Yahoo Will Pay Tumblr Founder David Karp $110 Million To Stick Around For 4 Years

Bloomberg/Charlie RoseTumblr founder David KarpTumblr founder David Karp says that he didn't expect to sell his company to Yahoo, or sell it at all, this year. He says he was motivated to sell because Yahoo would give Tumblr a "shortcut" to "all the very hard things" Tumblr had to learn to grow.

But on Thursday Yahoo revealed another pretty good carrot to get Karp to sell: Yahoo will pay him $110 million in cash and stocks if he stays with the company for four years. So it said in a form filed to the SEC, and spotted by AllThingsD's Peter Kafka,

Specifically, he gets unvested stock options and restricted stock units valued at $29 million, Yahoo common stock valued at $41 million and $40 million cash. It averages out to $27.5 million a year.

Compare that to another fact Yahoo also revealed: Tumblr had $16.6 million in the bank when Yahoo bought it. It had raised $125 million total, including an $85 million round in 2011, according to Crunchbase. So it had burned through quite a bit of cash when Yahoo came calling.