Founders at Work.pdf

Evan Williams 117
is a native form for this medium, just like all new mediums start out imitating
what came before them and then they kind of find out what they are good for.
We even looked at Blogger and, technically, it was trivial (at least until it
came to scaling it). It wasn’t based on any new technology. But that made sense
to me because it was not that the technology was new, it was that we had figured
out this medium, at least one of the native forms of what the Web was good for.
It was about freshness and about frequency, and it was about the democratization
of media and giving power to everybody and the universal desire for personal
expression and the attraction to a real, compelling personal voice. And
hyperlinks. And all of those things were just inevitable forces that were going to
terrifically impact the Web and media in general.
It was kind of the first time that I had started really seriously thinking about
media, and then at the same time Pyra had all these big ideas that were going to
take a really long time to build, and this was much more fun. So I said, “Well,
we can figure out a business. We can charge for pro accounts and we can license
it to companies and we can just make up the obvious businesses around it (even
though they weren’t necessarily that strong).”
Livingston: Was it easy to make up businesses around it to make money off
of it?
Williams: It’s easy to make up things to write down about how we are going to
make money off of it.
Livingston: Well, how did you make money off of it?
Williams: Well, that didn’t come for quite a while later. So, we had raised
money at this point and we decided to focus on Blogger. I wrote the business
plan for Blogger after we raised the money and said, “Here is what we are going
to do.” We hired some people. We were seven people in the middle of 2000,
just focusing on all types of things. We redesigned Blogger, with the help of
Derek Powazek, who created the famous orange “B,” which was great. It just
kept growing; there were probably hundreds of new users a day.
Livingston: But you weren’t charging them?
Williams: No, we weren’t charging any money anywhere. And we had all of
these features planned. We had most of the features planned that later became
standard in the blogging world—and some that haven’t yet. We were totally
focused on building the product and community around it once we had raised
the money, because this was still, “you get enough eyeballs, you have buzz,
you’ll be fine.” And the extent of the crash didn’t dawn on us that quickly.
I don’t think it dawned on a lot of people. We just wanted to build momentum
with this $500,000 and then raise more money later in the year.
At the time it was pretty much the belief that, if you have buzz and you have
users and you have good seed investors, you can raise more money. We said,
“We’ll make money, but this is down the road so we don’t need to focus on that.
We are going to focus on building more features and getting more users.”
We just went on that path, and in the fall we knew that we were running out
of money and started trying to have some conversations with folks. I also wasn’t