For Tumblr’s Young Founder, Education in Wall Street’s Ways

David Karp, the 27-year-old founder of Tumblr, may be a creature of the tech world. But he has had a rapid education in the ways of Wall Street.

Tumblr’s board hired Qatalyst Partners, the boutique investment bank founded by Frank Quattrone, to sell the company to Yahoo this year, agreeing on a price of $1.1 billion. But Mr. Karp made sure to note some of the fine print underlying that big number.

“Banker fees come out beforehand,” he said at the DealBook conference on Tuesday. “Everybody gets their piece before the thing ends up part of Yahoo.”

Mr. Karp, interviewed by David Carr of The New York Times, was joined on stage by Bijan Sabet, a partner at Spark Capital, which was an early investor in Tumblr.

“We didn’t have to sell the company,” Mr. Sabet said. “There was plenty of appetite to finance the company.”

In the talks with Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, the chief executive, cited Instagram and YouTube as “models of how to do this the right way,” Mr. Sabet said. Those two companies were sold to Facebook and Google, respectively.

What else did Ms. Mayer, a former Google executive, say that resonated with Mr. Karp?

“Plenty,” Mr. Karp said, but adding that he was not at liberty to share much of it.

After a moment, Mr. Karp said that being bought by Yahoo had given him an education in how public companies work.

“You’ve got a 27-year-old C.E.O. here,” Mr. Karp said. “It’s a lot of coaching through this stuff that I haven’t seen before.”