Founders at Work.pdf

Evan Williams 121
Trellix licensed Blogger in order to add blogging to their feature set. They did it
in such a way—Dan drove it in such a way—that if it was a traditional license
(months of due diligence and really figuring out if we wanted this), it wouldn’t
have helped and he knew that. So, he was like, “a) there’s a legitimate business
reason to do this, but b) we are going to push this through so it is really good for
you.” It wasn’t a lot of money—it was around $40,000—but with a contract later
on that ended up helping as well. But it was what we needed at the time.
Livingston: So you were back in business?
Williams: Sort of back in business, but both of those deals didn’t get me ahead.
They bought me a few months, but between just keeping the service running
and fulfilling on those deals, I didn’t have any other time. I wasn’t really making
progress, because it was just me. First of all, I had to keep the service running,
which was a really big deal in itself—we had several thousand users and I had to
teach myself Linux system administration and Java, so I could just keep the
servers up and fix bugs here and there. Things would break, and I’d go in and
fix them on the live site and figure it out as I went. That was very time consuming.
The technology wasn’t rock solid by any means, and it kept growing and
growing and I didn’t want to shut it off. Between that and fulfilling on these
deals, which were mostly giving stuff to other people, I wasn’t building in the
real things that were going to make a business. That was a lot of just day-to-day,
by-the-skin-of-my-teeth stuff for several months. Still I had the idea to build a
paid version of Blogger, but that was going to take a lot more development and
work to launch that.
Then there is another part going on around this time that I can’t talk too
much about. Suffice it to say my former teammates didn’t all go away happy,
and I spent almost as much money on my lawyer in 2001 as I paid myself.
The other thing was that all those people left, and then I was being badmouthed
within this community of people we knew. The story apparently was
that I fired all my friends and I didn’t pay them and took over the company. It
was really ugly, and of course we had all these mutual friends and there were
parties we were at. I basically went underground and did nothing but try to
keep Blogger going.
Livingston: There was a whole social component to cofounding a startup with a
friend.
Williams: Which I think is a theme for startups in general because people live
and breathe them and become friends, date and merge their lives together. And
then, if things go bad, it’s bad in ways that are much more devastating than your
work going badly.
So that was pretty much 2001. The funny thing about Pyra is that every calendar
year was pretty distinct—’99 was the first year, we were self-funded; 2000
was the year we got money and ramped up; 2001 was the year that it was just
me and it sucked. But somehow by the end of 2001 I started rebuilding. We
cleared up the legal thing, and things were looking up.