size of the service, but it quickly became obvious that there wasn’t much point, since they would almost certainly be out of date by the time I hit the stage. Sure enough, Karp mentioned that Tumblr recently crossed the 20 billion pageview-per-month mark, up from the 16 billion that is mentioned on its website.

When you look at Tumblr’s size and growth, it’s easy to assume that you have somehow made a mistake and added too many zeroes: at the beginning of this year the network was at 15 billion pageviews, and a little more than a year ago it was at 10 billion. According to estimates from Quantcast, in the past year the site has almost doubled the number of monthly visitors it gets, from about 80 million to almost 140 million. There are more than 35 billion posts on the almost 80 million blogs that are hosted on the service, and it gets tens of millions of new posts every day from what Karp told me were its 160 million or so members.

When comScore looked at the amount of time that users spend on different sites earlier this year, Facebook was still far and away the leader, with about 400 minutes per month, but Tumblr and Pinterest were tied for second place, with about 90 minutes per month. Time spent may not be a great measure of actual engagement — since many users leave sites like Facebook or Tumblr open in a window for hours at a time — but those are still pretty compelling numbers. And there have been some indications that Facebook’s engagement levels are falling, or at least levelling off.

It’s not just the growth, it’s the level of engagement

Those are some of the number-based reasons for why Facebook should be interested in Tumblr. The other part of the argument is more anecdotal: It comes from watching how both of my teenaged daughters use the service, and the powerful hold it has over the way that they consume and share all kinds of content, especially visual content (including animated GIFs, etc.) — and the corresponding decline in the amount of time they spend on Facebook. For them, Facebook seems to have become something they feel they have to use rather than something they want to spend a lot of time on, much like email is for older users. When it comes to sharing info about their favorite TV shows or movies or likes and dislikes, they use Tumblr almost exclusively.

If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I would be more than a little worried about that phenomenon, just as the Facebook co-founder and CEO was apparently worried about the growth of Instagram, and the threat that it posed to Facebook’s dominance of the photo-sharing market and the mobile market — and the possibility that a competitor such as Twitter or Google or Apple might acquire it. As Om described it after Facebook announced the $1-billion purchase (which lost some of its value after Facebook went public and its share price fell):

“Facebook was scared shitless and knew that for first time in its life it arguably had a competitor that could not only eat its lunch, but also destroy its future prospects. Why? Because Facebook is essentially about photos, and Instagram had found and attacked Facebook’s achilles heel — mobile photo sharing.”

It’s true that Tumblr is not nearly as large a player in mobile as Instagram was, but it is clearly a huge and growing force when it comes to sharing and engaging with visual content of all kinds — in other words, it’s the kind of curatorial and creative market that lots of advertisers and brands are interested in appealing to. The sharing of that content is exactly what Facebook has tried to encourage with its “frictionless sharing” apps and features, but much of that has been awkwardly handled from a user point of view and it’s not clear what effect it has had on engagement.

The bottom line is that any service that is growing as rapidly as Tumblr, and sucking up a massive amount of the attention of younger users, is a potential threat to Facebook’s future growth. Theoretically, it could acquire Tumblr for something close to what it was willing to spend for Instagram — since Tumblr’s last financing round allegedly valued it at about $800 million — and then keep the network as a standalone entity, as it has with the photo-sharing service (which has continued to grow by orders of magnitude).

The only stumbling block is that David Karp and his backers may see the value of remaining independent and the potential for building something even larger than they have now.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Gabriele Coletti

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According to Williams, “We’re all more sophisticated. The industry is more sophisticated and therefore it’s just a hell of a lot more work — and it’s a different kind of work.” That means he’s graduated from duct-taping servers to designing interfaces that are beautiful and function across platforms.

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Check out the rest of our GigaOM RoadMap 2012 coverage, and a full video of Williams’ session can be found here.

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Ljung said that unlike some other music or performance-focused services, SoundCloud’s focus is not just music but any kind of sound — from audio books to recordings of conference calls like Facebook’s earnings call, or the embedded audio that bloggers like venture capitalist Fred Wilson use. “It’s really natural when you think about it, because sound is a huge part of the way we experience the world,” he said. The company’s mobile app recently passed 10 million downloads on iOS and Android.

The size of the market means the potential opportunity for SoundCloud is huge, Ljung said, but it also means that it’s easy to try and do everything all at once, because there are so many potential ways to create and share sound. In addition to mobile, one of the ways the service is expanding its reach is through partnerships with companies like Apple — which built support for SoundCloud sharing into GarageBand — and Flipboard.

The company is also working on a redesign of the service that is currently in private beta. Ljung said that it is much faster, and also has a range of new features, including the ability to share sounds in different ways and to create collections of sounds that share certain attributes. There is also a continuous play feature so that users can listen to something while they are browsing through other content, and there are real-time notifications of new content.

When it comes to the future of sound, Ljung said he dreams about a day when it is just a standard part of how we experience the web: “When do we get to the point where I can listen to the internet and talk to the internet? That’s kind of out there, but it’s what I like to think about.”

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“How would society be different if we felt the same way about government that we do about our iPhones or Android phones?” Palkha wondered, arguing that citizens are more likely to feel involved with their local government if they don’t feel like their technology services cause more problems than they solve.

Code For America has taken on projects in New Orleans and Santa Cruz, working on things as profound as helping New Orleans residents track the status of blighted properties in their neighborhoods to encouraging Santa Cruz residents to take advantage of bike lockers that languished before a creative graphic designer took charge. “We’re trying to bring this notion of good design to government,” she said, citing a Code For America fellow who described their mission as creating “interfaces to government that are simple, beautiful, and easy to use.”

And if a sense of civic duty doesn’t move you, consider this: Federal and state government spending on IT is around $172 billion a year. Mobile video games, one of the hottest areas of the mobile development world? $10 billion.

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“If you look at content in the world in general, who is creating most of the stuff? Is it a better world if everybody’s creating? I think it’s a better world if everyone has the ability to create but I don’t think it needs to be that everyone is creating and gets equal attention because some stuff is frankly better than others,” he said today in a conversation with Om Malik at GigaOM’s Roadmap conference in San Francisco.

Since launching Blogger about a dozen years ago, he said he and his cofounder Biz Stone have been interested in democratizing the distribution of content online. But now, with both Medium and Branch, The Obvious Corporation-backed platform for hosting online conversations, he said, the focus is quality.

With Medium, the new collaborative publishing tool launched by The Obvious Corporation this summer, he said they want to provide a platform that enables anyone to create content but they don’t expect everyone to actually do it. And Branch similarly enables anyone to host an online conversation, but instead of opening it up to the masses, it lets users close it off to a smaller group to raise the bar of commentary.

He also said that while Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms may satisfy users’ obsession with the new and novel with a constant stream of updated information, Medium — which displays content in Pinterest-like “collections” of contents — is designed to give preference to higher-quality, longer-lasting and potentially longer form content.

People will always be attracted to the new and shiny object — and he said much of Twitter’s value comes from its real-time nature — but not all content on the Internet needs to be fast and fleeting.  He acknowledged that they sometimes wonder if they’re being “naive” to think that people might want more than the “junk food” content on the Web. But Medium’s hope is that people will “eat their information vegetables.” And If the site only appeals to a smaller audience in the process, he said, that’s just fine.

“Our goal at Obvious isn’t to reach the entire world, it’s to create as much value as possible,” he said. “HBO isn’t the most popular channel on TV but they do really really great stuff. And I’d rather be HBO than whoever creates “Desperate Housewives.””

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“We talk a lot on the team about this pressure to earn people’s time, both every minute and every month but also every year,” Silbermann said in an appearance at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference in San Francisco. “Every one of your experiences has to feel good. Every month, it has to be more than a passing novelty. If they don’t feel like it gives anything to them, they’ll crowd it out.”

Silbermann said that while there is a strong community around Pinterest, it differs from sites like Reddit in that it’s an independent experience focused on the user.

“Pinterest is a little more self-focused,” he said. “There are other people who are there, but it’s less about saying things and seeing how the community will react to them.”

Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at the Atlantic who was interviewing Silbermann, asked how the company managed to build such a strong presence among women, especially outside of the traditional tech scenes of New York and San Francisco.

“Did you send out invites to like 100 women in Milwaukee?” he joked. And Silbermann replied that he actually did grow up in the Midwest, and building a service that they themselves wanted turned out to be a great plan for winning over users.

“When we built Pinterest, we didn’t build it with a specific demographic in mind,” Silbermann said. “We built it for ourselves.”

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Olander told Wired senior editor Mike Senese that Nike’s sports technology — which allows people to track their runs, times and physical activity, among other things — has been successful because “people want credit. That’s one of the ultimate drivers for us as humans” and it’s “propelled everything we do at Nike+.” Forty percent of the runs completed through Nike’s GPS running app are shared on either Facebook or Path.

Getting that credit is another reason why Nike chose the wrist for its FuelBand, whereas competing technology Fitbit can be clipped to clothing or put in a pocket. Clip-on or pocket devices can get lost or can fall off too easily, Olander said. Plus, everyone can see your wrist and “you want to have this…as a symbol of your goal.”

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“Airbnb was born out of necessarity. Our rent went up. It was born out of a problem,” said Joe Gebbia, the company’s co-founder and chief product officer at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference in San Francisco Monday. “By inflating the air bed, it began that design process.”

Gebbia said that about five years ago, he and his co-founders were looking to make some extra money, and by hosting a few visitors in San Francisco, they were able to make some extra money and forge a social bond with their visitors. And then it occurred to them that the product could work for other people too.

Now, Airbnb has raised about $120 million in financing after a round last summer, when it was valued at about $1.3 billion. Gebbia says the site, which allows users to post rooms for rent and book visitors, sees more than 1,000 new listings every day. It’s booked more than 10 million nights so far.

“We started with airbeds,” he said. “And people have listed private rooms, and then… boats and treehouses and castles and villas.”

When someone listed their island in Fiji on the site for relatively decent prices, that’s when Gebbia realized Airbnb had reached a new level of business.

“I just remember sitting back in my chair, and saying, ‘this totally redefines the experience,’” he said.

Airbnb was one of the noted successes of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator incubator, and he said Graham was instrumental in pushing them in their early days to really consider who their customers were. The team was located in Mountain View at the time, but most of their customers were in New York, so they got on a flight and headed to New York, where they started talking to the people listing their homes on the site.

“Our conversations with them illuminated everything that was wrong with the product,” he said, saying it took off afterwards.

Gebbia said in the 1990s, the real consumer challenge for the internet was bringing customers online, but that’s changing now, and Airbnb is at the forefront of this change.

“Airbnb is about the nexus of the online and offline to create the perfect customer experience,” he said.

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