[Posted on November 5, 2007 - 5:42 PM]
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Digg"I invested in www.tumblr.com!" enthused Martin Varsavsky Sunday morning in a Twitter post announcing his modest $25,000 bet on the multimedia blog tool maker. In a longer post on Monday, Varsavsky said that "with Tumblr anyone can create a simple and beautifully designed personal page to aggregate his digital identity and share content with their friends."
Varsavsky is in good investing company, joining the likes of Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital and bringing the total raised by David Karp, the 21-year-old founder of Tumblr Inc., to $775,000.
Varsavsky is a Argentine-Spanish entrepreneur who has founded seven companies in the past 20 years, including Viatel, Jazztel and Ya.com. Interestingly, his bio notes that not all his efforts have succeeded: "In 2000 he started Germany's largest ASP, Einsteinet, and the company was sold in 2003 at no return to him or investors." Refreshing.
Varsavsky's latest endeavor is FON, which aims to become the world's largest Wi-Fi network and raised $21.7 million from Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Skype Technologies SA, eBay Inc. and Google Inc. Varsavsky also recently played angel to Dopplr, a social networking site that lets people share their travel schedules. When I asked him how Tumblr fits in with his investment strategy, he emailed me back: "I invest in companies whose products I love, and Tumblr fits the criteria." - Mary Kathleen Flynn
See Sept. 4 post from Tech Confidential
See Martin Varsavsky's video interview with David Karp
See Martin Varsavsky's tumbelog
See Feb. 2006 post on FON from GigaOm
