YouSaid · the spoken record

Evan Williams

lines on the record: 86
first: 2024-05-06
most recent: 2024-05-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Whole lot of both, a whole lot of both for sure. And I think anyone who has success, who doesn't mention luck is fooling themselves and it's, like everyone says, you can increase your chances of luck. I worked incredibly hard. And from those first days of those first companies to the extent where I didn't sleep. I worked too much to the point of decreasing returns for sure. But I learned everything I possibly could about what I was doing and I kept trying stuff. And again, I attribute like maybe my upbringing, maybe the way I was wired, but that sense of I have to completely rely on myself and I'm not going to give up certainly paid off.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't want to run another company. I am not running it. I'm really getting more and more just into the creative side and just like, and by creative side, I mean of life, being like, I also recently got divorced. I have two kids trying to create a great environment for them. I'm working on some art projects. I do a little philanthropy. And other than that, I don't know, could be music, could be events. But that's what I'm focused on right now.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So after I stepped down from medium, which was almost coming up on two years, Tony Stubblebein, also someone who I've known for a very long time. And I hired him to run that company. He's doing a great job doing a better job than I was doing running. Medium's going great. I co-founded another company recently. It's a company called Mosey, which is a social app. It's another social app, but it's not a social media app. It's really about relationship building and getting people together in real life. And so I'm starting that, but I wasn't.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The network. It was giving people a place to write these longer things, but connecting them so they could be discovered. And that's what Blogger wasn't. There was no network to Blogger. You create a web page, you couldn't follow the web page, and there's no real reason to write on Blogger versus anywhere else because there's no audience on Blogger.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like if Twitter just did what Blogger did and posted your tweet to a web page and didn't fan it out if there wasn't this follow mechanism, it wouldn't be very interesting. It would essentially just be bloggers. So it's the distribution system that created all the value in this way I call my company is obvious. It was obvious to me that that should exist.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The seeds of medium were really planted while I was still at Twitter. And the initial genesis, Biz and I, Biz who came over from Twitter. He and I were talking. One of the things we learned at Twitter, which we really believed in, was this idea of constraints. So we're like, What if we create a writing platform that wasn't so short as Twitter but still was not too short not too long? And I walked up to Whiteboard and I wrote Medium. I was like, I don't know what it is, but we should call it that. And then the idea was essentially what we had learned from social networks was that the value was in the connectivity.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it felt like the huge failure and so much of me. I honestly thought that it was going to destroy the company. And so it was really sad about that. But it was also. Terribly embarrassed, and like, I spent years trying to prove myself and like. And at the height of my success, I was just kneecapped. And it felt like nothing I did before mattered. Because I failed at the biggest thing I ever”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I had a meeting, it was my coach at the time, hired by a VC, which is a bad idea, Bill Campbell, who told me, and I was just like, what? What are you even, what? What? Couldn't believe it. And then I was very upset and very mad, went through all the stages of grief.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was devastated, devastated. I can't like. Describe how I was also shocked. I didn't even think it was possible. And so I went from owning 100% of this company to being kicked out. That was my own fault. I had why I didn't get the legal protections. There's no way I had to lose control of the company. I just trusted my investors and the board. And I was like, oh, we're all in the same side. And so. Knew I was barely keeping things together, but it's also the nature of fast growing companies. The company grew 10X and users and employees and valuation in the two years I was CEO. So I'm like, guys, on paper, this isn't going that badly.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was good at, and a ton of fear, and that I didn't think I actually even could be ousted, so it wasn't that, was just really about being called out for not knowing what I was doing.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For sure, for sure. That didn't really change anything. And I hadn't really done any work on myself at the time. And I think this is like for entrepreneurs, so important to realize like what is driving you and where your blind spots, I had no idea. So when I would hear, I got a little bit of feedback. And by the way, somewhat ironically, the board of Twitter had a lot of conflict aversion because they never gave me that feedback to my face. I didn't know I was going to be fired at all because no one ever told me I was doing bad job. So there's a whole culture of conflict aversion. And my execs who were complaining about me to the board also weren't telling me everyone was avoiding conflict. But yeah, I had a lot of, I had a ton of fear and a lot of, I had both a lot of confidence about.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fear of rejection. I think especially if you have imposter syndrome and Look, I'm a farm boy from Nebraska who run this company. I was like, I never had a. Where I rose to the ranks.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think both are fair. I was not a great CEO by any stretch. And I think I was getting better. What I was very good at was product and knowing, in my opinion, product and strategy and knowing where to take the company, what we should build. But the company got to a size where lots and lots of other things were important for the CEO to do. Certainly management, finances, leadership, giving confidence to the entire team. But I think in a lot of cases I was slow to make decisions because I was avoiding conflict. I didn't want to make decisions that other people disagree with. I didn't have felt something intuitively the evidence or the data or the logic. Everyone was arguing something else, then I would just got frozen. Or if the decision was about a person and I was lacking the confidence to”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For years and years and years. And so I thought that was another reason that didn't seem to apply to us. And third was that if just from a fiduciary perspective, if the offer clearly was a no-brainer from a financial perspective, then you might be inclined to do as well. And so my letter to the board was, I think these are the reasons to sell. I think none of them apply. And so we shouldn't sell. And so that was the end of conversation.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, that was serious. We had to take that seriously. We, of course, didn't know what Facebook would become either, you know, eventually that half billion would be, who knows? Like, I don't know if you did the math on that. But I went to the board and I thought about very deeply and I came up with this like, okay, why would you sell a company? I think there are three reasons and none of these meet that criteria. Three reasons being you don't want to do it anymore. And so you need someone to do it for you or you're in trouble. So there's famous cases like YouTube sold to Google, obviously amazing acquisition for Google, but YouTube was really in a lot of trouble both with copyright infringement and the scaling and infrastructure costs of YouTube really needed this shelter that Google could provide and lost money.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a story that Biz tells about Biz and I going down to Palo Alto and meeting with Mark. And it was just Mark. And Biz and I in a room with soft seating. And it was very awkward and strange, but wanted to hear him out. And I felt I had no interest in selling, but you got to listen to these things. And Facebook, of course, was private at the time, but based on their valuation, they could do a stock deal that may value us around a half billion dollars. A lot of money, and we were maybe, no, we were 30 people at the time.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was on the board, I gotten pushed as CEO. And I was on the board for Multiple years, and he was also on the board the whole time, even after he left a CEO, he was still on the board. And so we were on the board together for a decade. And so, yeah, and we were, yeah, we were fine. We're friendly. We have dinner, but yeah, we're not best friends.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the break. Oh, yeah, that was the break for sure. And again, I would handle that very differently because I hadn't been giving him clear feedback. And it looked, he was pushed out and then I... Hard to believe, but it wasn't actually my plan. I still didn't necessarily want to be CEO, and we talked to a few other candidates, but then I was like, okay, maybe I'm the best person to be CEO. So it really looked like it was just a, oh, this thing is successful. I'm going to push him out and take over. So understandably, he was hurt and upset about that.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we didn't see eye to eye. We're very different, actually. We both desperately wanted it to succeed and both thought we were correct and we didn't talk about it in a healthy way.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had never been a manager, I believe, before he became CEO of this very fast growing company. I wasn't a great manager, but I had a few years on him.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happen in every company. Yeah, I think we were frustrated with each other. Goes back to what I said earlier about being not good at relationships. I didn't know how to deal with that. And I didn't do a good job of dealing with that. I was senior to Jack in age and experience. So I should have been the one to really work on lead working on the relationship. And stress gets high when you have something. Stress was very, very high because we had something we knew was working and it felt incredibly precarious. Twitter always felt precarious. Stuff kept breaking like we couldn't handle the growth. Facebook was always looming over us and feeling felt like they could eat our lunch at any time and they were trying to. And it was so the stress was incredibly high. And Jack went from individual contributor”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the course of events was Twitter and ODO were just products inside of Obvious, which I ran. And so, and I had around this time also sold Odeo. So Twitter was the only thing we had, but I had lots of other ideas. I was just like, I just kind of want to tinker and invent new things. So that was the time when we spun it out into Twitter Inc. that for Jack the job of CEO.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did not, certainly not in those very early days, you know, the team over the years gotten a lot of flack on the trust and safety side, but those people are some of the most earnest, hardworking integrity-driven folks I've ever seen in. In the world of business, and we didn't realize it's sort of like, in some ways, like when we figured out processed food manufacturing and we're like, oh, this is an easy, cheap way to get calories, not realizing all the implications of that, let's keep working on it.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. We did. We got a lot of investors knocking on our door. I still owned 100% of it at that time through Obvious, but it was clear that we needed to grow, we needed to raise money. So we started taking those conversations.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know the numbers. I know the shape of the charts was very hockey stick. The service definitely started falling down. I mean, getting overwhelmed and we were running into scaling issues immediately. But it's certainly still tiny. I mean, South by Southwest, it's not even at the time, I don't know, maybe a few thousand people were using it, but they were using it a lot.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, everybody there got on Twitter. And, you know, there's a few thousand people. And again, lots of journalists, lots of bloggers. And so then they talked about it and wrote about it. It was a moment, just capturing lightning in a bottle amongst that community. It was the perfect thing at the perfect time with enough density to reach a tipping point.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they were like, I think moving across the screen from people who were there. And so that was pouring gasoline on the fire because it had the density. It was like classic network building. You need density. And there was also the real-time nature was very valuable because people were walking around and didn't want to pull out their computers to know what was going on.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did something kind of unusual because we had a sense that that was our audience. And I knew from experience that Going in the South by southwest, so we contacted The organizers there and said, Can we actually set up a screen in the hallway?”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, or here's a link. And this whole time we're tweaking, we're changing how the system works. And even though the original idea that it was going to be through our phones and via SMS, which is why messages were what became known as tweets were limited to 140 characters, I think it was in late, it was a few months in that we made it easier to use on the web. And that's when we saw our first real bump of growth because people were our audience especially was sitting at their desktop all day.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's part of me that felt that I think today I would value that part of me much more strongly than I did at the time. And I think one of the things that I've learned through my own efforts and watching others is that that's why I mentioned that feel being more important than the numbers. I didn't trust that enough at the time. It's so easy to get overwhelmed by data, especially in tech. And as soon as you have anybody using your product, the attention turns to numbers In testing, and people try to be very scientific about it. You're in those conversations like, no, but it really feels like something. And as someone who really has gone by feel and has that intuition, you just kind of, you downplay that. It's like, ah, well, there's no evidence to back up what I'm feeling.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a board meeting where it was assumed we were just going to decide to give the remaining money back to investors. Twitter wasn't growing. We didn't believe in ODEO. I made an offer and I said, well, I'll actually buy it. And that was obvious was the name of the company that I bought ODIO with.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It felt like a thing because once we had a handful of people on it, most of whom we knew, and we're using it through our phones to get and send these real-time updates. We use the term real-time a lot then because the internet wasn't real time, email was asynchronous, web got updated, kind of slowly. The first thing we felt where you could send a message and buzz a bunch of people's pockets, it would update. And that was new. And it was such a unique and immediate sensation.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We still had Odeo, and Biz said this very wise thing, I think, at the time, which was even though we were only a dozen people, it's like Twitter was such a nascent idea. He was like, if we put everyone on this idea, it's like this idea is like a small ember that if it gets too much oxygen is just going to go out. And so we need to keep the team on Twitter small while we develop it. So most of the team went back to Odeo. Twitter was another side project And people still think Twitter is a dumb idea. Imagine the very first days like, what? That makes no sense. And okay, so what are the numbers even after we launch publicly? It's like, oh, there's like. 500 people using it. And we know 200 of them. And so it didn't look like a thing. It felt like a thing, which.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could have been Twitch. Yeah. So We called it Twitter, but ODIO still existed. So at the end of the hackathon, the two weeks officially, we declared it probably wasn't named Twitter yet, but we had an internal joke name called Friends Stalker. And sort of like, yeah, you're stalking your friends. You're seeing, you know, what they're up to all the time.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I remember seeing an email where he had been brainstorming names and it was on a list. I'm like, ooh, Twitter. He always explained it was like, what's that feeling when you feel your pocket buzz? And it's like, it's like a Twitch. And he looked up Twitch in the dictionary. And next to that was Twitter, which is a dictionary.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Twitter, in my opinion, one of the best names, may it rest in peace for this for a tech product. I think Noah came up with that on a list of names.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we knew everyone kind of had a sense that mobile computing was the future, but building things for phones was a pain in the butt. And so we thought, well, SMS is ubiquitous. You don't have to install any software on the phone. That would be pretty amazing if we could leverage that.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was harder to do. There were a couple services that let you do that grade groups. I know there was a lot of conversation around the time. We all used AOL Instant Messenger on our desktops. And there's this status line, which was just like, you know, not a message, but it's like what you're doing and you could update it. Facebook had the same feature. It's like update your status. Like say like, okay, going to the park might be your status. And you can see your list of friends. You could see them up in the order updated of their status. And that was the whole thing.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Biz came over to Odeo fairly early from Google. And so Jack and Biz were working on things. There was maybe three or four teams. And then Noah, the original founder of ODIO. So the thing that we saw in one stage of the hackathon that was intriguing was the ability to send a message with your phone and it would arrive on other people's phones.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take credit from anybody, Jack had an idea, which I didn't probably even see the very first version of. And he started working with Biz. And so they were a team.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you have other ideas? And I always prided myself on having lots of ideas. But we were still, I think, fairly attached to audio. And so there was a lot of Basically, we had a two week, what we call a hackathon where we divided into teams and just let people come up with ideas to find the new course of the company. And that's when... Jack presented, he had been thinking about, I guess, this idea for a while of like a status update service. And the first version of that I heard, it was actually attached to audio. I do remember a conversation where at first there was a version of what became Twitter presented that had audio. And I remember asking, what if it didn't have the audio piece? And I don't remember the first form and I don't want to.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of that evolved. I'm not sure how long Jack had been thinking about this, but basically we came to a point where I didn't have faith in the original plan of ODO. I actually went to the board. I think we had three of the $5 million left and said, I can't sell you on the future of this company. Maybe we should just give the money back and go away. The board was like, well, we didn't invest in podcasting, we invested in you. So you...”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we hired Jack just as a programmer and we liked him. I think around the same time, we also had Kevin Sistrom, founder of Instagram. Was working for us as an intern. So Kevin and Jack paired to write our, I think our installable podcatcher, as we called them.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We tinkered for a few months. Like I said, we were like, okay, maybe we'll create tools for podcasters. And that was another big lesson for me because I listened to podcasts, but I never created podcasts. And one of my fundamental rules, I can believe, is unless you are really good at user research, build products for yourself. I had no sense of because I didn't create podcasts, I had no sense of what the tools needed were or how the software should work. That's where I think great products come from is feeling that. And so we took some stabs at that, but our product wasn't good.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had done for the last six months. We raised money to do. We made the mistake of actually raising too much money pre-product, really pre-product, we raised $5 million, which was a terrible mistake because it allowed us to grow the team to a point where we just weren't nimble enough to easily pivot. And so we thought, we told ourselves as every small company does when a big company moves in their space, oh, we can compete. We'll do it better, whatever. But they had They had insurmountable advantage. Like people, they had the software.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And so we built a odio.com was a directory of podcasts. We were basically collecting all the feeds. We were making them easy to find. You could listen to individual episodes on the web. But then there's a piece of software that you could install on your desktop that would sync whatever podcast you subscribe to onto your iPod.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To download this stuff. Exactly. And so we find out these guys are talking about it, but there's no software to do it. And so then the idea was obvious, like make it easy to do this. Make it easy to listen, make it easy, commercialize this idea. And it's another democratizing media. Anyone can have a radio show. That seemed obvious. And so I was really encouraging Noah to do that, to take audioblogger and create a podcasting company. I didn't want to create a podcasting company, but I thought Noah should. And I didn't have a job then, and I was determined to take some time off, but Noah kept arriving at my door. So I fell into it.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's funny how this came about. I had this neighbor named Noah Glass who was a fun, boisterous entrepreneurial guy who invented a way to call a telephone number and leave a voicemail that would end up on the web. And then Biz Stone, later co-founder of Twitter, he worked with me a blogger. And we were driving home from Google one day and just kind of brainstorming about it. It was one of those moments of independent invention, kind of to help Noah because we're like, no one's, you know, it's cool you can record these, but no one's going to listen to these things on their desktop computer. What if you get them on their iPad? And we were thinking about what the technical solution is to that. And then we start looking into it. It's like around the same time people like Adam Curry and Dave Weiner had started talking about podcasting.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“killed Blogger, I'm happy to say 20 years later is still running. And anything written on Blogger 20 years ago, unless the author took it down or it was like a violation, is still up on the internet for free and Google has paid for that and probably lost money that entire time So that's amazing and super lucky to have felt that. But I didn't know how to operate within Google. And so yeah, after Google went public, I left.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. And I was employee number 800 at Google. So it's laughable how small it was. Same size as the high school I went to. And it felt similar. It felt like a college. But yeah, I didn't know how to operate. And they didn't know what to do with me either because they had not done any acquisitions. We were literally the first acquisition that involved people. They had bought some IP, but we're the first group of employees to come in who were Googlers but not. And so we were just kind of plopped in there. trying to figure out how to survive. And to their credit, a lot of tons and tons of big companies bought these tiny internet things at the time and then they would just die.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT