Founders at Work.pdf

114 Founders at Work
It was a blog, but it was just, “Here’s a thing from a competitor or a potentially
useful page or just information for each other.” It was a place where we collected
everything and, as we grew, it was the center of Pyra. It was where things
happened.
So this whole time we are building our real collaboration tool, with all kinds
of structure and big ideas trying to be implemented into it, but we were really
using Stuff a lot. And then Paul wrote a little addition to Stuff so that certain
things we posted to our internal blog we could put on our external company
blog.
We were one of the first companies to have a blog on their site—not that
many people were reading. But it was neat. We were publishing news, random
things we liked, whatever.
This must have been around March of ’99, so all of this happened fairly
quickly. That’s when I got the idea for Blogger—I know because I registered
the domain then. I totally pictured what it was because it was based on what I
was already doing and then the way we were publishing our own blog to an
external site. I said, “Let’s turn that into a product.” I have always been a product
guy and am just always thinking about products and thought this would be a
cool little idea.
While it did seem fairly easy to build, it was a dilemma, because one of the
big lessons from my first company was to focus. After my first company died, I
did an inventory of the projects I had worked on in the last year. There were
something like 30 projects that I had started on and not finished. My total
weakness was not focusing on things. So I had this idea and I loved it, but very
clearly we were only three people and we had to contract to pay the bills and we
couldn’t start another product. We had this big thing we were trying to do. So it
just kind of sat in the back of my head, but it wouldn’t go away. It kept bugging
me. Of course, what made me still think about it was that we were using it for
our own purposes and we were building this collaboration tool, but we were
doing this kind of collaboration with Stuff. We actually said several times,
“Maybe Stuff should just be our product?” And we agreed, “That’s too simple,
that is too trivial.” And also we didn’t have the resources for two products. So
that went on for a long time, and it was in July, I guess, when we finally launched
Pyra, the app, and that actually got a pretty good, if limited, reception.
People started using Pyra and it was in evolving it that I came up with the
justification for why to do Blogger. That was based on the idea that we were
trying to solve a really, really big problem, which is organizing people’s information
of all types. We said, “That is too big a problem to start with, so we should
focus it.” We decided to focus it on people who were building websites, as a
place for them to collaborate. Then we thought up this architecture where
there would be little mini-apps, and Blogger would be one of those. So, with
that justification (Meg was actually on vacation for a week), Paul and I built
Blogger and launched it while she was gone. Which was a terrible thing to do,
but ultimately a good thing to do—but not a cool thing to do.
Its functionality was really dead simple at first, but it did what we needed it
to do and we already had the script. We thought it would take a couple days—it