Founders at Work.pdf

Evan Williams 123
search company. So we brainstormed all these ideas maybe we could do with
Google and we went down there, and it turned out that we were meeting with
their corporate development people—meaning the people who buy companies.
We started talking about ideas and within the first 5 minutes they said, “Yeah,
there’re lots of ideas, but it’s hard for someone like us to really partner with
someone so small as you; why don’t you just come here and do all that stuff?” So
we were like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” (We tried to play it cool.)
I had had one or two other conversations with possible acquirers. One was
Lycos back in 2001, which would have been terrible—though it would have
made a lot of sense for us because they had Tripod and Angelfire (two of the
biggest publishing sites that there were). But they didn’t have any money for
that area, so that didn’t go anywhere.
What Google said was, “Would you consider being acquired?” And we said,
“Well, we’ve talked to people, but Google’s never asked before.” Like everyone
else, we thought very highly of Google, and we said, “Let’s talk about it.”
Four months later, we were sitting in Google.
Mind you, it wasn’t an easy decision. I struggled hard deciding if going to
Google was the right thing to do. We weren’t desperate. We actually had a term
sheet on the table for $1 million in investment from Joi Ito’s Neoteny (who
ended up investing in Six Apart). And after 4 years of pouring my heart into
Blogger, I saw a lot of risk in giving up control.
Eventually I decided Google was right. I really thought we could do huge
things at this point, and Google had done bigger things than most, so I wanted
to get in there and learn and get those resources.
Livingston: At what point did you most want to quit?
Williams: There were a lot of points in 2001 that I seriously considered quitting.
Everybody I knew just thought I was crazy. And I was getting negative feedback
on the Web; people who used to be my friends were posting negative things
about me. We’d gotten enough press at that point . . . the Industry Standard,
which was the bible of the dot-com era, had this annual list, the Net 21, titled
something like, “The 21 people who had made lemonade out of lemons,” and I
was one of them. It was pretty cool, but the title for me was “The Idealist”
because I hadn’t sold out. Like I had a chance to have riches and I didn’t.
Someone took that and wrote a parody: “The Egoist.” Because there was a
story—not really on the surface, but very clearly underneath the community
that I was previously a part of—that was a very negative story about what happened
in the last days of Pyra, because all those people left and they weren’t
very happy (completely understandably).
For the most part, the old Pyra employees were cool with it later. But,
during 2001, these stories got out that I took over this company and kicked
everyone out and was just this terrible guy. That was the worst part.
And I was writing this service that was free and thousands of people used it,
and all I heard were the complaints when it wasn’t working. So for many reasons
it was bad. I don’t know how close I came to quitting. I don’t think I was
terribly close, even though I should have been. I was always hallucinogenically