It was just about a year ago

that Yahoo! purchased Tumbler.

There was a headline, just recently,

that said, no regrets after a year.

Just between us, really? (laughs)

Really, I mean, look,

they made an incredibly compelling case a year ago.

Marissa and her team spent a lot

of time with us in New York.

This was a chance for us

to have a conversation with somebody

who could bring a bit more to the table

than just writing a check,

and, look, they were real believers in this path

that we were on, and they determined to help us get there

even faster in any ways that they could help,

and a big first example of that was the ad tech

that powers all of the targeting, all the analytics,

and a whole lot more of the ad capabilities

that we're going to be shipping this year.

That's all powered by Yahoo! now.

Do you have a one- or two-sentence mission?

Look, our purpose in the world,

everything that we started this thing for

and everything that we try and do always comes back

to empowering creators to make their best work

and get it in front of an audience they deserve,

and we put the tools out there into the world,

and we don't really prescribe

how people are going to use them.

We just kind of stretch the canvas a little bit.

We try and up the GIF limit,

so people can post longer loops.

We support hi-res panoramas or photo sets,

or just last week, we added the ability to customize

how your blog looks on the small rectangle, which, you know,

traditionally there hasn't been HTML in the small screen

in the way that there was on the big desktop webs.

We ship those tools and then we're just surprised,

thousands and thousands of times over,

by what people do with them.

It's an unbelievably fulfilling mission,

and it's one that I think is really underserved

in this technology industry that we're in today.

I don't think that if you look at any

of the other big networks right now,

Google or Facebook or Twitter,

even Apple today isn't particularly concerned

with the creative community,

the people that actually make the stuff that we enjoy.

They're obsessed with social,

they're obsessed with communication,

they're obsessed with discovery,

but not actually empowering the people

that make the stuff that we all like to talk about.

I mean, we're coming out of a world that was made up

of HTML pages that could be anything,

and have now been squeezed into, you know,

white profile pages on Facebook,

and are now being squeezed into square photos

and six-second videos.

It's just really a shame to me to think

that we're telling those aspiring and talented creators,

like, make it square, make it six seconds.

That's that very engineers-rule-the-world mentality

that I think underserves that creative community.

Some people, like, looked back and said,

boy, it was like MySpace.

MySpace had these,

like, allowed these messier personal spaces there,

and people wound up avoiding them,

because they were so ugly, generally, and--

So, the big setback for MySpace was actually

that all that customization was hacked in there.

It wasn't actually supported by the platform,

which meant that, as people were, like,

hacking their MySpace pages apart,

they were breaking a lot of functionality along the way,

and that meant that MySpace wasn't

in a position to change anything,

because it would cause all that customization to break,

because it was all hacked in there.

At the same time, though,

people cherished their MySpace pages.

They were meticulous about customizing those things,

and I think we've brought even more customization

into Tumbler while solving all the issues that, you know,

worked to the detriment of previous platforms,

like GeoCities or MySpace, and I think,

rather than try to work through those issues,

the general course that the rest

of the industry took was like, let's just abolish it.

Let's give everybody a vanilla, white profile page.

I think it's giving up a lot.

May be useful when you're trying to make something

that is just about keeping up-to-date with people,

but when it really comes to expression,

and empowering creators to make stuff that we love

and make stuff that surprises us,

I think it's a real detriment to that community.