Founders at Work.pdf

118 Founders at Work
sophisticated at all about how you do that. We felt connected at that time, but it
wasn’t necessarily to the money crowd, and we probably wouldn’t have been
able to talk the talk of VCs anyway. So the money wasn’t coming. We scrambled
around. We decided we could launch some for-pay stuff.
Other companies at the time were going into enterprises, since companies
had money. At the time it was like, “Consumers aren’t spending money. Go to
companies—they’re the ones with money.” So many companies at the time took
their consumer Internet thing and made it an enterprise Internet thing and
then died anyway. We debated that a lot. We had a good story about why this
was really useful inside companies, and we had a friend at Cisco who wanted to
use it and we got it installed inside of Cisco. It was just a pilot and we started
saying on our site, “We have enterprise Blogger.” But there was a lot of pressure
internally, a lot of debate about just doing enterprise, which I was pretty
adamant that we didn’t want to do because, whether or not it would make
money, I thought it was pointless. At this time I was very much excited about
the idea of democratizing media and that’s what mattered. It mattered more
than the company, really. When you are in that mode, it’s hard to say that the
company doesn’t matter, since everyone’s heart and soul is in it, not to mention
their livelihood.
Livingston: But you’re changing the world?
Williams: Yeah. I didn’t think we could do enterprise and still do the consumer
site well, even though we had talked about it from the beginning. I sort of realized
later on that, if we do enterprise, we are going to have to focus on enterprise
and the consumer stuff is going to suck and that doesn’t sound fun. Also,
we probably won’t be good at enterprise, because we don’t know how to sell and
service companies. So, we had lots of arguments about that. Then I said, “What
we need to do is charge money from the consumers, just to have a Blogger Pro,”
which was always in the plan, and everyone said, “We can’t make money doing
that. No one pays for stuff on the Web.”
In late 2000, we built a version with many more features but never felt that
we had it to the point where we could feel comfortable charging money for it.
So, we talked to a couple of companies about merging—private companies who
had funding. We had a couple of serious conversations and came close to doing
a deal. Actually one deal was with Moreover, which did headline aggregation
before there was much RSS out there. It was started by Nick Denton, who is
the guy who runs Gawker Media. Nick and his cofounder, David Galbraith,
were fans of Blogger and wanted to buy us. It wasn’t a particularly attractive
offer, but we were on the brink and thought, “Maybe we can get in there and
everyone would have jobs.”
Everyone in the company wanted to do the deal but me. But I had conceded,
because I wasn’t going to be the asshole who denied the chance everyone
had to still be employed. We were out of money. Fortunately Moreover’s
board wouldn’t approve the deal. It was some ridiculously lowball offer—it was
something like a million dollars worth of their stock. But they’re a private company.
So it was basically like, “We’d give everyone jobs.”