Announcing our investment in Tumblr

I’m super excited to announce Greylock’s investment in Tumblr.

We knew Tumblr was big when we started talking with David and John over the summer — over the last year or so, it’s practically exploded onto the scene — it seems like every piece of interesting content and expression you see today has been posted on someone’s Tumblr. The numbers back that up — last month the 30 million blogs on Tumblr generated 13 billion page views.

As we got to know the team there more, it became a more and more obvious decision for us to get involved. We love entrepreneurs who are product visionaries, who have a strong point of view and who want to build great products that affect hundreds of millions of users. David is clearly one of those — a founder with deep character and a desire to build a meaningful, enduring set of products and a company that users love.

What we didn’t know when we started, but learned as we went is that in addition to the ubiquity of Tumblr today, the engagement of users and posters and rebloggers is absolutely off the charts. Good content gets surfaced and spread incredibly rapidly — more quickly than any other network I’ve ever encountered. Lots of reasons for this incredible engagement — the team at Tumblr has done a wonderful job of figuring out some fundamental and novel avenues for self-expression. I’ve found so many interesting posts and perspectives on Tumblr that I never would have found without it — and it’s clear that that’s been the experience for millions of other users.

At Greylock, we’re always looking for the breakout companies — because we’ve each been involved in building and growing some of the companies with the broadest reach in history (Facebook, LinkedIn, Pandora, Mozilla, and more), we have a huge respect for founders and teams that have gotten to real scale like Tumblr has.

So Greylock and I are thrilled to be involved with Tumblr now, and we’re excited to help the company take the next steps forward into becoming an even more powerful platform for self-expression and discovery.

And you can find my own Tumblr at lilly.tumblr.com.

John Lilly is a partner at Greylock Partners and former CEO of Mozilla.