(tumblr.com)

Local blogging platform Tumblr has raised a staggering $125 million in venture capital. Tumblr is now hosting more than 53 million blogs with images, video and a complex system of duplication via reblogs, all for free, so the company needs the cash. "In about six months, the word 'Tumblr' will eclipse 'blog' in Google popularity," wrote the web comic artist and statistician Randall Munroe of XKCD.

Welcome to the big leagues. And at its size, Tumblr's investors are keeping a closer eye on the goings-on at the wildly unprofitable startup. After years of leaving Tumblr's magical fairyland largely to its own devices, two recent major changes suggest the company may be feeling pressure from investors (and its burn rate).

John Maloney previously ran the forum for Upper East Side moms UrbanBaby, where he employed David Karp. Four years ago, Mr. Karp then hired Mr. Maloney to serve as president and resident adult of Tumblr. Last week—late on a Friday, naturally—Mr. Maloney announced he is stepping down from the company.

"I told the team and board this week that it’s time for me to transition away from running day-to-day operations. It’s the right time for me and a good time for Tumblr. We’re in great hands with David and the excellent leadership team we’ve built. The company is filled with amazing people," Mr. Maloney wrote obliquely on his personal Tumblr.

He will spend more time with family and "learn a bunch of new things," he wrote.

The news of Mr. Maloney's resignation comes after Mr. Karp announced that Tumblr will start selling a form of advertising this week--a revenue option the founder had hoped to avoid. The words of early Tumblr investor Fred Seibert in late 2010 ring prescient: "You're going to have to prove to somebody that you're really worth the money they gave you," he told Mr. Karp at the time.

To its credit, Tumblr has fixed the downtime issues that plagued the service for months and its controversial fashion director Rich Tong is now gone. But the popular blogging service, which has more than half the users MySpace did at its peak, has yet to prove it's worth the money investors gave it.

"One could guess from these developments, and their open-ended question marks, that Tumblr's board has finally decided to start calling shots," a source Gchatted Betabeat over the weekend.

Mr. Maloney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Stacy London of What Not to Wear has a new startup called Style For Hire. (Source: Phil Plait via Wikipedia)

SHUTTER. Luminance is not your average photography conference. Instead of focusing on the latest gear, this two-day program will bring together experts at the forefront of the technology we use to create, manipulate and share our images. Among the speakers are Behance founder Scott Belsky, Hipstamatic cofounder Lucas Allen Buick, Google's Chris Chabot, Pulitzer prize winning photographer Barbara Davidson, Tumblr CEO president John Maloney, Facebook Photos engineer Srinivas Narayanan and the School of Visual Art's David Ross. All speakers will present a 20-minute TED-style lecture.

TOE, HEEL, TOE, HEEL. What Not to Wear's Stacy London is the cofounder of a just-launched site that aims to connect personal stylists with the stylistically clueless. Style For Hire stylists will perform a "closet audit," provide personal shopping services or create new outfits out of clothes a customer already has—that's called closet shopping. Now women who aren't lucky enough to be on the show can still have their closets—and lack of fashion sense—torn apart, but without the benefit of a judgmental, national audience.

FREE LUNCH. Rickshaw Dumplings, Mexicue and Wafels & Dinges are giving away food tomorrow to all Fondu users. Download the the micro-reviewing platform for restaurants, create an account and head to West 4th and Greene Street from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. to get your grub on. Sorry to all you Android or yet-to-adopt-a-smartphone users out there—Fondu is only available on iOS.

INCUBATE. The Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, a program that provides startup with access to seed capital, mentors and coworking space, is taking applications until April 29th. Brooklyn Beta's summer camp for designer-developer teams is also taking applications through May 31. The 12-week program fosters connections between talented  people, invests $25,000 in participating companies and has advisors from top companies like Kickstarter, Airbnb, Union Square Ventures, Etsy and many others.

HACK 'ROUND THE CLOCK. ZocDoc HQ  will be the launching point for April 24th's 10gen 24-hour hackathon. The event, which begins at 568 Broadway at 6 p.m., will focus on working with MongoDB. Hack away until breakfast the next day at 9 a.m. and then hack your way to the post-awards afterparty at Von Bar.

DEVBOOTCAMP. DevBootcamp is a 10-week program that brings non-programmers up to basic programming level via an intensive curriculum. It's in San Francisco, but the organizers invite national and international students to apply. Participants include an aerospace engineer, a kid "straight out of highschool," a math teacher and finance grads, making for a veritable DevBreakfastClub. "The spring cohort finished two weeks ago, 7 out of the 16 looking for jobs have so far had job offers," DevBootcamp's Lachy Groom wrote in an email. "Almost everyone has had an exceptional amount of interviews (I think the average might be 8 each). We're expecting a very high job rate within the next few weeks."

NETWORK. Entrepreneur Week, an event that brings established entrepreneurs, industry leaders and investors together to foster opportunities and relationships, began on Monday and will continue through tomorrow. Tickets are still available for some of the week-ending talks and events. Check 'em out here.

BLOG WAVE. Tidal, a company that provides tools to bloggers and publishers to help them share and be shared on similar blogs, just announced its 250,000 post milestone and three new partnerships. Tidal is loading up the Sony Music Popmarket Backstage site with reviews, photos, users and content creators eager to promote and share. Neighborhoodies, a T-shirt and hoodie company, is moving from textiles to terabytes as Tidal breathes life into their site with style posts, restaurant write ups and travel tips all focused on NYC. Finally, Seatgeek, a third party tickets site, is getting the Tidal treatment as well, as members talk about tour dates and their favorite and most anticipated shows.

NET-WORKS. Things just got a little bit faster on Staten Island. AT&T recently announced the expansion of their 4G LTE network which means mobile internet could be up to 10 times faster on those devices.

LUNCH MONEY. Education startup 2tor has obtained a $10 million line of credit from Comerica Bank.

COLLIDE. Kaleidoscope, a new way to shop for street fashion by browsing a mix of submitted and professional photos, is now on iOS.

MOMMA. Shapeways, a platform for creating and sharing 3D designs, is holding a Mother's Day make-a-thon. Participants can turn any flat two-dimensional design into a three-dimensional plastic or metal work of art. For Mother's Day, it certainly beats a stale store-bought card. Order by April 22 for metal and April 29 for plastic to get those gifts in time for dia de los madres.

JOBS. Bitly needs a new sales research associate. Acclivity is looking for a UI/UX designer and Python back end developer. Send a snazzy email. What's Watched has an opening for a sales director with three years of experience. Email Burr. News.me would like new senior iOS  and Python engineers. Torsh needs a technical cofounder and chief architect to develop web and mobile apps.

Letter make Lloyd sad.

If there were a more visual element (perhaps a honey badger or LOLcat) attached to the "Why I Left Company X" genre, the meme would already be cresting to the top of BuzzFeed. Former TechCrunch employees may have thought they had the art of the bomb-throwing exit letter on lockdown, but over the last couple days, they've been bested by the their more corporate brethren.

Yesterday, Google's former engineering director James Whittaker accused the once-great innovation lab of devolving into an advertising machine. And today Goldman Sachs former executive director Greg Smith issued the most damning sayonara since Jerry McGuire. He started by decrying the toxic, profit-hungry culture, then revealed Goldman's pet name for clients ("muppets"), before going on to level charges of widespread "moral bankruptcy."

Those missives quickly spawned a parody ("Why I Am Leaving the Empire, by Darth Vader") and a spin-off (Mr. Smith's former intern at Goldman tried to jump into the fray.) Both "Greg Smith" and "Goldman Sachs" are already trending topics on Twitter.

The startup world—which never shies away from the world-changing rhetoric, even when it's being used to shill for American Express—couldn't have dreamed up a better recruiting strategy than Mr. Smith's 2,500-word explosion of righteous indignation.

Tumblr President John Maloney wasted no time tweeting it out to potential new hires:

Wall Street engineers - if that GS resignation letter speaks to you then just quit and join this booming magical NYC tech startup community

— John Maloney (@JohnMaloney) March 14, 2012

One new Tumblr engineer let him know that he'd already gotten the memo:

@JohnMaloney I left GS and started at Tumblr last Monday. — Bryan Irace (@irace) March 14, 2012

Buzzfeed's own Ben Smith noticed how quickly startups were glomming on to coopt the rage to their advantage:

Certain lack of sympathy for disgruntled Goldman types: "Deal with it or leave and open an Etsy store." thereformedbroker.com/2012/03/14/how… — Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) March 14, 2012

Dan Frommer wondered how quickly the VCs would pull their checkbooks:

"Why I Quit Google/Goldman" form letter generator startup raises seed round in 3, 2…

— Dan Frommer (@fromedome) March 14, 2012

To be fair, New York startups have been using the finance sector's moral decline as a recruiting tactic since well before Occupy Wall Street. This just codifies it—and gives them a URL to point to during an interview. In the end, Betabeat is more inclined to take Anthony De Rosa's view on things:

Goldman made insane profits while the economy melted down, but a resignation letter got your attention?

— Anthony De Rosa (@AntDeRosa) March 14, 2012

Of course, we'd hasten to add an asterisk about Goldman's role in ushering in that meltdown in the first place.

"I mean, Google is freakin' massive, and they've almost had no effect on the community," Hacker Union head and 10gen engineer Brandon Diamond told us by Gchat. "They're trying to get out there, but they seem to be awful insular. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook is the same way... it will probably help more than it hurts. Fb obviously isn't banking on the 'tremendous number of hackers living in NYC.' Instead, I think they believe they'll be able to woo many new hackers with the added bonus of being in a cool city. It's a boon."

As to whether the new office will lure back some of the talent Facebook poached in the form of Drop.io, Hot Potato, Daytum and Mail Rank, but survey says no. "I don't suspect? Highly doubt it, actually," says a source, regarding the Hot Potatoes.
CC FAIL. "Note to all: Don't CC the current CEO on an email that speaks to replacing the current CEO. #idiot," tweeted Zelkova Ventures' Jay Levy before Thanksgiving. Crappy way to find out you've been terminated, we suppose, but it turns out the CEO was in the clear. Apparently a rogue board member was musing a little too freely on email and indiscreetly copied the founder on an email about firing him. "The rest of the board had 110% confidence in him and asked that board member to remove himself from the board," said a source familiar with the matter. "Him being the CEO... CEO staying and is going to continue to grow the company into a force in the industry."

WHITHER THE PARTY? Last week, Betabeat interviewed MessageParty founder and Y Combinator graduate Amanda Peyton for a story about East versus West. We casually dropped by the site and noticed it was a bit of a deadzone; Ms. Peyton herself hadn't posted in three months, the Twitter account hasn't tweeted since August, and the last newsletter went out in June. Yikes, we thought, remembering MessageParty's April pivot. Has the startup bitten the dust? "We are actively considering a few options for the future of the product, though it won't stay in its current state for much longer," Ms. Peyton said in an email.

SEAN PARKER, MAN ABOUT TOWN. Lolol:

He said, 'Google my name and Lindsay Lohan. You'll see that a year ago there's an article written that says she had me kicked out of Bungalow 8.' He said, 'I don't think she had me kicked out... I want to know who [did].' "Lerner, who knows Lohan socially, agreed to look into the matter. It turns out it wasn't the Mean Girl but her ex, DJ Samantha Ronson. Satisfied, [Sean] Parker restored Lerner's profile in just six hours.

STAYING TRUE TO STEREOTYPES. Tumblr's John Maloney has purchased a new bicycle, which according to engineer Matt Hackett "is attracting quite a crowd. Bikes are flames to moths here in Tumblr HQ." The hipster startup has a room full of the the things.

ALL YOUR PARTIES ARE BELONG TO US. Send Betabeat your holiday party tips.

Tumblr President and customer service special agent John Maloney. (Source: john.io)

Tumblr has restored Microsoft researcher and pundit Danah Boyd's blog to its original location after a public spat.

Yesterday, Microsoft researcher of 43,900+ Twitter follower fame Danah Boyd discovered her Tumblr account, zephoria.tumblr.com, had been changed to zephoria1.tumblr.com to make room for Zephoria Inc., a New York-based social media marketing agency. Ms. Boyd is an infrequent Tumblr user--her last entry was in January--but she was irritated that one, Tumblr would automatically give preference to a corporation, and two, she had no idea her blog was being moved until it happened.

Ms. Boyd wrote a miffed open letter to Tumblr saying she was "shocked, outraged, and disappointed" and "pissed." Tumblr's CEO David Karp and President John Maloney scrambled to defuse the situation, at first via Twitter and through the company's Richmond-based customer service office, making contradictory statements about how and when Ms. Boyd had been notified.

Mr. Maloney and Ms. Boyd spoke by phone late last night. In a conversation that Ms. Boyd described on her blog as "lovely" and that ended after 10:30 p.m., Mr. Maloney apologized for a "human error" in customer service and said Tumblr was restoring Ms. Boyd's account to its original location. Tumblr had shifted Ms. Boyd to zephoria1.tumblr.com, keeping her followers and content, but breaking any links to her posts elsewhere on the web.

Mr. Maloney told Ms. Boyd that Tumblr has only had four issues where users were upset after being booted due to potential trademark infringement, and argued that the Gawker-publicized case of a user who was kicked off pitchfork.tumblr.com ten minutes after Pitchfork Media requested the domain was a case of squatting.

"I’m really grateful for Tumblr’s willingness to take this seriously and restore my account as well as my respect for them as a company," Ms. Boyd wrote, but said she will blog about her full thoughts on the situation and the larger issue of corporations kicking users off their names later today.

Zephoria the company has been moved to zephoriainc.tumblr.com.