YouSaid · the spoken record

Ev Williams

lines on the record: 59
first: 2025-03-19
most recent: 2025-03-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And it's just a whole night of nostalgia because we're back in Austin and its dignity. And it's good times. So I hope you guys enjoy it.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would just say, Tim, thank you for having me. Tim and I have known each other for 20 years. I've never been on the podcast. That was fun.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're trying to take a conservative approach to privacy, but balance that obviously with ease of use and growth and having enough nodes in the network, but we were not compromising on privacy. We never want to surprise someone that they're sharing information with that random X or crazy person who happens to be in their phone book.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then plans have a separate mode. So what people are most nervous about, and we want to make very clear, is it's not going to tell everybody in your address book where you are. We don't even automatically update your location. You put in plans. And then the plan level, there's another level of privacy where you just say you have to actually opt in to say this person can see my plans. Does that make sense”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good question We are assuming for starters and made this false assumption if you are in the phone book of someone else and they're in yours that you're willing to share more than your phone number. You're willing to share your private profile. And we're not sharing anything that's never public, but that's, if you've given your phone number to them, then you can see what we build mode Z profile, which is just, it's not address, it's like social handles. It's more or less what to show up on a social network profile. But some people are nervous about that. So, I mean, you can not sync your contacts and build it from scratch would be the answer.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“City level location sharing, but we also have these ideas around customizing if it's a digital business card, it was like, what if you could customize it, make it look really cool, and choose your fonts and colors, and wouldn't that be just fun and kind of a throwback? So we actually built that. We built this whole system for making these cool looking cards that would show up for your friends in your Mozi. Then we killed it all. Thankfully, that was painful because you've gone down a path with the team. They work really hard and like, actually, you know what? This is complicating our vision because what we're hearing from people and what we're sensing is that's kind of noise compared to the utility. What I just want to know is when my friend's in town, or I just want to know when I'm going to a city, like where are my friends? And all the rest of this is noise. So we ripped that up.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the idea of Flaxo, pre smartphone, desktop, like a Rolodex on your computer. But if I have your business card in my Rolodex, you can update it on my Rolodex. I heard that idea like, duh, that's one of the many things that the internet is going to change is the difference of being in a connected world versus disconnected world is in what utility and great stuff come from that. Fast forward 2023 we still don't have that, which is kind of crazy. Like I have this contacts app and it's lacking information. It's incomplete. It's outdated. So it's like, I'm going to build a better contacts app. And then it led to the idea of, okay, if you manage to do that and got lots of people connected, then you would actually have this private social network. Then you could do all kinds of things. And one of the ideas we had was location sharing or”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll use Moses as an example of that, sorry, because it's fresher in my mind, but where we've done a much better job. So Mosey originally conceived of as a better contacts app. And the idea was a very old idea, like the Plaxo idea, if you remember that. I do remember. I remember hearing about Plaxo 2001 or something like that.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was internal, but it was self imposed by me, but it was also. This is part of prematurely scaling if you get beyond a handful of employees, it's as much pressure from employees as it is from an investor. Right. And if you have everyone around the table and everyone's seeing all that, then you can kind of take your time more. But if you, like, people are having doubts and you have to sell internally all the time before you figure it all out. That's a dangerous place to be. So that's where we were for a while.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say 80% of the time if I meet with a startup or founder, which I don't really do anymore, if they ask me their advice, I say less. And so medium, it was like that. It was like build a great writing platform. And then got impatient for growth.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm good at seeing systems. In like a product, most of the things I build are systems. They're not just a product. And with Medium, I had lots of experience understanding the internet and publishing some platform. And I wanted to build everything new. And that may or may not have been possible, but I tried to do it all at once. Which was, I think, the mistake. And so that's why I say we're prematurely scaled is just that it takes time Get everything right. And the company and the product, et cetera. And because when you're trying to do a whole bunch of things at once, it's classic failure mode to try to buy it off more to Ying Chu. And almost every”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot of cases I was much too eager to add things. Especially medium. Medium, I definitely prematurely scaled. And I just wanted to create”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't even understand that. I don't want to give the impression that I'm an expert on any of this. I just follow my curiosity. I used to just exclusively consume business and technology and startups. Most of my adult life, I was CEO of a company and just waking up every day desperately trying to make that succeed. And so a lot of my new stuff, like music, it's just fun.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time for Right, right. Great book, by the way, Tim Irvin's book. I have the pretty random. It's just like wandering, like I'll buy tons of books. I read mostly on my phone, but I'll buy physical books to remember that the book exists. So I'll have a laying around the house and be like, oh, this is interesting, then I'll go because I'll just read it on my phone. But I feel like I should have a better way. I also watch a lot of YouTube, I have to admit.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You read a lot more than I do. But I may read two a month, but I think it's kind of haphazard, which is scary because you're going to select a very tiny portion. Yeah, Tim”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a book I'm reading right now called The One by Henry Poss. I don't know anything about him. The one is about how it's monism, the idea that the universe is just one thing in nature and us and this class is all one thing and that the separation is an illusion, how that fits with quantum physics and the whole history of quantum physics and how this idea had come up but rejected. It was very interesting to learn how the implications of that which we've heard about with multiverse and all these crazy ideas were rejected by scientists who were materialists and it was interesting to learn that materialism in science is basically religion and that's fascinating so”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I used to read a lot of physics books and quantum physics just for fun and it had been a while. So I started delving into that more setup.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I still owned a bunch of the company. I didn't have to do the job. I mean, that's like objectively it wasn't that bad. But as an identity and ego hit, it was tremendous. I also thought the best thing for the company was for me to say and even not in CEO role. And I tried to negotiate that and that wasn't accepted. But it was more like, this is so wrong. It was like, okay, what can I learn from this? What is once I was out of that? Know some deep reflection happened, and I think a long-term path of personal growth.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of goes back to all our unhappiness comes from thinking things shouldn't be how they are because I was Very upset because of the injustice of it. And what I thought was just dumb. Now, in retrospect, and even at the time, I knew I was in over my head to a certain extent. And Dick, who became the CEO, was much better at certain aspects of the job. I wasn't even that attached to being the CEO long term. I was just like, maybe we should talk about it before you fire me. That seemed rude. I mean, this is my company. But the line, like, I didn't have to do the job anymore. That's one.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We already talked about ODO, which is kind of failure that led to Twitter, so that's obvious. But a thing that took me very long time to appreciate that felt Like the biggest failure possible was getting fired from Twitter. Which I did. I co founded the company. I was CEO for two years, and then I got fired to my great shock and dismay. And I was just devastated, absolutely. Now I looked and I was like, wow, I'm probably way happier today than I would have been had I had I not. But it took me a while. Took me a long while to appreciate that”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes noting, sometimes noting. And I know you like to know about products, you know about this product, but I was using the way. You probably talked about that before. The Way is a meditation app. I hadn't used a meditation app for years. The way I started using the way Kevin sent it to me actually when it was still in data.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had meditated the day before. I was like, I could meditate every single day to this year. And it was just that sort of psychological hook that you find motivating even though it's arbitrary. And I was like, yes, I'm going to meditate every single day in 2024. That's a goal. And I don't normally set goals like that, but I was like, okay, let's see what happens. My teacher says you can't boil water if you keep turning off the flame. So the consistency of meditation, I underestimated what a dramatic difference that makes and how fast you can drop in if you do it every single day.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Early COVID, I was like, what the fuck am I doing? I'm gonna turn 50 and I need to work a hell of a lot harder to be in shape than I was. So I just started doing it. I was at home. I had the time. So I did that. Although that's increased. And because you get the positive reward cycle and it feels great. And meditation, I've always found super valuable and I just last year On January 2nd 2024.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it does exercise exercise in meditation. I dabbled in for a long time. And then I got much more serious a couple years ago about both and really, really dramatic life improvement.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A week, and we're like, okay, this is a message. I'm go sign up for this thing, show up. I had no idea. And then you just dive in. And it's incredible.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't easy, but it's just in the context of it, it just feels very safe. One of the fascinating things is it's strangers. You are not allowed to say your last name or what you do in the real world when you get there. So you connect with people. And I realized after a few days I relied so much on people knowing who I was or what I did that it was this veil between me and other humans. So you get to know people at such a deep level without really knowing any of the normal things that we would say you meet someone here. What do you do? Where do you live? And that just feels incredibly safe. But the process is they've been doing it for 50 some years. It's very evolved. It's very well done. You take any of it out of context that sounds weird. Like I knew nothing going in. And about five people brought it up to me in random conversations over.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's a thing called the Hoffman process. It's 20 years of therapy in a week in terms of the effect. I mean, I've got much more out of it than I ever got in therapy. It's a week-long retreat. There's a few different places. The main ones in Petaluma, California. You hand over your phone. You go and do some exercises with 36 strangers and yourself for a week and you come out a new person.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, just for six months. And I've gone through a lot. I've done a lot of work, particularly in the last couple years. That's been just super, super important.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, it was a long, long process. I mean, the therapy helped the psychedelics helped meditation growth, learning, reading books, having friends, stopping drinking.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I think would do a tremendous amount of good if people adopt, oh, feel your feelings. It's a little bit easier to imagine that I think so much of our suffering. And I say this as someone who told their first therapist, I don't understand the point of feelings. They are just a nuisance in getting the way. So it took me a long time to appreciate that. And the avoidance that so many of us go through. And then... One step further might be stop drinking alcohol for six months and see how you feel. Not tonight, though. It's fine. We're in a partner.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then my mind goes, what's a big fundamental truth that we want everyone? Let's pretend if they read it, they'll actually get it and know it. Then I think there's a little bit of tension between the most fundamental truth and how actionable they are. So if we said we are all one, which I believe, it's like, okay, we're all one. The universe is one big thing. We're all connected. What do I do with that? Maybe if you really ponder that and meditate on that a long time, it'll actually, it will do you some good. But then if you move toward the spectrum of usefulness of what's a fundamental truth that's more useful, you might have some Buddhist or saying all of our suffering comes from our thoughts or inability to accept reality, which is a little bit more useful. But maybe for the masses, still not very actionable. And then you could move to feel your feeling.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to build on that. And thinking about this, what comes to mind, first of all, is the category is something that will help people heal, you know, just be their whole and true selves because I think that's where all our problems come from is the lack of that. And as much as I care about climate, I think the key to solving climate is to heal ourselves, to heal culture, to heal the planet. And so I start with the self.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As hell didn't have in rural Nebraska in the 70s is social emotional learning. And that's just like how do you connect with people? I mean, we know that's critical to any job no matter what you're doing. And I think that's probably, well, hopefully not going to go away. Who knows?”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I haven't thought about this deeply, but what comes to mind is social human things, two things. One is I do encourage them to read and write still because I think that's how you figure things out. That's like the best way to think and have ideas and get clarity is to write. And you can't write if you don't read. So even if the AI can write for you, that's fine if it's a paper or a report or some analysis where the product is very important, like this is the information and text that I need, but it robs you of the process of thinking. So I think problem solving, creative ideation is useful no matter what you do ever. So I think those core skills and then social skills. And one of the reasons I love the school they go to is actually they have a thing called SEL, which maybe you all had.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me is you have this intuition, you kind of know what it is, you start to develop it, you're like, oh, it's this, not that, let's try this, not that. And you feel your way into what's the best first version of it. If you're lucky and good enough that that first version meets with some success in the world, then at least in the tech world, employees and investors and business people come in and it's like, okay, where are we going next? What's the plan? What's the roadmap? How are we going to make the numbers go up? And it doesn't work too very far. It works a little bit to get that next stage, but it doesn't work to really innovate. It doesn't work. And so you have to be comfortable with the ambiguity of not knowing where you're going to go. And this book is good. And it makes his points very short. It also talks about evolution a lot and how the most creative force”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marathon, and you can download a training regime and you can go run the marathon. And probably you can't do that to invent the computer or Twitter or create amazing art. You can't plot it. And to the extent you try to plot it, you shoot yourself in the foot because you cut off the possibilities that lay before you. And I read this book when I was running Media, my last company. It had a great effect on me because I felt this deep sense of relief because my entire business and startup career, I've been deeply driven to create things. I saw the companies in particular products as a creative process. It was like writing a book or painting a painting is like you have to figure it out as you go. You don't have it fully baked in your head from day one. But what I've seen happen a million times and happen.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why greatness cannot be planned? I recommend this to 100 people. Love this book. It's the subtitle is The Myth of the Objective. And the premise is by a guy named Ken Stanley and another guy who were AI researchers. And the way it starts out is they, this is early AI researchers. Ken worked at OpenAI later. They were building bots. And the example they talk about is trying to build a robot to go through a maze and how they've tried to program all kinds of smart algorithms into it. And then they found that the most effective strategy was just try something new. And they go on from that and extrapolate this idea that if you are trying to do something that hasn't been done before, you know, we're taught from birth and from school and everywhere is like set your goal, make a plan to get to the plan, persevere, go through that. And the premise of the book is that works if it's something that's been done a lot and that's formulaic. You can set a goal to run.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not an executive anymore, so that's not as useful. Then they are motorcycle manus is great, but I will mention one, but very related to the conversation, which is Have you read White Greatness Cannot Be Planned?”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm sure it'll end up in something very, very different. It's early for Mosey. The way we think about it in our wildest dreams, it is a ubiquitous social network and the way Facebook was it one time, but actually designed for enhancing people's social lives and relationships, which means it's not a media platform. It's not advertising platform. It's not a performative platform. It's not a status building platform. It's really about sharing information that's important to you with people you care about and enabling, it won't all be about IRL, but that's where folks end right now. But it's early. We haven't figured it out yet. And I think that's part of the fun is figuring out where it goes.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was the idea we had, it was starting to take off amongst the people we knew in South Fi was always the conference where the indie cool tech people came and these were our people. Can we buy a screen and put it in the hall where everybody's hanging out? And that was the move. And people saw that. I'm like, oh.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it was kind of like that, and it was kind of like aim messages. And the very first version, there wasn't a whole feat. It was just the latest person who had updated their status was on top and went out via text message. But we're like, hmm, interesting. And we felt it was interesting when we had maybe 10 people on it, 10 people worked at the company, and then we started getting our partners on it. And we were intrigued. So this is 2006. It really wasn't growing for months and months. And really, we hit an inflection point here in Austin in 2007.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were pretty intrigued right away. I mean, we certainly didn't know. The extent of it by any means, but it felt new and interesting. We kept evolving it. It definitely wasn't right. I mean, I think no ideas come out fully baked. And so there was a lot we had to get right. Like what is the graph? The very first version actually was highly informed by status messages, which were a thing in Facebook, but this is pre-Facebook being available to outside of colleges, and we were too old to be on Facebook, so we didn't even know about status messages on Facebook.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Broadcast and then having come from the blogging world that we're familiar with RSS and subscribing was turned into following and yeah kind of evolved from there that was to mention names that was of course Bizstone and Jack Dorsey's project and it also was informed by Jack's previous work on careers and status systems and”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was around 12, 14, something like that. People worked on a bunch of stuff. A lot of it was relayed because we were doing an audio and recording in the browser with Flash and stuff like that. Again, pre-smartphones. But we were dabbling with text messaging. And there's a couple of the engineers were familiar with how to send text messages en masse, which was little known at that time. There was no real APIs for that. People were trying to a lot of things along those lines. May we send an audio voicemoard browser, a little kind of social things. Then they're one of the ideas was to, the way I remember first, it was record a message actually via your phone, and then it got broadcast text to people, and then they could listen to it. And then that quickly involved to what if we got rid of the audio? Maybe it was just text.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the investors, thankfully, my board I went to board said, this is my honest assessment of ODIO, and they, as good investors do, said, well, we didn't believe investment podcasting, we invest in you. You have a great team. You got any other ideas? And I thought, hmm, I must have other ideas. So I always prided myself on having ideas. But I went back to team and said, I don't have any ideas. You guys got any ideas? And we ended up doing a hackathon where we basically for a couple of weeks.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've struggled with this because I don't have a clean way to understand it, but I think one big difference is I believed in the vision blogger the whole time. And that was where Odio is like, I'll keep coming to work and make it succeed. It was also, I was lucky because Blogger being my first real company and I was a little bit younger. I believe in vision, but I also just was petrified of failing. I just couldn't accept that possibility for myself. I also didn't have a lot of other prospects. I'd never really had a job. I didn't have a degree. The dot come boom. It was like, well, I don't know what the hell else I'm going to do if I don't make this succeed. So I'm going to stick with it. But it didn't really make sense.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The company is still going, but I was like, I realized that I was just working as it was ego, it was pride, it was expectations of other people. And the book is really great if you don't know because it just points out all the reasons beyond sunk cost fallacy that people do things way longer than it makes sense to do them. And the biggest thing is they underestimate opportunity costs. If you're working on one thing and there's identity and ego and all those other things, but it's like you don't know what else there is until you clear that your attention away from the thing that you've been struggling with. And so I think if you're in a situation where it feels like a slog, quitting is probably a good idea.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a ton of companies, and it's not a people just getting into these life situations where they just keep going. And that's certainly what I was taught. In fact, Blogger, which the company I sold to Google, I completely ran out of money after dot-com bust. I had to lay off all my employees, was barely able to pay my rent, and kept working at it, kept working on it, kept working on it, eventually sold it to Google very happily. And to me, I was like, yes, that is the triumph of perseverance, and that's why you should stick two things. And then ODIO, thankfully, we didn't. We did create another company out of that. But I think this idea of it's okay to quit is underappreciated. And the main reason everyone knows about sunk cost fallacy, there's a great book by the way by Andy Duke called Quit, which I highly recommend. And it's actually was part of the reason a couple years ago I stepped down from Medium, which is my last company I was running for a long time. I quit my job.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wasn't that into it personally. I wasn't a podcaster. And I think that was another principle that I've learned over and over is I think some people can build products for other people and thank goodness they do, but I just build products for myself. And I was like, I don't know. I don't know what the product is.”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tells the story is that I wrote this big strategic document about how to succeed in the podcasting business and it was very convincing about the pivot we could do and to do and I was like I don't want to do this and so I went to investors and said I don't think this company is on a great trajectory maybe we should just stop but that was unusual this was kind of pivoting now of course is taken for granted that your ideas and thrite the first time out that was less assumed back then so I was embarrassed I was like I said I was going to start a podcasting company and I raised this money I made these employees I have these investors but I don't believe in it I don't believe in this vision anymore even though it wasn't dead as you said”
2025-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #800: Ev Williams — The Art of Pivoting (e.g., Odeo to Twitter), Strategic Quitting, The Dangers of Premature Scaling, Must-Read Books, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT