Episode Transcript
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it. I hope
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so excited to have you come on the
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show. And now, onto the
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show. How
3:58
did you feel when you were in the audience? found out that
4:00
you were being, let go, a CEO. I
4:03
was devastated. I
4:06
was also shocked. I didn't even think it was
4:08
possible. I went from
4:10
owning 100% of this company to
4:14
being kicked out. At
4:16
the height of my success, I
4:18
was kneecapped, and it felt
4:21
like nothing I did before mattered
4:25
because I failed at the biggest thing
4:27
I ever did. Welcome
4:36
to How I Built This, a show about
4:39
innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and
4:41
the stories behind the
4:43
movements they built. I'm
4:48
Guy Roz, and on the show
4:50
today, a college dropout from Nebraska
4:52
moved to California, started two
4:55
major blogging platforms, and somewhere along
4:57
the way, co-founded
4:59
a little company called Twitter.
5:05
One day far in the future, there's
5:07
a possibility you'll find yourself in a
5:09
bookstore and come across a history book
5:11
about this time, about our era. When
5:14
that happens, thumb to the index section,
5:16
and I'm pretty sure you'll find lots
5:19
of entries under the word Twitter. Now,
5:22
just to get the elephant out
5:24
of the room here, I don't
5:26
think Twitter is entirely guilty of
5:28
the things that it gets accused
5:30
of. Misinformation, polarization, cancel culture, etc.
5:33
But I do think that over the
5:35
past 10 years or so, Twitter did
5:37
help to shape the politics and culture,
5:40
at least in the United States, in
5:42
good and bad ways. None
5:45
of this was anticipated by Ev
5:47
Williams. Twitter was never supposed to
5:49
do any of this, and it's
5:51
possible that Ev and Jack and
5:53
Biz and Noah, the original founders,
5:55
were just naive. And
5:57
the product they came up with, like many
5:59
successful products, wasn't even supposed to
6:01
happen. At the time, Ed
6:03
was pursuing, believe it or not, podcasting.
6:06
In 2004, Ev co-founded
6:08
a podcasting platform called Odeo. Now,
6:10
going into podcasting at that time
6:13
was a little like getting into
6:15
electric cars in the 1990s,
6:17
just a little too far ahead of its time.
6:20
So, not surprisingly, Odeo didn't
6:22
work out. But a
6:24
side project of Odeo, one that
6:27
was being worked on by Jack Dorsey,
6:29
did. And that side project
6:31
would become Twitter. Twitter,
6:33
of course, became Ev's best-known
6:35
brand. But he also founded
6:37
Blogger and later Medium, three
6:40
hugely influential products in the
6:42
era of social media. Along
6:45
the way, Ev learned what it
6:47
meant to be a really bad people person,
6:49
something he spent much of the past 10
6:51
years working to get better at. Now,
6:54
like a few well-known tech founders, Ev
6:56
Williams is a college dropout. He barely
6:58
made it through two years before striking
7:01
out on his own. Ev grew up
7:03
on his family's corn and soybean farm
7:05
in a rural part of Nebraska. It
7:07
was a tiny place, only about
7:09
400 people. I
7:11
feel very fortunate that that's where I grew
7:14
up. I think there's tons of great
7:16
stuff that I grew from
7:18
that, from a values and character
7:20
perspective that was just fundamentally ingrained
7:22
in me and
7:25
very fitting with being
7:28
an entrepreneur. To
7:30
a lot of people, the juxtaposition of
7:32
going from farm boy to tech
7:35
founder sounds weird, but the
7:37
things that are very aligned
7:39
are these ideas of independence
7:41
and self-reliance. And all farmers
7:43
are basically entrepreneurs. And that
7:46
ethos of figuring things out yourself,
7:48
actually having to be fairly innovative,
7:51
that was what I saw my
7:53
dad doing from birth. So
7:56
the idea of starting a company was
7:58
very natural to me because It was
8:00
just like, well, why would you go like
8:02
align with some institution? That seemed like a much
8:05
stranger idea. So in many ways, I adopted
8:10
those values and didn't
8:12
question them at all.
8:15
I think the part that I didn't resonate with
8:17
as much was really the culture. And
8:20
it was very sports-centric. Literally
8:23
every boy in my high school played
8:25
football except for me. And
8:28
that was, I was somewhat athletic,
8:30
but I was fairly small. And I just didn't,
8:32
I wasn't into it.
8:34
I didn't like it. I was like, yeah, that's not what I want
8:36
to do. So, all
8:39
right. So you're, and would you
8:41
describe yourself, obviously you're smart, but would you
8:43
describe yourself as a good student? Were you
8:45
a standout student in high school? No, I
8:47
was never a good student. I
8:50
wasn't rebellious in like I was getting in trouble with
8:52
the law or doing anything super dangerous, but I really
8:54
didn't want to do
8:57
what I was told or
9:00
in kind of an in-your-guard. Like I never lined
9:02
up to institutions or anything.
9:04
And I was like, I'm not
9:06
going to try hard and get good grades. I'm not, I
9:08
mean, I'm just not
9:10
going to do that. And
9:12
so I never did any homework. I
9:15
also, for some reason, I think I didn't sleep
9:17
at night and I fell asleep in every single
9:20
class in high school. So
9:22
yeah, it was a bad student. But
9:25
I read that you were, like growing up,
9:27
you were really into computers, right? And then
9:30
eventually when you went to college, I don't
9:33
think you majored in computer science or had
9:35
any specific kind of plan, right? In fact,
9:37
I think you dropped out. And
9:41
I guess you lasted about a year and a
9:43
half or so at the University of Nebraska. Why?
9:47
I mean, why did you drop out? I
9:51
was just in such a rush. The
9:55
whole time I was like,
9:57
I gotta do something in the world. I
10:00
thought I am not gonna get a degree
10:02
and go get a job. That's just not
10:04
me. I'm going to make something, I'm gonna
10:06
build something. And
10:08
for some reason I was in a tremendous
10:10
rush to do it. I
10:13
always had some scheme or something that I
10:16
thought I was gonna go do. I
10:20
was like, I was in a really
10:22
like embarrassing, get
10:25
rich mail order ideas. Like
10:27
drop shipping or like I'm
10:29
gonna, I
10:34
would read like Entrepreneur Magazine and order stuff out
10:36
of the back. Like or
10:38
Success Magazine. There were all these like.
10:41
Like multi-level marketing things? There
10:43
was, I probably got into
10:45
some multi-level thing but yeah,
10:47
there's multi-level stuff and mail order.
10:50
Mail order was really like
10:53
the get rich path that, but
10:56
I was like, oh, I could do that because you
10:58
can do it from home. You don't,
11:00
doesn't matter who you are. Sort of like
11:02
pre-internet. So when you dropped out,
11:04
what was the first thing you started to do to
11:07
support yourself? I actually
11:10
moved to Key West Florida and
11:13
because there was this marketing guru there
11:15
who I wanted to study under. So
11:18
I wasn't necessarily, I would just, I
11:20
knew I didn't know anything. I
11:23
had a very strong sense in my abilities
11:26
and again that like kind of fearless independence.
11:28
Like I'll figure it out, but I was
11:30
aware I didn't know anything and I didn't
11:32
have any money. And
11:35
so there was this guy that I was like,
11:38
I'm gonna go work for that guy. I'm just gonna show up
11:41
and then I'll be able to do stuff. What was his
11:43
name? His name was Gary Halbert. Okay.
11:46
So I showed up
11:48
at Gary Halbert's office. And
11:51
he's like, who are you? And I told him I
11:53
was there. I was gonna, I wanted
11:55
to write. It's like I could write for you. And he's
11:57
like, Okay., You
12:01
gotta was joking. He was a understood
12:03
I've just looked him up. He was
12:05
a copywriter to sustain us copyright. Famous
12:07
Copywriter. Yep, he will copy for other
12:09
people. that's how he he he made
12:11
his name and then he started like
12:13
silliness own newsletter and seminars and stuff.
12:17
But I'm in retrospect as like
12:19
oh, that was really it's. Sketchy,
12:22
In, it's easy thing to be a part
12:24
of. But. I don't know
12:26
as farm boy from Nebraska. So yeah I
12:28
was just like I'm gonna. I
12:31
want to write for you are
12:33
with you or whatever and it
12:36
gives me an assignment to bring.
12:38
back. In the morning turns as
12:40
Memorial Day weekend south as close
12:42
for three days and so I'm
12:44
literally sleeping in my veins. Inky
12:46
was terrified, No money and the
12:48
first night I stayed up all
12:51
night to rights to do this
12:53
assignment. Finally bring back and Tuesday
12:55
and. Done. Again
12:57
he thought I was at he thought someone else did it.
12:59
He thought it was the like a. He
13:02
didn't believe I read it. And
13:05
then he is like okay
13:07
of are paid to write.
13:10
A A A Blessing and a Gary
13:12
Halbert and I mean his convalescence. A
13:14
youth said that I didn't know he
13:16
was but like apparently the most legendary
13:18
control of all time died two thousand
13:21
seven. But this was your first and
13:23
a mentor. Yes, the I'm sure. How
13:26
long did you end up staying in Key West? Southern.
13:28
Months. Ah case of
13:30
pretty relatively short time and I guess
13:33
I guess after that you go back
13:35
to Nebraska. Added to catch fire has
13:37
a couple businesses and kids. They don't
13:39
really pan out and then you you
13:42
land on this idea eventually. To.
13:44
Start a website businesses around suggests
13:46
the early nineties to to sort
13:48
of. Make web sites for
13:51
local businesses, is that right? Yeah
13:53
with my friend Paul and Craig
13:55
and we. And. We
13:57
figured I had a make web sites. So.
14:00
So that's when we really got started on the internet. 93
14:02
and 94 ended up doing
14:04
some website development for
14:08
companies in Lincoln. And
14:13
did that pan out? I mean, there's lots of, we've had
14:16
people on the show who started that way in the 90s
14:19
and really built successful
14:22
businesses that way. Totally
14:24
could have. I
14:28
think it was poor execution. Also
14:30
location wise, we
14:33
could have been selling website development
14:36
to anyone, but we were, because of where we
14:38
were, we were trying to sell it to local
14:40
businesses in Lincoln. And
14:44
they weren't really that into it. And
14:47
to their credit, they shouldn't have
14:49
been. Their customers weren't necessarily on the internet.
14:52
So we barely,
14:54
we were not paying the bills with that.
14:58
Was really broke the whole time. Was
15:00
very broke. But you're a young guy. You were
15:02
a young guy. I mean, you eventually moved to
15:05
the Bay Area in 97, I
15:08
think, and this was, you
15:10
were what, 25 at this point, maybe
15:13
a little older actually. No, it was 25. 25,
15:15
yeah. But no
15:17
degree. No degree. You
15:20
had a couple of failed ventures behind
15:22
you. So when you came
15:24
out to California, did you come
15:26
out with a job? Or did you just come
15:29
out and say, I'm gonna look for something? I
15:31
actually did get a job. So after we
15:33
really shut down that company in Lincoln.
15:36
There's the internet. The internet company, we
15:38
called Plexus, and then finally shut the
15:40
doors on that. I felt terrible.
15:43
Just felt like this big loser. And I went
15:45
back and I was living on the farm again
15:48
with my dad. And
15:51
my girlfriend, because of that company, she was
15:53
helping for a while, and then ended up
15:55
getting a job at another internet company in
15:57
Lincoln. And then they offered her
15:59
a position. or maybe she requested it in
16:01
San Francisco. And so
16:03
she moved to San Francisco and I had never even
16:05
been to California. But of course, by the time I
16:08
was like, I was
16:10
consuming every bit of information there was in
16:12
every magazine and on the web about Silicon Valley.
16:14
And I so wanted to be a part
16:16
of it, but I think
16:18
I was just scared. And it
16:20
was like, oh, and even though I was, I
16:23
was bold enough to start an internet company in Nebraska,
16:25
but I was terrified of moving to California and trying
16:27
to be a part of the real thing. Until
16:30
she moved and I actually drove
16:32
her out from
16:34
along that I 80 goes straight
16:36
from basically the farm
16:38
into the heart of San Francisco. Yep.
16:42
And then I drove
16:44
her of that Bay bridge and like, holy
16:46
shit, this is where it
16:48
all happens. Yep.
16:51
And then I went home and I was like, maybe
16:55
I could go. And
16:57
yeah, and so you do, you do eventually
16:59
you do move to the Bay Area and
17:01
get a job here. I
17:04
think you got a job at a software company called
17:06
O'Reilly Media, which is just
17:09
north of, about an hour north of San Francisco in the
17:11
town of Sebastopol, which I love, I know it very well.
17:14
And I think that you were hired to
17:16
do marketing, right? Like to write ad copy
17:18
and that kind of thing. So was
17:21
that good? Or was that interesting? Yeah.
17:25
So I found myself in this company, I
17:27
remember distinctly being in a meeting, this is
17:29
conference room with maybe like a dozen people
17:31
in it and thinking,
17:35
oh, so this is what a meeting is
17:37
like. Having spent
17:39
a couple of years trying to have meetings and
17:41
after studying at my own company and thinking, maybe
17:44
you should work at a company before you start
17:46
a company. Yeah. Which is
17:48
a tip that I would recommend to most people.
17:50
To buzz people. So that's very important
17:52
advice. And here you are 25 for the first
17:54
time you're working for a company rather
17:57
than your own startups. And how did... What
18:00
did you do in that environment? I mean, you described
18:02
yourself in high school as just kind of like an
18:05
outsider a little bit and somebody who
18:07
is not really good working
18:10
within the confines and structures of other
18:13
people's rules. And
18:16
so here you are now in a company. How
18:19
did you do in that environment? Not
18:22
great, not great. Unlike high
18:24
school, I tried very hard.
18:27
I worked my butt off the
18:30
first few months. Well, I was only there a few
18:32
months. I worked really hard. I
18:34
did good work, but I was not a good
18:37
employee. I was
18:39
rebellious and I would
18:41
have lots of opinions about what
18:43
the company strategy should be because
18:46
I'd read a bunch of business books and
18:48
I would write Tim emails or memos about
18:51
how we shouldn't be doing this or that.
18:53
There was some product that I didn't think was very
18:56
good that I was assigned to write copy for and
18:58
I sent an email to the
19:00
whole team saying why it wasn't good and
19:02
we shouldn't release the product. Everybody
19:06
love a 25 year old who does that.
19:08
Oh my God. The new employee. Oh my gosh, cringe. And
19:11
by the way, if you're listening to your 25
19:13
and you do that, do that. It's okay, there's
19:15
nothing wrong with it. I'm just saying that you
19:17
will piss everybody off, but that still doesn't, still
19:19
you should do it. All right, so you're like,
19:23
you're trying and while you were
19:25
there, I guess, something
19:27
else you started to do it on the
19:29
side for fun was
19:32
wasn't it called blogging, but
19:34
you were starting to like put your, I
19:37
guess you started your own website and you started to
19:39
just write your own thoughts
19:41
on it. Well, tell me what this website
19:43
was. It didn't quite overlap. I did have
19:45
my own website from even before
19:48
I moved to California and yeah,
19:51
I had written some essays. I had some
19:53
stuff on evhead.com. We called them personal
19:55
homepages at the time. There's
20:00
a couple essays I wrote
20:02
that were, the
20:04
only one I remember is why Amazon shouldn't
20:07
expand beyond books, obviously very
20:09
wise. Pressure,
20:11
pressure, whatever. I
20:14
don't remember, I think a lot of it, for a
20:16
short while I wrote just like
20:18
kind of newsy technology updates.
20:21
At this website, evhead.com. evhead.com.
20:24
And you would just post things, this is
20:26
before people use the word blogging, I think.
20:29
Yeah, there wasn't a ton of writing and there
20:31
certainly were probably even fewer readers,
20:34
but it wasn't quite a blog yet.
20:37
The big blogging innovations came
20:39
later where there's actually like a
20:43
chronological scroll of posts. And
20:45
so this was all hand rolled and
20:48
it was a little bit later and
20:51
it was actually after I started my next company that I
20:53
really turned it into a blog. Right,
20:56
I got it, okay. So by that
20:58
time I knew how to code, I
21:01
wrote software to do it. A lot of people were doing web blogs
21:04
by hand, like editing HTML and then
21:06
uploading. And I just wrote software
21:08
and I made it so I could go to my
21:10
own website, I could hit N and
21:13
a little form would pop
21:15
up and I
21:17
could type something and hit a button and
21:20
boom, it was at the top of my webpage. And
21:22
that was
21:25
just, I can still picture
21:27
that moment because that was
21:29
new and different. Like having
21:31
the thought and then putting
21:33
that on the worldwide web available
21:35
for the entire world. Of course,
21:37
no one's looking at it, but
21:39
just going from thought to something
21:41
published publicly in a matter of
21:43
moments felt
21:46
like an entirely new thing. So
21:48
meantime, okay, so that's happening, that's one
21:50
thing kind of happening, but
21:53
meantime, you would left O'Reilly and
21:56
you had some
21:58
programming experience. You
22:00
weren't, I think, by your own, even your own account.
22:02
You were a great programmer, but you were probably getting
22:04
better at it. And
22:07
you met this woman named Meg Horahan. This is
22:10
in the late 90s, and I guess she was
22:12
a developer and designer
22:14
living in San Francisco. You
22:17
meet her, and I guess
22:19
by chance, and the two
22:21
of you decide to start a business together. Tell
22:23
me about that. What happened?
22:27
So when I left O'Reilly, actually,
22:30
I'd gotten paid
22:32
enough. By the way, when I got to O'Reilly,
22:34
I was in debt to
22:36
the IRS because I didn't pay payroll taxes
22:38
at my first company. But
22:41
I made enough money to pay off the
22:43
$10,000 or whatever it is, which seemed insurmountable
22:45
before that. And then, and
22:47
I had learned enough more programming that
22:49
they actually hired me as a
22:51
contractor at O'Reilly after I quit
22:54
as an employee in marketing. And
22:57
so I rolled that into some other
22:59
contract programming jobs. I ended up working
23:01
through agencies. That's when
23:03
I met Meg. I had already decided to start a
23:06
new company. I knew what it was, and
23:08
we started what we call Pyra
23:10
Labs. We
23:13
called it Project Management or Productivity
23:15
App that was web-based collaboration
23:18
project management,
23:20
that space. How did you
23:22
finance that? I mean, this is the end of
23:25
1998, I think, and this is the height
23:27
of the dot-com boom. Was there,
23:30
I mean, as a 20,
23:32
I don't know, now a 28, 26-year-old, was it easy for
23:34
you to
23:36
raise money? No, it was. And
23:38
it was frustrating because everything you read is like,
23:40
oh, it's so easy to raise money just rolling
23:42
down the Sandhill Road. And I
23:45
didn't know anyone. Like especially
23:47
time is very, very much
23:49
a connection game. So
23:51
I was like, I don't know. Like people say, money is
23:53
easy. Where do I go? Whose door do
23:55
I knock on? But it
23:58
was, that's why I was doing that. the contract
24:00
programming. So that's how we paid
24:02
for it. Entirely bootstrapped and
24:06
so was able to then Meg and then Paul who
24:08
joined later were able to do some of the programs.
24:10
Paul, this is your high school friend. My high school
24:12
friend, yeah. He moved out. Yeah. So
24:16
and did you ever find any
24:18
customers to sell this software to?
24:21
No. And we never charge for
24:23
it. Yeah, there was just a
24:25
handful of users. It was very
24:27
beta. And so from
24:29
what I understand, fairly early
24:31
on in the company, you made a pivot.
24:33
You moved away from project collaboration,
24:36
project management software to
24:39
this other thing, which was this side thing
24:41
that you've been working on, which was basically
24:43
web logging. Yeah. So Paul and
24:46
Meg and I were all into,
24:48
we all had our own web logs.
24:50
I had that moment I told you about
24:52
where I turned my own, I just wrote
24:54
code to easily post my site.
24:57
And that gave me the idea. I was like, this could be a
24:59
product, but it's too simple. That's
25:01
what actually told myself. And we talked about it
25:03
as a team. It's like, it's too simple. It's
25:06
not interesting. Anybody could do that. Our
25:09
collaboration thing was not simple at all.
25:11
It's very, very complex. And
25:13
I don't, I didn't appreciate at the time
25:15
the power of simplicity, but
25:19
eventually we didn't pivot at first.
25:21
We just created another product as
25:24
a three person company that was bootstrapped and also
25:26
doing outside stuff. And the
25:28
product was, what was the product called? It's called Blogger.
25:31
Blogger. Yeah. Yeah. So
25:33
you go to blogger.com, create an account,
25:36
put in where your website was, and then easily
25:39
post. I'm
25:42
actually that the word blog or
25:44
blogger was, was
25:46
not yet popularized at that point.
25:48
No, not at all. Especially blog.
25:51
Even web blogs were, were quite
25:53
niche. And I remember
25:55
for a few years, the hardest thing
25:58
about blogger was the explaining what it
26:00
was. Okay, this, I guess
26:02
on the strength of this, you did
26:05
manage to raise some money
26:07
for it, about half a million,
26:09
half a million dollars. We did, we raised half
26:11
a million dollars in I think April of 2000,
26:15
which was technically right after the stock market
26:17
crash from the dot com. It was the
26:19
beginning of the crash, but
26:22
we were still able to get the money. I think
26:24
the crash took a while to reverberate. So
26:27
you raised half a million dollars. The
26:29
crash happens. And that's
26:32
probably not gonna be enough money to
26:34
keep this company going for that long.
26:36
So did you go out and
26:39
try and raise more money? I mean, in that
26:41
environment? Yeah, although half a
26:43
million dollars was more money than I'd ever seen
26:45
in my life. So it wasn't clear. I was
26:47
like, we can do anything on a half a
26:49
million dollars. I mean, that was gonna last us
26:51
forever. Of
26:54
course, we stopped doing the contract programming. We
26:56
hired a few people. I think we got
26:58
up to six or seven people. And then
27:00
you're right, in like six
27:02
months, we're running out of money. Because
27:05
you had no revenue. You weren't selling this.
27:07
You were just giving it away for free. What
27:10
was the business plan? How are you gonna make money?
27:12
This is why it took us a while to drop
27:14
the collaboration tool, because we thought we could charge money
27:16
for that. We didn't think we
27:19
could charge money for a blogger necessarily. I'm
27:22
not sure what the plan was. I think the
27:24
plan was to raise more money. And then it
27:26
was like, oh yeah, I figured
27:28
out this maybe. And then it was in the fall of 2000
27:31
when things started getting really bleak. And
27:35
then we started getting nervous. And I
27:37
think a ton of companies did, ton
27:39
of consumer internet companies did at that
27:41
time was pivot to enterprise. We'll
27:43
take our product built for consumers and we'll go sell
27:45
it to businesses. And then there
27:48
was a moment where Meg and
27:50
I really had to come to Jesus. Because
27:54
it was bothering me. I didn't like that
27:56
path. And I think this in retrospect was
27:58
a very important moment because. I
28:01
was just like, I don't want to build
28:03
that. That's not why,
28:06
by that time I had gotten very
28:09
excited about this
28:11
idea that anyone in the world can
28:13
share their ideas and knowledge to
28:16
the internet was a very powerful
28:18
idea. And it's what really got me most excited
28:20
about the internet in the first place. And
28:23
so I loved what we
28:25
were doing. And I loved the idea of bringing
28:27
that to millions of more people. And
28:30
so like company blogging,
28:32
I was like, fine, maybe we
28:34
can make money, but I'd kind
28:36
of rather go out of business. That's
28:38
not interesting. Let's
28:41
not do that. I
28:43
guess you did basically get close to
28:45
going out of business, right? Because at
28:48
a certain point, Pira, you
28:50
stopped being able to pay employees. That
28:53
was a very stressful time. Basically, we
28:57
didn't pivot to enterprise. We didn't get
28:59
any customers. We still didn't have any revenue. And
29:02
then eventually it just got to point. I was like,
29:04
look guys, we're not going to be able to, I
29:08
think there was even a payroll we
29:10
missed. And then I sat
29:13
everybody down, said, we don't have
29:16
any money to pay you past this next pay
29:18
period. So you're welcome
29:20
to come back. I think this is on Friday, it was
29:22
your welcome to come back. I'm going to keep working. If
29:25
you come back and work, we'll pay
29:28
you when we make money, but we're
29:30
out of money. And
29:32
then the next Monday I came back and
29:35
I was the only one there. When
29:38
we come back in just a moment, how
29:40
Ev brings blogger back to life and
29:43
then heads into a whole new
29:45
venture, which does not go anywhere
29:47
until it turns into Twitter. Stay
29:51
with us. I'm Guy Raj, and you're listening to how I
29:53
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Again, that's
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netsuite.com/built. Hey,
33:35
welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raj.
33:38
So it's around 2001 and Ed Williams is
33:41
determined to get blogger up and running, even
33:43
if he has to do it alone.
33:47
Yeah, I couldn't
33:50
imagine stopping.
33:53
Once everybody left, my costs went
33:55
from 50,000 a month to
33:57
5,000 a month. Still, to
34:00
pay for the servers and
34:02
I just wanted to keep building it. So
34:04
I kept building
34:06
it. And just
34:08
by yourself working on this site, updating
34:10
it, trying to improve it. Yeah. It
34:14
was both really sad
34:16
and very freeing. And
34:19
it was sad because, I mean, you
34:21
reached that point in the company. There
34:23
has been a lot of stress and
34:25
a lot of angst. And, um,
34:27
I think that's just natural. And my company
34:29
was also my social life. And so there
34:32
was this overlap with my
34:34
roommate didn't work at the company, but
34:36
David, someone who did and brother worked
34:38
at the company. And so. And
34:41
everyone was mad at me at the end. And
34:46
I felt really bad because I felt like I failed. They were
34:48
mad at you. They were mad at you when it failed. They
34:50
were mad at me when it failed. Yeah. And
34:53
we had been fighting and all my
34:56
friends went away. It wasn't just my employees went away. My
34:58
friends went away. I felt
35:00
really guilty. I
35:03
didn't wasn't talking to anybody, but
35:06
I was able to show up at work every day
35:09
and not explain anything to anybody, not
35:12
have to argue. I was just like, I am
35:14
going to build whatever the heck I want. And
35:17
that felt great. And that feeling
35:19
of creation was really
35:21
what always drove me. And
35:24
so that was that was very
35:26
liberating and very fun. Did
35:29
you this
35:32
is, you know, this is a
35:34
little bit complicated, but I think that at the
35:36
time, some of the people
35:38
who had left, Pira felt like burned.
35:40
Right. Your view was, well, I stayed.
35:42
I kept running this thing. So
35:45
like, what do you expect? But some of
35:47
the people said, Ev doesn't know how to
35:49
manage teams. And by the way, I say
35:51
this is somebody who still struggles to manage
35:53
people. It's really hard. But you
35:56
were criticized. Was that
35:58
a fair criticism that you just were not good? I
36:01
don't know, at managing teams? I
36:04
would say worse than that. I don't think
36:06
I was good at relationships, which
36:08
even more fundamentally. I mean, management is
36:10
a particular skill, but
36:13
I wasn't good at relationships, i.e.
36:16
how to deal with conflict, the most
36:18
important thing. And I avoided
36:21
conflict, especially in those days, and
36:25
I, at the time, really considered
36:27
the people part of company
36:29
building a necessary evil. And
36:32
so I didn't invest in relationships, I
36:34
didn't know how, I never had any
36:37
model for that, I never, because
36:39
I never worked at companies, I never saw,
36:41
so yeah, I was terrible, terrible, in
36:43
those days, at dealing
36:46
with people, for sure. I
36:48
mean, Blogger eventually started to gain
36:50
traction. What started to happen? I
36:53
mean, you know, within
36:55
a year, I mean, this is 2001, and
36:57
of course, we know
36:59
what happens in 2001, September 11th, I
37:03
wonder if that had something to do with
37:05
more people using it, more people
37:07
going to blogs, what happened? Yeah,
37:10
so blogging was kind of growing
37:12
the whole time, despite the.com boom,
37:14
and bust, and that
37:16
was part of the reason that I didn't want to give up,
37:19
like it was, the
37:21
numbers were good. And then, yeah, 9-11 was
37:23
actually a big moment for blogs, and
37:28
it's when, the way I would describe
37:30
it, it's when journalists started taking them
37:32
seriously. Actually, 9-11,
37:35
the day 9-11 happened, I
37:38
actually spent the day aggregating, because
37:41
there wasn't really real time search, and of course,
37:43
there's no Twitter or anything, but people were writing
37:45
about their experiences, including a lot
37:47
of people in New York, and
37:50
it was hard to find out, hard
37:53
to find this on the ground information, so I
37:55
actually spent the day calling
37:57
these posts, as they're coming in from
37:59
database, put up special pages
38:01
about that. And some
38:04
really big blogs emerged after that time that
38:06
were really covering the news. And then of
38:09
course, newspapers and magazines started
38:11
creating their own blogs around, probably
38:14
after that time. And
38:16
then, yeah, we continued to see
38:18
growth for sure. So
38:21
by 2002, you were able to
38:23
actually start charging for
38:25
Blogger and it started to bring in
38:27
some revenue. Like you guys were getting
38:29
people paying money to use it. Yeah,
38:33
it's somewhere along the line. We offered to host
38:35
blogs, but we had ads on them. And the
38:37
ads never made any
38:39
money to speak of. There's like a very
38:41
tiny trickle of money, but then the first
38:43
thing I started charging for was you could
38:46
remove the ads from your blog. That
38:48
was the first thing. And that made a surprising amount of
38:51
money for me at the time. Maybe I could pay my
38:53
rent. And then I launched
38:55
what I call Blogger Pro. And
38:58
yeah, people paid for it. Of
39:00
course, many people who know this story know where
39:02
this is going because it attracted Google's attention and
39:05
they made an acquisition offer to you. And
39:07
in February of 2003, they bought Blogger
39:09
from you. And
39:14
here you are, you're 31,
39:16
and you come into some money. Yeah,
39:20
that was pretty amazing. All
39:23
right, so you go to work for Google.
39:26
You become a Google employee because they acquired
39:28
Blogger, which was a really
39:30
big deal at the time. Was
39:33
it clear to you soon after you arrived to
39:35
Google that you were not fit to
39:38
work in a big organization? Yeah, I felt like
39:40
a stranger in a strange land. And
39:43
I was employee number 800 at Google, so
39:45
it's laughable how small it was. Same
39:48
size as the high school I went to.
39:52
And it felt similar. Well, it
39:54
felt like a college. But yeah,
39:56
I didn't know how to operate. And they
39:58
didn't know what to do with me. either because
40:01
they had not done any acquisitions. We
40:03
were literally their first acquisition
40:05
that involved people. They had bought some
40:08
IP, but we're the first group of
40:10
employees to come in who were Googlers
40:13
but not. And so we
40:15
were just kind of plopped in there and
40:20
trying to figure out how to survive. And to
40:22
their credit, a lot of tons
40:24
and tons of big companies bought these tiny internet
40:26
things at the time and then they
40:28
would just die. It killed them. Blogger,
40:31
I'm happy to say, 20 years later, is
40:33
still running. And anything written
40:35
on Blogger 20 years ago, unless
40:39
the author took it down or it was
40:41
a violation, is still up on the internet
40:43
for free and Google has
40:46
paid for that and probably
40:49
lost money that entire time. Yeah.
40:51
So that's amazing and super lucky to have
40:54
felt that. But I didn't know how to
40:56
operate within Google. And so,
40:58
yeah, after Google
41:00
went public, I left. All
41:03
right, so 2004, you leave Google and
41:08
you start to noodle
41:10
on a new idea because
41:12
you made some money from Blogger and
41:16
the new idea would become, you
41:19
started a podcast platform in 2004 called
41:21
Odeo, which
41:24
must have been, I mean, this is before Apple
41:26
Podcasts. This is like out of the one of
41:28
the first podcast. What
41:31
even was, did you call it podcasting?
41:33
Did you say, hey, let's make an
41:36
audio platform? Tell me about this idea.
41:38
Yeah, it's funny how this came about.
41:41
I had this neighbor named
41:43
Noah Glass who was
41:46
a fun, boisterous entrepreneurial
41:48
guy who invented a
41:51
way to call a telephone number
41:54
and leave a voicemail that would end up
41:56
on the web. And
41:58
then, Biz Stone,
42:01
later co-founder of Twitter, he
42:03
worked with me, a blogger. And
42:06
we were driving home from
42:08
Google one day and
42:10
just kind of brainstorming about it. It
42:13
was one of those moments of independent
42:15
invention, kind of to help Noah, because we're like,
42:17
no one's, you know, it's cool you can record
42:19
these, but no one's going to listen to these
42:21
things on their desktop computer. What if you get
42:23
them on their iPad? And we were thinking about
42:25
what the technical solution is to that. And
42:28
then we started looking into it, it
42:30
was like around the same time, people
42:33
like Adam Curry and Dave Weiner
42:35
had started talking about podcasting. Adam
42:37
Curry, the former MTV VGA, a
42:39
lot of people don't know, is truly
42:41
the pioneer of podcasts. Yeah, Adam
42:44
Curry was doing like a daily show, I
42:46
think around that. When nobody was listening to,
42:48
I mean, who knew even knew how to
42:50
connect your iPod to the computer to download
42:52
this stuff. Exactly. And so we find out
42:54
these guys are talking about it, but
42:57
there's no software to do it. And so
42:59
then the idea was obvious, like
43:01
make it easy to do this, make it
43:03
easy to listen, make it easy commercialize this
43:05
idea. And it's another
43:07
democratizing media, anyone can have a
43:10
radio show that seemed obvious. And
43:13
so I was really encouraging Noah to do
43:15
that, to take audio blogger and create a
43:17
podcasting company. I didn't want to
43:19
create a podcasting company, but I thought Noah should.
43:23
And I didn't have a job then. And
43:25
it was, I was determined to take some
43:27
time off, but Noah kept arriving at my
43:29
door. So I
43:31
fell into it. So that was it. Yeah.
43:34
And so we built a audio,
43:36
I know was, I was determined to take some time
43:39
off, but Noah kept arriving at my door. So
43:42
I fell into it. So that was it. Yeah.
43:45
And so we built a audio.com was
43:47
a directory of podcasts. We were basically collecting
43:50
all the feeds. We were making them easy
43:52
to find. You could listen to individual episodes
43:54
on the web, but then there's a piece
43:56
of software that you could install on your
43:58
desktop that would. whatever podcast
44:00
you subscribe to onto your iPod.
44:03
So you built this entire platform to
44:05
make it easy. There was nothing like
44:08
it. Okay, so you've spent the time
44:10
and money on building this and
44:12
then Apple comes out with their
44:15
own podcast service on
44:18
iTunes and what did that mean for
44:20
your business? It basically obsoleted everything we
44:22
had done for the last six months
44:24
that we raised money to do. We
44:27
made the mistake of actually raising too much
44:29
money pre-product,
44:33
really pre-product. We raised $5
44:35
million, which was
44:37
a terrible mistake because it allowed
44:40
us to grow the team to the point
44:42
where we just weren't nimble enough
44:44
to easily pivot. And
44:47
so we thought, we told ourselves as
44:49
every small company does when a big
44:51
company was in their space, oh, we
44:53
can compete. We'll do it better or
44:55
whatever. But they had an insurmountable advantage.
44:57
Like people, they had the
44:59
software. Yeah. So
45:03
when that happened, what
45:05
did you do? I mean, you raised $5 million to start
45:07
a podcast company and all of a sudden the big 800
45:10
pound gorilla is like, actually, we'll take it
45:12
from here. Yeah. And so
45:15
what did you do? We
45:17
tinkered for a few months. Like I said,
45:19
we were like, okay, maybe we'll create tools
45:21
for podcasters. And that was another
45:24
big lesson for me because I
45:26
listened to podcasts, but I'd never
45:28
created podcasts. And one of my fundamental
45:30
rules I've come to believe is, unless
45:34
you are really good at user
45:37
research, build products for
45:39
yourself. I had no sense
45:42
of, because I didn't create podcasts,
45:44
I had no sense of what the tools
45:46
needed were or how the software should
45:48
work. That's where I think
45:51
great products come from, is feeling that. And
45:54
so we took some stabs at
45:56
that, but our product wasn't good. All
45:59
right. this company,
46:01
Odeo, that
46:03
you started with Noglass,
46:06
there was a guy you hired. And
46:08
I guess he kind of approached you. He
46:11
had written to you and sent you his resume, and he
46:13
was a young programmer
46:18
named Jack Dorsey. And
46:20
I guess you hired him on the strength
46:22
of his resume. Tell
46:24
me about him and what he was
46:26
doing at Odeo. Yeah,
46:29
we hired Jack just as a programmer, and
46:31
we liked him. I
46:36
think around the same time, we also had
46:38
Kevin Sistram, founder of Instagram,
46:41
was working for us as an intern. So
46:44
Kevin and Jack paired
46:46
to write our, I think our
46:48
installable, like, podcatcher, as we called
46:51
them. And I guess
46:53
Jack, on
46:56
the side, had some kind of idea that he
46:58
was talking about that was
47:00
intriguing to him, that was more
47:02
about, like, not audio blogging, but
47:05
microblogging? Uh, sort
47:07
of. That evolved... I'm not sure how long
47:10
Jack had been thinking about this, but basically we
47:12
came to a point where I
47:14
didn't have faith in the original plan of Odeo.
47:17
I actually went to the board, I think
47:19
we had three of the five million dollars
47:21
left, and said, I
47:24
can't sell you on the future of this company.
47:26
Maybe we should just give the money back and
47:29
go away. And
47:31
the board was
47:34
like, well, we didn't invest in podcasting,
47:36
we invested in you. So you come
47:38
up with something. You have other ideas? And
47:41
I always prided myself on having lots of ideas.
47:44
But we were still, I think, fairly attached
47:46
to audio. And so there's
47:48
a lot of... Basically
47:51
we had a two week, what we call
47:53
a hackathon, where we divided into teams and
47:55
just let people come up with ideas to
47:57
find the new course of the company. And that's... when
48:03
Jack presented what
48:05
he had been thinking about, I guess,
48:07
this idea for a while of like
48:09
a status update service. And
48:13
the first version that I heard, it
48:15
was actually attached to audio, like, I
48:17
do remember a conversation where at first there
48:19
was a version of what became Twitter presented
48:23
that had audio. And I remember asking, what
48:25
if it didn't have the audio piece? And
48:28
I don't remember the first form and I don't want to
48:31
take credit from anybody. Jack
48:34
had an idea, which I didn't probably even see the
48:36
very first version of. And he
48:38
started working with biz. And so they
48:40
were a team is this biz also
48:42
had worked with you on blogger. Right.
48:45
Biz came over to audio fairly early
48:47
from Google. And so Jack
48:49
and biz were working on saying there was maybe three
48:51
or four teams. And
48:53
then Noah, the
48:56
original founder of audio. So
48:59
the thing that we saw in one
49:01
stage of the hackathon
49:03
that was intriguing was the ability to
49:06
send a message with your phone, and
49:08
it would arrive on other people's phones. So
49:11
instead of just why would you just send them a direct
49:13
text message? Because I guess it costs money. Well, you could
49:15
send it to multiple people at once. That
49:17
was that was harder to do at the time. It's
49:19
harder to do there were a couple of services that
49:21
let you do that create groups. I
49:24
know there was a lot of conversation around the time, we
49:26
all used AOL instant instant
49:28
messenger on our desktops. And
49:31
there's this status line,
49:35
which is just like, you know, not a message,
49:37
but it's like what you're doing and you could
49:39
update it. Facebook had the same feature, like update
49:42
your status, like say like, okay, going to the
49:44
park might be your status. And you can see
49:46
your list of friends, you could see them up
49:48
in the order updated of their status. And
49:51
that was the whole thing. And
49:53
we knew everyone kind of had
49:55
a sense that mobile computing was the future. But building
49:57
things for phones was a pain in the butt. And
50:01
so we thought, well, SMS is ubiquitous. You
50:03
don't have to install any software on the
50:05
phone. That would be
50:07
pretty amazing if we could leverage that. So
50:10
at a certain point, this seems
50:12
like – I mean, you
50:15
guys had to make a decision like, well, let's pursue
50:17
this thing. So even
50:19
when it debuted, because I think it was like
50:21
March of 2006 when it was
50:23
like – it went live, but it was still tiny. It
50:27
was just a part of the podcasting business still.
50:29
It wasn't – okay. And you
50:31
guys had already called it Twitter by this point.
50:34
Twitter, in my opinion, one of the
50:36
best names – may
50:39
it rest in peace – for this,
50:41
for a tech product. I think
50:43
Noah came up with that on a list of
50:45
names. Noah Glass, he came up with that. Yeah.
50:47
I remember seeing an email where he
50:49
had been brainstorming names, and it was on a list.
50:52
I'm like, ooh, Twitter. He always
50:54
explained it. It was like, what's that feeling when you
50:56
feel your pocket buzz? And it's like a twitch. And
50:58
he looked up Twitch in the dictionary, and next to
51:00
that was Twitter, which is a dictionary word.
51:03
Another good name. Twitch was also good. It could
51:05
have been Twitch. Yeah. So
51:08
yeah, we called it Twitter, but Odeo still existed. So
51:11
when – the end of the
51:13
hackathon, the two weeks officially, we declared
51:15
– it probably
51:17
wasn't named Twitter yet, but we
51:20
had an internal joke name called Friendstalker.
51:23
And it was sort of like, yeah, you're
51:25
stalking your friends. So you're seeing what they're
51:27
up to all the time. Right.
51:29
Okay. But we still had Odeo.
51:31
And Biz said this very wise thing, I
51:33
think, at the time, which was, even
51:36
though we were only a dozen people, it's like Twitter was such
51:38
a nascent idea. It's like
51:40
if we put everyone on this idea – it's like a –
51:43
this idea is like a small ember that if
51:45
it gets too much oxygen, it's just going to
51:47
go out. And so we
51:49
need to keep the team on Twitter
51:51
small while we develop it. So
51:54
most of the team went back to Odeo, and
51:57
Twitter was another side project. Yeah. And
52:01
people still think Twitter is a dumb
52:03
idea. Imagine the very first, very
52:06
first days, like what, that makes no
52:09
sense. And okay, so
52:11
what are the numbers, even after we launched
52:13
publicly, it was like, oh, there's like 500
52:15
people using it, and we know 200
52:17
of them. And so
52:20
it didn't look like a thing. It felt like a
52:22
thing, which has, I've
52:25
come to realize is the most important
52:27
thing, and it's feeling
52:29
as much more important than metrics
52:31
early on. Why did it
52:34
feel like a thing to you? It
52:36
felt like a thing because once we had a
52:38
handful of people on it, most
52:40
of whom we knew, and we're using it
52:42
through our phones, to get
52:45
and send these real time updates. We
52:47
used the term real time a lot
52:49
then because the internet wasn't real time.
52:53
Email was asynchronous, the
52:55
web got updated kind of
52:58
slowly. And so it
53:00
was the first thing we felt where you could send a
53:02
message and buzz a bunch of
53:04
people's pockets, it would
53:06
update, and that was new. And
53:09
it was such a unique and
53:11
immediate sensation. When
53:15
we come back in just a moment, however
53:17
makes the right moves to grow Twitter, but
53:20
then fails to realize that he's
53:22
no longer the right guy to
53:25
run it. Stay with us,
53:27
I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to How I Built
53:29
This. On
53:37
our podcast, we love to highlight businesses that
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person. Like a good neighbor, State
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Farm is there. Hey, welcome back to
55:25
How I Built This. I'm Guy Roz. So it's
55:28
around 2006 and Ev Williams and
55:30
his partners are juggling a few things. Odeo,
55:33
a struggling podcasting service, and
55:35
Twitter, a site that only
55:37
a few hundred people are
55:39
using. And Ev realizes that
55:42
for Twitter to get off the ground, he
55:44
has to change how the company
55:46
is run. There's a board meeting where it
55:49
was assumed we were just going to decide to
55:51
give the remaining money back to investors. Twitter wasn't
55:53
growing. We didn't believe in Odeo. I made
55:56
an offer and I said, well, I'll
55:59
actually buy it.
56:02
And that was obvious was the name
56:04
of the company that I bought Odio
56:07
with. Right. And just to clarify,
56:09
you buy it and obvious is the
56:12
company you form that includes both
56:15
Odio and Twitter. And yeah,
56:17
I mean, very smart decision on your
56:19
part. I mean, I think probably
56:21
some investors wish that they could have been a
56:23
part of it, you know, maybe some were eventually
56:26
but did you know
56:28
in your mind, did you have an
56:31
inkling that Twitter I mean, you
56:33
say there was an energy that there
56:35
was a feeling you had. Did you already
56:37
in 2006
56:40
feel like okay, this thing
56:42
I think could be the next blogger could
56:44
be bigger. I think there's
56:46
part of me that felt that I think
56:48
today, I would
56:50
value that part of me much more strongly
56:52
than I did at the time. I think
56:56
one of the things that I've
56:59
learned through my own efforts
57:01
and watching others is that that's why
57:03
I mentioned that feel being more important
57:05
than the numbers. I
57:07
didn't trust that enough at the time. It's
57:11
so easy to get
57:14
overwhelmed by data, especially in
57:16
tech. And as soon as
57:18
you have anybody using your
57:20
product, the attention turns to
57:22
numbers and testing and
57:24
a and people try to be very scientific
57:27
about it. If
57:29
you're in those conversations that no, but it really
57:31
feels like something. And as someone
57:33
who really has gone
57:35
by feel and has that intuition, you
57:39
just kind of you downplay that it's
57:41
like, ah, well, there's no evidence to back up
57:43
what I'm feeling. Yeah. And
57:46
so I can't defend it. But
57:48
yeah, there's enough. I feel enough that I'm going
57:50
to keep investing in it. So
57:53
you basically now are
57:55
the owner of this new
57:57
company. And Twitter
58:00
is this thing that you really
58:02
start to pursue. I think by the end of 2006, you had about
58:07
60,000 users. And it was initially,
58:09
right, it was like a status update. Like
58:11
the question was what are you doing, right?
58:13
That was the first thing. And then you
58:15
would just populate it with I'm
58:17
at the grocery store, whatever it is. But this is, and
58:20
it's still before the iPhone comes out. So
58:22
people are doing this on, most
58:25
people are like, I'm sitting at my desk working on
58:27
my computer. Yeah, or here's
58:29
the link. And
58:32
this whole time we're tweaking, we're changing
58:34
how the system works. And even though
58:36
the original idea that it
58:38
was going to be through our phones and via SMS,
58:41
which is why messages were
58:43
or what became known as tweets were
58:45
limited to 140 characters, I
58:48
think it was in late,
58:51
it was a few months in that we made
58:53
it easier to use on the web. And
58:56
that's when we saw our first
58:58
real bump of growth, because people were
59:00
our audience, especially was sitting at their
59:02
desktop all day. Yeah. I
59:06
guess the turning really the turning point
59:08
happens in March of 07, which is
59:10
South by Southwest, right? You take Twitter
59:13
to South by South. It becomes a
59:16
turning point for many companies, Airbnb, and
59:19
others later on. But in 2007,
59:21
you go to South by Southwest. And
59:24
what did you do to attract attention there?
59:27
We did something kind of unusual, because
59:30
we had a sense that that was
59:32
our audience. And I knew from experience
59:34
that going
59:37
in the trade show floor is not where
59:39
you wanted to be. And that everyone hung
59:42
out in the hallway, I spent
59:44
many hours hanging out in the hallway. South
59:46
by Southwest. So we contacted the
59:50
organizers there and said, Can we actually
59:52
set up a screen in the hallway?
59:56
A screen, TV screen. There's
59:59
a screen that that had these little
1:00:02
tweets floating by of people just
1:00:05
scrolling, tweets scrolling up. Yeah, they were
1:00:08
like, I think moving across the screen
1:00:10
from people who were there. And so
1:00:12
that was pouring gasoline on
1:00:14
the fire because it had the density, like
1:00:17
classic network building, you need density. And,
1:00:20
and there was also
1:00:22
the real time nature was very valuable because
1:00:24
people were walking around and didn't want to, you
1:00:27
know, pull out their their computers to know what
1:00:29
was going on. And
1:00:31
so what happened? I mean, people people
1:00:34
started to see other people basically everybody,
1:00:36
everybody there got on Twitter. And
1:00:39
you know, it's a few thousand people and again,
1:00:42
lots of journalists, lots of bloggers. And
1:00:44
so then they talked about it and
1:00:46
wrote about it. It was a moment
1:00:48
we just capturing lightning in a bottle
1:00:50
amongst that community. It was the perfect
1:00:52
thing at the perfect time with enough
1:00:54
density to reach a tipping point. Wow.
1:00:58
And and so when you left
1:01:01
South by Southwest, how big did it
1:01:03
grow? I don't know the
1:01:06
numbers. I know like
1:01:08
the shape of the charts was very,
1:01:10
very hockey stick. The service
1:01:13
definitely started falling down.
1:01:15
I mean, getting overwhelmed and we
1:01:17
were running into scaling issues immediately.
1:01:20
But it's certainly
1:01:23
still tiny. I mean, South by Southwest
1:01:25
was, it's, it's not even
1:01:27
at the time, I don't know, maybe
1:01:30
a few thousand people were using
1:01:32
it, but they were using it a lot. And
1:01:35
I have to imagine that that what happened
1:01:37
at South by Southwest starts to attract a
1:01:39
lot of attention. And so did
1:01:41
you start to get investors kind of
1:01:43
banging on your door, wanting to get
1:01:46
involved? We did, we did. We
1:01:49
got a lot of investors knocking on our door.
1:01:51
I still owned 100% of
1:01:53
it at that time through
1:01:55
obvious, but it was clear that we
1:01:57
needed to grow. We needed to money.
1:02:00
So we started taking those
1:02:03
conversations. Can I ask
1:02:05
you about the broader
1:02:07
idea of Twitter? As
1:02:10
you started to see this thing really
1:02:12
grow, and I've seen you talk about it
1:02:14
like at the time, already at
1:02:17
the time, saying things like, this
1:02:19
is going to be a way for people to
1:02:22
really build community and connect, and if there's like
1:02:24
an earthquake in San Francisco, like
1:02:27
this is a way, and some of
1:02:29
that happened, a lot of that happened,
1:02:31
like there was an idealized division of
1:02:33
what this was going to bring to
1:02:35
the world, that it was going to
1:02:37
bring the world closer together and make
1:02:40
us all happier and friendlier and kinder,
1:02:42
but it really has been a force
1:02:46
for division too. Did
1:02:50
you in any way anticipate that
1:02:52
that would happen, that Twitter would
1:02:54
actually exacerbate
1:02:56
division and tension? I
1:02:59
did not. Certainly not in those very
1:03:01
early days. You know, the team over the
1:03:03
years has gotten a lot of flack on
1:03:05
the trust and safety side, but
1:03:08
those people are some of the most earnest,
1:03:10
hardworking, integrity
1:03:12
driven folks I've ever
1:03:15
seen in the world
1:03:17
of business, and
1:03:19
we didn't realize, it's sort of like, in
1:03:23
some ways, like when we figured out processed food
1:03:25
manufacturing and we're like, oh, this
1:03:27
is an easy, cheap way to get calories,
1:03:29
not realizing all the implications of that, you
1:03:32
know, let's keep working on it. Tell
1:03:36
me a little bit
1:03:38
about, because basically
1:03:42
you were running ODO, but it
1:03:44
was clear that Twitter was the
1:03:46
product now in this bigger company,
1:03:50
and Jack was, I think he
1:03:52
had been named the CEO of
1:03:54
Twitter, and you were the chairman of
1:03:56
Twitter, and this is a little tricky, I understand,
1:04:00
talking about personalities and big personalities and
1:04:02
people who were friends and, you know,
1:04:04
and had falling outs.
1:04:06
But how did your relationship with Jack Dorsey
1:04:09
begin to change? Because I know, I mean, this
1:04:11
is no secret, it's been written about, there was
1:04:13
a falling out. Yeah,
1:04:15
so the course of events
1:04:18
was Twitter and Odeo were just
1:04:20
products inside of Obvious, which I ran.
1:04:23
And so, and I had, around
1:04:25
this time also sold Odeo. So Twitter is the only
1:04:27
thing we had, but I had lots of other ideas.
1:04:29
And so it's like, I just kind
1:04:31
of want to tinker and invent new things.
1:04:33
So that was the time when
1:04:35
we spun it out into Twitter Inc. that
1:04:38
offered Jack the
1:04:41
job of CEO. And
1:04:43
I again, like, Jack is not
1:04:45
here and others aren't here to take this
1:04:47
as an documentary show. It's a one person's
1:04:49
perspective. The story that
1:04:52
I've read is that he
1:04:54
became frustrated because you
1:04:57
were, you know, I don't know,
1:04:59
maybe you were frustrated with his leadership when
1:05:01
he was CEO, he was frustrated with your
1:05:03
meddling. That's a that's a that's an old
1:05:05
story that's happened in every company. Yeah, I
1:05:08
think, yeah, I think we were frustrated with
1:05:10
each other and goes
1:05:13
back to what I said earlier about being not
1:05:15
good at relationships. I didn't know how to deal
1:05:17
with that. And I didn't do a good
1:05:19
job of dealing with that. I
1:05:21
was senior to Jack in age and
1:05:23
experience. So I should have
1:05:25
been the one to really work on what I
1:05:28
said earlier about being not good at relationships. I
1:05:30
didn't know how to deal with that. And
1:05:32
I didn't do a good job of dealing with that.
1:05:35
I was senior to Jack in age
1:05:37
and experience. So I should
1:05:39
have been the one to really work
1:05:41
on lead working on the relationship. And
1:05:45
stress gets high when you have something stress
1:05:48
is very, very high, because we
1:05:50
had something we knew was working. And
1:05:52
it felt incredibly precarious. Twitter
1:05:55
always felt precarious. Our
1:05:57
stuff kept breaking, like we couldn't handle the growth.
1:06:01
Facebook was always looming over us and feeling,
1:06:03
felt like they could eat our lunch at
1:06:05
any time and they were trying to. And
1:06:08
it was, so the
1:06:11
stress was incredibly high. And
1:06:15
Jack went from individual contributor.
1:06:19
He had never been a manager, I believe, before he
1:06:22
became CEO of this very fast growing company. I
1:06:25
wasn't a great manager, but I had a few
1:06:27
years on him. You
1:06:30
had some experiences with failure to say the
1:06:32
least. For sure, and so
1:06:34
yeah, we didn't see eye
1:06:36
to eye. We're
1:06:40
very different actually. We
1:06:43
both desperately, desperately wanted it to succeed and
1:06:45
both thought we were correct and we didn't
1:06:47
talk about it in a healthy way. Yeah,
1:06:50
all right. So
1:06:52
eventually the frustration got to
1:06:54
a point where you asked
1:06:56
the board to relieve him
1:06:59
of his duties and he was, this
1:07:01
is well known, he was basically kind
1:07:03
of pushed out. And that, I'm
1:07:05
assuming, was that the end of your relationship? Was
1:07:07
that more or less kind of the
1:07:09
break? That was the break, oh yeah,
1:07:11
that was the break for sure. And
1:07:14
again, I would handle that
1:07:16
very differently because I hadn't been giving
1:07:18
him clear feedback and it
1:07:20
looked, he was pushed out and then I
1:07:22
became CEO, which is
1:07:25
hard to believe, but it wasn't actually my plan.
1:07:27
I still didn't necessarily want to be CEO and
1:07:30
we talked to a few other candidates, but
1:07:32
then I was like, okay, maybe I'm the best person
1:07:34
to be CEO. So it really looked like it was
1:07:36
just, oh, this thing is successful, I'm gonna push him
1:07:38
out and take over. So
1:07:42
understandably, he was
1:07:44
hurt and upset about that. Have
1:07:46
you guys ever talked
1:07:49
since then or repaired your relationship or not
1:07:51
really? Yeah, we've talked, I
1:07:53
was, you know,
1:07:56
long story in the Twitter saga, as you know, he
1:07:58
eventually came back as CEO. and
1:08:00
you were on the board. And I was on the board,
1:08:02
I had gotten pushed as CEO, and
1:08:05
I was on the board for multiple
1:08:08
years, and he was also on the board the
1:08:10
whole time. Even after he left as CEO, he
1:08:12
was still on the board. And
1:08:14
so we were on the board together for a decade.
1:08:18
And so, yeah, and we were, yeah, we were
1:08:21
fine. We're friendly, we have
1:08:23
dinner, but yeah, we're not
1:08:25
best friends. Yeah. So
1:08:28
he left, you
1:08:30
became the CEO, and
1:08:32
this would be kind of a two year stint for you.
1:08:38
You didn't know that at the time. You
1:08:41
also, I guess, were approached
1:08:43
in 2008 by Mark Zuckerberg
1:08:45
to buy you out. Yep. I
1:08:49
mean, what happened? What was
1:08:51
the story? Because from what I understand, you guys
1:08:54
said, well, you know, we think we're worth half
1:08:57
a billion dollars and Mark
1:08:59
Zuckerberg was like, okay, yeah, that
1:09:01
sounds right, but the sale never
1:09:03
happened. What happened? There's
1:09:07
a story that Biz tells about Biz and I going
1:09:09
down to Palo Alto and meeting with Mark.
1:09:12
And it was just Mark and Biz
1:09:14
and I in a room with
1:09:16
soft seating. And it was
1:09:19
very awkward and strange, but
1:09:22
wanted to hear him out. And I felt, I
1:09:25
had no interest in selling, but
1:09:27
you got to listen to these things.
1:09:29
And Facebook, of course, was private at the time, but
1:09:31
based on their valuation, they could do a stock deal
1:09:33
that may value us around a half
1:09:36
billion dollars. And that
1:09:38
was a lot of money. And we were maybe, no,
1:09:41
we were 30 people at the time. Wow.
1:09:47
So yeah, that
1:09:49
was serious. We had to take that seriously.
1:09:51
We of course didn't know what Facebook would
1:09:53
become either. Eventually that half
1:09:55
billion would be, who knows? Like,
1:09:57
I don't know if you did the math on that. But
1:10:00
I went to the board and
1:10:02
I thought about it
1:10:04
very deeply and I came up with this like, okay, why would you
1:10:06
sell a company? I think there
1:10:09
are three reasons and none of these meet
1:10:11
that criteria. Three reasons being
1:10:13
you don't wanna do it anymore. So
1:10:16
you need someone to do
1:10:18
it for you or you're in trouble.
1:10:22
So there's famous cases like YouTube
1:10:24
sold to Google, obviously amazing acquisition
1:10:26
for Google, but YouTube
1:10:29
was really a lot of trouble
1:10:31
both with copyright
1:10:33
infringement and the scaling and infrastructure
1:10:35
costs. If YouTube really needed this,
1:10:39
the shelter that Google could provide and lost money
1:10:41
for years and years and years. And
1:10:44
so I thought that was another reason that didn't seem to
1:10:46
apply to us. And third was
1:10:48
that if just from
1:10:50
a fiduciary perspective, if the offer
1:10:53
clearly was a no brainer from a
1:10:55
financial perspective, then you might be inclined to do as well.
1:10:58
And so my letter to the board was, I think these are the
1:11:01
reasons to sell. I think none of them apply. And
1:11:04
so we shouldn't sell. And so that was the end
1:11:06
of conversation. All right, I
1:11:08
wanna go back to your leadership. And just
1:11:10
to point out, being CEO, Twitter is like
1:11:13
being an Italian Prime Minister, right? Like you
1:11:15
don't last that long, okay? And
1:11:18
that just was the theme. Like it's a hard
1:11:21
horse to ride. You're just not gonna last that long. But
1:11:24
there was a wrap on you. And I say
1:11:27
this not to make you feel
1:11:29
bad or criticize you, but I'm
1:11:31
curious just from a self-reflective perspective
1:11:33
on what you think about
1:11:35
it and whether you learned from it if
1:11:38
it's in retrospect helpful. But the wrap
1:11:40
on you was, you're too slow to
1:11:42
make decisions. And also
1:11:44
you were prone to hiring
1:11:46
people you knew, which is
1:11:48
a big no-no for some people. Again,
1:11:51
not saying that's right or wrong,
1:11:53
that was the criticism that's, massive,
1:11:58
sad group. millions
1:12:00
of column inches have been written about Twitter, that's
1:12:03
come out. Do you think that's fair? I
1:12:06
think both are fair. I
1:12:08
was not a great CEO
1:12:12
by any stretch. And I think
1:12:15
I was getting better. What
1:12:18
I was very good at was product
1:12:21
and knowing, in
1:12:23
my opinion, products and strategy and knowing where
1:12:25
to take the company, what we should
1:12:27
build. But the company got to
1:12:30
a size where lots and lots
1:12:32
of other things were important for the CEO to
1:12:34
do. Certainly management,
1:12:38
finances, leadership, giving confidence to
1:12:40
the entire team. But
1:12:43
I think in a lot of cases, I was
1:12:45
slow to make decisions because I was avoiding conflict.
1:12:49
I didn't want to make decisions that other people disagree
1:12:51
with. I didn't have, if
1:12:54
I felt something intuitively, but
1:12:59
the evidence or the data or the logic,
1:13:01
everyone was arguing something else, then
1:13:03
I would just, I got frozen. Or
1:13:06
if the decision was about a person, and
1:13:11
I was lacking the confidence to really
1:13:17
upset people. And that was a
1:13:19
huge weakness for sure. And
1:13:21
so how did you overcome
1:13:24
that? Or did you ever over, we'll go
1:13:26
on to your next company. I got better.
1:13:29
Having conflict aversion is,
1:13:33
for some people, it's a character trait. And
1:13:36
what I respect, because I identify with it.
1:13:39
Yeah, it's not like embracing
1:13:41
conflict is a great character trait
1:13:44
either. But I think
1:13:46
conflict aversion comes from fear. Fear
1:13:49
of what? Fear of rejection. I
1:13:52
think, especially if you have imposter
1:13:54
syndrome and look, I'm
1:13:56
a farm boy from Nebraska who was in
1:13:58
this company. I was like. I'd never
1:14:00
had a job where I
1:14:03
rose to the ranks. Even with the
1:14:06
success that you had and
1:14:08
the psychological kind of, let's
1:14:11
say, foundation of wealth that
1:14:14
you had built, you still have that? For
1:14:16
sure, for sure. That didn't really change anything. And
1:14:18
I hadn't really done any work
1:14:20
on myself at the time. And I
1:14:22
think this is, like
1:14:24
for entrepreneurs, so,
1:14:26
so important to realize what is driving
1:14:29
you and where are your blind spots,
1:14:31
I had no idea.
1:14:33
So when I would hear, I got a little bit
1:14:35
of feedback. And by the way, somewhat
1:14:38
ironically, the board of Twitter had a lot
1:14:40
of conflict aversion because
1:14:42
they never gave me that feedback to my
1:14:45
face. I didn't know I was
1:14:47
gonna be fired at all because no
1:14:49
one ever told me I was doing a bad job. So
1:14:53
there was a whole culture of conflict aversion. And
1:14:56
my execs who were complaining about me
1:14:58
to the board also weren't
1:15:00
telling me, everyone was avoiding
1:15:02
conflict. But yeah, I
1:15:04
had a lot of, I had a ton
1:15:06
of fear. And I had both a lot
1:15:08
of confidence about what
1:15:11
I was good at and a ton of fear
1:15:13
and that I
1:15:16
didn't think I actually even could be ousted. So
1:15:18
it wasn't that, it was just really about being
1:15:20
called out for not knowing what I was doing.
1:15:23
How did you feel when you found out that
1:15:25
you were being let go
1:15:27
as CEO, were you devastated? Was
1:15:29
it a dark time? I was
1:15:31
devastated, devastated. I
1:15:33
can't like describe
1:15:36
how, I
1:15:40
was also shocked. I didn't even think it
1:15:42
was possible. And I went from
1:15:44
owning 100% of this company to
1:15:48
being kicked out. That
1:15:50
was my own fault. I had like
1:15:52
why I didn't get the legal
1:15:54
protections. There's no way I had to lose control
1:15:56
of the company. I just trusted my investors. And
1:16:00
and the board and I was like, oh, we're all on the same
1:16:02
side. And so I
1:16:05
knew, you know, I was barely keeping things together,
1:16:07
but it's also the nature of fast growing companies.
1:16:09
The company grew 10X and
1:16:12
users and employees and valuation in the
1:16:14
two years I was CEO. So I'm
1:16:17
like, guys on paper, this
1:16:19
isn't going that badly. And
1:16:21
so I had a meeting,
1:16:24
it was my coach at the time
1:16:26
hired by a VC, which is a bad
1:16:28
idea, Bill Campbell, who told
1:16:30
me, and I was just like, what? What are you
1:16:33
even, what? What?
1:16:36
Couldn't believe it. And then I was
1:16:38
very upset and very mad, went through all
1:16:40
the stages of grief. Yeah.
1:16:45
It's interesting because from one
1:16:47
perspective, people might say, well, who
1:16:50
cares? You're gonna walk out of this rich
1:16:52
guy and who cares? But
1:16:54
personally, it felt like a failure. Like
1:16:56
you had not succeeded
1:16:58
as burning this thing. Yeah,
1:17:01
it felt like the huge failure. And so
1:17:03
much of me, I
1:17:05
honestly thought that it was gonna destroy the
1:17:08
company. And so
1:17:11
I was really sad about that, but it was also terribly
1:17:14
embarrassed. And like I spent
1:17:16
years trying to prove myself
1:17:21
and like, and this at the height of
1:17:23
my success, I was knee capped
1:17:26
and every, it
1:17:28
felt like nothing I did before
1:17:30
mattered because
1:17:32
I failed at the biggest thing I
1:17:35
ever did. Okay,
1:17:38
so this chapter of your
1:17:41
life is over, but you
1:17:43
clearly, you have an energy and
1:17:45
a drive and you clearly
1:17:48
were gonna do something else, which you did,
1:17:50
it's no secret to people listening. It was
1:17:52
gonna be medium, which
1:17:55
is kind of amazing because it's like the first
1:17:57
really, the thing that you first really
1:17:59
had success. which was blogging, you
1:18:01
kind of go back to that. It's like a 360 return. Tell
1:18:05
me about, what did you want it to
1:18:07
do? The
1:18:09
seeds of Medium were really planted
1:18:12
while I was still at Twitter. And
1:18:16
the initial genesis is Biz and I,
1:18:18
Biz who came over from Twitter, he
1:18:23
and I were talking, one of the things we learned
1:18:25
at Twitter, which we really believed in, was this idea
1:18:27
of constraints. We're
1:18:29
like, what if we created a
1:18:31
writing platform that wasn't so short as Twitter,
1:18:33
but still was not too
1:18:36
short, not too long. I
1:18:38
walked up to the whiteboard and I wrote Medium. I
1:18:40
was like, I don't know what it is, but we should call it
1:18:42
that. And then
1:18:44
the idea
1:18:47
was essentially, what we
1:18:49
learned from social networks was that
1:18:51
the value was in the
1:18:53
connectivity. If
1:18:55
Twitter just did what Blogger did and
1:18:57
posted your tweet to a webpage and
1:19:00
didn't fan it out, if there wasn't this
1:19:02
follow mechanism, it wouldn't
1:19:05
be very interesting. It would essentially just be Blogger.
1:19:07
So it's the distribution system that
1:19:09
created all the value. And
1:19:11
that's why I call my companies obvious. It
1:19:13
was obvious to me that that should exist.
1:19:16
So the idea of Medium was
1:19:19
basically to... I mean,
1:19:21
how was it going to be different from what
1:19:23
Blogger was? It was the network. It
1:19:26
was giving people a place to
1:19:28
write these longer things, but connecting them
1:19:30
so they could be discovered. And
1:19:34
that's what Blogger wasn't. There was no
1:19:36
network to Blogger. You create a webpage,
1:19:38
you couldn't follow the webpage. And there's
1:19:40
no real reason to write on
1:19:43
Blogger versus anywhere else because there's no audience on
1:19:45
Blogger. So tell me
1:19:47
about how the
1:19:49
rest of your life and career unfolds.
1:19:51
And you have no idea. But
1:19:55
you're not old. I mean,
1:19:57
you're in your early 50s. You
1:20:00
know, you've achieved incredible
1:20:02
success and built amazing
1:20:04
well-known brands, blogger, Twitter,
1:20:07
medium. I mean, very few people can
1:20:09
say that. You obviously,
1:20:12
as a result of that,
1:20:14
became incredibly wealthy. You
1:20:16
can't possibly spend a fraction of the money
1:20:18
that you earned in your lifetime. How
1:20:21
do you imagine the rest of your life
1:20:24
unfolding? I mean, starting more
1:20:26
businesses, investing. How
1:20:29
do you think it's going to go? So
1:20:34
after I stepped down from Medium, which is almost,
1:20:37
it's coming up on two years, a
1:20:39
guy named Tony Stubblebein, also
1:20:41
someone who I've known for a very long time.
1:20:44
And I hired him to run that company.
1:20:46
He's doing a great job, doing a better
1:20:48
job than I was doing running Medium. Medium's
1:20:50
going great. I co-founded another
1:20:52
company recently. It's
1:20:55
a company called Mozy, which is a social app.
1:20:58
It's another social app, but it's not a social media
1:21:01
app. It's really about relationship building
1:21:03
and getting people together in real
1:21:05
life. And
1:21:08
so I'm starting that, but
1:21:11
I didn't want to run another company. I am
1:21:13
not running it. I'm really getting
1:21:15
more and more just into the creative side
1:21:18
and just like, and by creative side, I
1:21:20
mean of life being like, as
1:21:23
I recently got divorced, I have two kids trying to
1:21:25
create a great environment
1:21:27
for them. I'm working on some art
1:21:29
projects. I do
1:21:31
a little philanthropy and
1:21:33
other than that, I don't know,
1:21:35
could be music, could be events,
1:21:38
but that's what I'm focusing on right now. When
1:21:41
you look back on your career so far,
1:21:43
because so far you still have a long
1:21:46
life out of you. How
1:21:49
much of where you got to do
1:21:51
you attribute to the work you
1:21:53
put in, the grind, and how much do you think
1:21:55
happened because you were lucky, you were here at the
1:21:57
right place at the right time? A
1:21:59
whole lot. A whole lot of both, for
1:22:01
sure. And I think
1:22:04
anyone who has success, who
1:22:07
doesn't mention luck
1:22:09
is fooling themselves. And
1:22:12
it's like everyone says, you can increase your
1:22:14
chances of luck. I worked incredibly
1:22:17
hard from those
1:22:19
first days of
1:22:21
those first companies to the extent
1:22:23
where I didn't sleep. I worked too much, to
1:22:26
the point of decreasing returns, for
1:22:29
sure, but I learned everything
1:22:32
I possibly could about what I was
1:22:34
doing, and I kept trying
1:22:36
stuff. And again, I attribute
1:22:39
maybe my upbringing, maybe the way I was
1:22:41
wired, but that sense of, I have to
1:22:43
completely rely on myself, and I'm not gonna
1:22:45
give up, certainly put up.
1:22:51
That's Ev Williams, founder of Blogger
1:22:53
and Medium, and co-founder of Twitter.
1:22:57
Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show
1:22:59
this week. Please make sure to click the follow
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it's free. This episode was produced
1:23:08
by Kerry Thompson with music composed by
1:23:10
Rontine Arablui. He was edited by Neva
1:23:12
Grant with research help from Carla Estes.
1:23:15
Our audio engineers were Gilly Moon and Josh
1:23:17
Newell. Our production staff
1:23:19
also includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini,
1:23:21
Casey Herman, JC Howard, Sam
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Paulson, John Isabella, Catherine Seifer, and
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