Founders at Work.pdf

116 Founders at Work
People were using our other app, too, a little bit, but it wasn’t very mature
because it was much more complicated.
In early 2000, we started actually raising money, and O’Reilly invested in us.
They were some of the only people I knew. I guess I left an OK impression on
O’Reilly. I only worked there for seven months as an employee and then
another couple as a contractor doing a completely different job, but left a good
enough impression that I was able to go back there and say, “Hey, look at this
thing.” They were aware of Blogger, but we were still doing Pyra, too, and they
agreed to invest.
Livingston: So, you had Blogger out there but you weren’t totally focused on it.
Were you worried that competitors, since it was a simple thing, would try to
copy it?
Williams: There were a couple other products out there, but they weren’t very
substantial. No one was really paying attention to it. It’s hard to fathom now, but
blogs took a really long time to be taken seriously. But, yeah, we felt we needed
to make it a lot better and spend a lot more time on it, and we didn’t have the
resources to do that. But at the same time, we didn’t think there was a business
there, so we weren’t that concerned about it. All the time, of course, we are
debating whether or not there was something there and debating why it was
appealing to people. I thought about it a lot and I came to the conclusion why it
was appealing and the impact it had, and I started to get some insight about its
potential.
I started leaning more and more toward Blogger by late ’99. I think Meg
and Paul were pretty much pro-Blogger and I was the one who was still on the
fence. Pyra was my baby and I had all these ideas I wanted to see realized. I felt
the need to focus, but it was also like, “This is the cool thing that’s taking off.”
I couldn’t decide.
The money was actually raised around both. There wasn’t a very specific
plan. We had this thing that had buzz and then we had this thing that had all of
this potential. So it was like, “Here’s some money, go do whatever.” We ended
up not really getting the money until April or May of 2000, which was around
the crash, but (around here anyway) it wasn’t like everything was over all of a
sudden. People had faith.
We were still able to get money without a lot to go on. We raised a half of a
million dollars from O’Reilly, Advance.net (Condé Nast’s parent company),
Jerry, Meg’s parents, John Borthwick from AOL, and Jerry’s father-in-law. A
half a million dollars was a ton of money to us at the time. We ramped up to
seven people and shortly thereafter decided we were going to focus on Blogger
and developed it.
Livingston: Do you remember why you finally decided, “OK, we will do this”?
Williams: I had come to the conclusion that blogging was going to dramatically
impact the Web. After I thought about it a lot and saw what people were doing,
I decided that this made tons of sense. The conclusion I came to then was kind
of the one I stuck to, which was that this is going to impact the Web because it