The Way I Work: David Karp of Tumblr

„Every Monday morning, we have an all-team meeting in our conference room, a place I designed to be quiet and cozy. There are no conference tables—just a couch and a few comfortable chairs. Our customer support team, a group of eight people in Virginia, attends via Skype. I started holding these meetings in January as a way for everyone to get up to speed on what everyone else is doing. The first few meetings were pretty awkward. I tend to get excited and ramble on. So I've been trying to go around the room and have everyone else talk about the projects they're working on. I still probably talk too much.

Our office is a big, open loft space, and I'm right in the middle. The engineers, who run the site, are clustered on one side of me. And the community outreach team—the company evangelists who interact with our users—is on the other side. People are really quiet and respectful of one another. I use headphones if I listen to music. We mostly use e-mail to communicate. I love e-mail, because it doesn't interrupt anyone. The fewer distractions, the better.

I have two screens on my desk. The first is a 30-inch Mac monitor. I always have Tumblr open in the Web browser. The second is a vertical screen, which I use only for writing code. You can turn most Dell or Hewlett-Packard monitors sideways, a trick I learned from Marco Arment, who used to be Tumblr's lead developer. I like using two screens, because if you do everything on the same monitor, you end up constantly flipping back and forth between programs, which is distracting. A lot of our engineers have the same setup now.

I'm on Tumblr all day. I don't follow a ton of people, but I post and reblog stuff I really care about. I love my blog. I get most of my news from my Tumblr dashboard. I used to be a 24-hour news consumer, but so much of the reporting is bad these days. I find tech reporting incredibly tedious and dull. And I've kind of given up on reading anything that anyone writes about Tumblr. It's often inaccurate.

I used to spend all day coding, but that changed when we hired engineers who were a lot smarter than me.”