Tumblr President John Maloney just posted (on his Tumblr, natch) that he’s stepping down from a day-to-day operational role at the company.
“It’s the right time for me and a good time for Tumblr,” Maloney writes. “We’re in great hands with David and the excellent leadership team we’ve built.”
However, he says he will stay involved in what sounds like an advisory role: “The transition from running ops is effective immediately, but I’m sticking close w/ [founder and CEO David Karp], the team and company. There’s more work to do and I want to help see it thru”.
Maloney became president of Tumblr in 2008, but his history with Karp goes back further — before starting Tumblr, Karp worked at Maloney’s startup UrbanBaby.
Oh, and Maloney also says that “the team will ship some awesome new stuff next week.” He doesn’t say what that will be, but he could be referring to the new paid promotional units that Karp mentioned would launch on May 2. (Random note: A Tumblr spokesperson previously told me that it’s not an “ad unit per se” but rather “a package of native promotion for the Tumblr post.”)
Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog. The difference is that its extreme simplicity will make luring users a far easier task than acquiring users for traditional weblogging. Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly. The result is...
John Maloney is the former President of Tumblr. He is also a co-founder of UrbanBaby, an angel investor, and a co-chair of the Tech4Obama ‘12 Committee.
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