How Evan Williams turned side projects like Twitter into huge successes
We’re back in the archives this week, revisiting my 2005 interview with Evan Williams. Today, Ev is most well-known for being the co-founder of Twitter and founder/ceo of Medium. But back when this episode was recorded, Twitter hadn’t even been conceived of yet. When we spoke, Ev had just raised about $2 million in venture capital money for a hot new podcasting company he was about to launch called Odeo. Spoiler alert: Odeo didn’t make it. But a little side project had promise, and about a year after this interview was conducted, he and his partners decided to shift their focus to it. That side project was Twitter.
This interview changed my life. Getting to know Ev and becoming one of the first users of Twitter ultimately gave me the idea for my first big success as an entrepreneur, The Shorty Awards. And that led me to start up my software company, Muck Rack. You never know where your journey is going to take you. This episode takes us back to Ev’s mindset as he was gearing up for the launch of Odeo, and it’s also a good reminder that failure is part of the entrepreneurial path. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast and Spotify. If you love it, please leave a review!
“I was in the wrong place at the right time. Trying to build an internet company in ’94 in Nebraska was mostly explaining what the internet was to folks.”
Evan Williams may now be best known as the billionaire co-founder of Twitter, Blogger and Medium, but he started out a long way from Silicon Valley. In the early nineties, Ev was living in Nebraska, where he was running an internet company — even though most of his audience wasn’t quite familiar with what, exactly, the internet was at that time. He eventually found his way to California, landing at what was then a breeding ground for entrepreneurs, O’Reilly Media. Like many founders, he says he realized early on, “I was never good working for other people.” But even though he wasn’t at O’Reilly for long, he made valuable connections there that would play a part in his later ventures.
“I just finally decided to build it sort of on a whim.”
Especially from today’s vantage point, it’s interesting to hear Ev talk about the roots of Blogger, which came out of his next venture, Pyra Labs. As he explains it, the plan with Pyra was to build a web application for online collaboration and project management — “this sort of elaborate vision of a super information manager.” At the same time, he and his co-founders had their own blogs, and he’d thought about creating a blogging platform. But that was the side project, not the big practical business idea. Eventually, he decided to go ahead and build it “on a whim.” As we now know, this wouldn’t be the first time in Ev’s career that a side project would upstage the main event.
“We got a lot of luxuries from Google that there’s no way an independent company would have ever gotten. The priorities changed a lot.”
After four years “up and down a roller coaster” with Blogger, the company was settling in and had an offer on the table to raise another round of money. And then Google came knocking. Google acquired Blogger a short time after those initial discussions, marking the first time it had bought a company that actually had a team in place (“a whopping six people”). For Ev, it meant going from being an entrepreneur and the CEO of his own company to working within an entrepreneurial company. He shares how things changed once Blogger was working on Google’s scale, where things were all about volume. It was also the first time the team had to compete for things they’d never had to compete with before since they weren’t the only or highest priority.
“The ability to think audaciously huge ideas...changing the metrics on people is a fascinating discipline to have and something that speaks to their phenomenal success.”
With his strong independent streak, Ev says it wasn’t exactly a no-brainer decision to go to Google. But he went through with the acquisition for two reasons: He thought it was the best way to achieve Blogger’s potential, and he knew he’d learn more at Google and from the people at Google than any other path. One of the things that stuck out in particular, he says, was Google’s ability to think big. It’s not easy for independent companies to think “bigger than most people dare to think,” he points out, but Google showed him what was possible.
“Audio is everywhere. It’s the most ubiquitous medium there is.”
You never know where your next big idea is going to come from. For Ev, it came from being stuck in traffic on his commute to Mountain View every day. He listened to music and audible.com to pass the time, but what he really wanted to listen to was someone talking about a subject that interested him. Podcasting was still a nascent industry at the time, but he predicted that it would take off in the same way that blogging had. And unlike blogs, with the right platform, you wouldn’t have to be stuck behind your computer to enjoy a podcast.
“I definitely think there are going to be people who make a living creating podcasts, or more generally, related to podcasts.”
Up until the day before our interview, Odeo was angel funded by Ev and one other person. On this episode, he revealed that they had just closed venture funding with a group of investors. I was pretty excited to be able to break that news on my own fledgling podcast, and Ev was looking forward to the launch of Odeo and helping to build the future of podcasting.
Of course, looking back on it now, it’s funny how this interview wraps up on such an optimistic note, considering Odeo didn’t make it, and a podcasting startup I was working on at the time didn’t take off either. Ev’s predictions about podcasting were correct, but his decision to shut down Odeo and pivot to that little side project called Twitter paid off in a huge way. It’s something to think about if you’re struggling with your own business right now and thinking it might be time to pivot. Success often comes out of the ashes of failures. Sometimes you have to be willing to turn your attention to those big ideas that have been lingering on the back burner.
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