Founders at Work.pdf

Evan Williams 113
The first year was entirely self-funded. It was just doing this work mostly for
HP. HP basically funded Pyra for the first year, unbeknownst to them, because
at the time you could charge a decent amount of money for doing pretty simple
web application development. If one of us was working on that full-time, it
would pay for three of us (not that we were paying ourselves much). We started
working on things in November ’98. We technically started the company in
January. Meg started full-time in February, and we hired our first employee,
Paul Bausch, in May. Then we got an office down here in SOMA.
Livingston: So is that when you focused on developing Blogger.com?
Williams: No. We had personal websites and we were web geeks, but those
things were separate. At the time, blogs (or weblogs as everyone called them
back then) were just beginning to be talked about as a distinct thing. There are
those who argue that the first website was a weblog. It didn’t really matter,
because early ’99 is when people started saying, “OK, I have a weblog.” And the
form and community were just sort of developing. Paul and I already had personal
websites for a few years. They weren’t blogs; they were just kind of typical
homepages—experiments with web technologies. But we were reading folks
like Dave Winer.
Paul turned his site, onfocus.com, into a blog before I did. Being web app
developers, I think we both wrote our own scripts to do it—basically the same
functionality as Blogger. It seemed like not a big deal at the time, but it did
change my relationship with my website—even with the Web.
Livingston: It was easy?
Williams: It was easy, and that was a key thing for me because I wasn’t lacking
the knowledge about how to publish to the Web . . . For a long time, people
understood Blogger as “It makes it easy to have a website.” But a lot of things
before that made it easy to have a website. GeoCities made it easy to have a
website, but they didn’t make it easy to publish anything on an ongoing basis.
So, for me, the idea that I could have a thought and I could type in a form and
it would be on my website in a matter of seconds completely transformed the
experience. It was one of those things that, by automating the process, completely
morphed what it was I was doing. If I could have a thought and then put
it on my site, then obviously I am going to potentially do that much more and it
is a stream for communication of a whole different type.
So that was a little bit of an insight. To me it was, “Heck, that’s handy.” But
it was not dissimilar to what other people were doing with weblogs. They were
either doing it by hand or maybe they wrote their own little script to do it. But
it’s the little thing that clicked in my mind: “This is that little tweak that makes
it kind of maybe a big deal.” Not that the future lit up in my head and I said,
“We are doing that.” It was just sort of a hint, more in retrospect than at the
time.
We took the script I wrote to publish my site, and we made an internal site
where we could do the same thing. So, even when it was only Meg and I, we
had this little internal blog we called “Stuff,” and we just put stuff in there.