Founders at Work.pdf

122 Founders at Work
Then eventually I started launching some for-pay features of Blogger.
Things that people would actually pay for. So 2 years into it, Blogger itself was
starting to make money—not directly but through some little ways. Like the
blogs we hosted, we had advertising, which never made any money because it
was during the time when web advertising didn’t make money. (After it made
money the first time and before it made money again.) I created a mechanism
to charge people to take their ads off and that actually made money. I said, “Pay
me $12 a year, and I’ll take the ads off your blog.” I started with this “product”
because it was probably the easiest thing I could build that I thought people
would pay for. And they did.
I did a couple other small things like that and got to a point where it was
paying the hosting bill. I had gotten rid of my office by then, and I had no place
to work at home. So I posted on my blog that I needed to rent a desk somewhere.
This company, Bigstep, offered me a free desk, which was nice.
Then I just started building more things. Working from the Bigstep office, I
designed and launched the Blogger API, which didn’t make any money, but
became important later. I actually hired a contractor programmer and had
started working with Jason Shellen on business development stuff. So things
were looking up. And then 2002 was a completely different year altogether.
We finally launched Blogger Pro, the paid-for version of Blogger. The paidfor
version of Blogger did very well for us and we brought in some other
people. With Jason’s help, we did a big deal in Brazil with this company that
wanted to license Blogger. So 2002 was a ramping-up year again. Everything
was on the uptick, and we had a completely different team. We were getting by
and the money was increasing and we were building new stuff and it was
looking good.
October 2002 was when Google came knocking. We had a small office
downtown—more of a conference room than an office. It was Adaptive Path’s
first office, which we moved into after them. And we had brought on a tech
support guy and a sys admin. Then Google called us up. I forget how that
happened . . . I think that was O’Reilly again.
At this point I think it looked like Pyra came back from the dead. Blogging
in general had exploded all this time. We got a lot more competitors, but the
phenomenon just exploded. We were a less substantial part of blogging, but
blogging was a much bigger deal. So it drove our growth and it legitimized us as
being a major player in an increasingly big space.
So O’Reilly was talking and they said, “I guess Pyra’s still alive.” We had a
meeting up at O’Reilly around this time, and Tim [O’Reilly] and Mark
[Jacobsen] were trying to figure out how they could help us. One of the suggestions
was to introduce us to folks like Amazon and Google.
Soon after, according to the story I heard, Larry or Sergey were on a call
with Tim and Tim mentioned us, and Sergey had recently been at this conference
where everyone was talking about blogs, and was interested in blogs and
he said, “Yeah, we want to talk to them.”
We’re like, “Alright. Why?” It didn’t even occur to us that they might want
to buy us because Google hadn’t bought anybody at this point. And they were a