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

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

“Yeah, it's somewhere along the line we offered to host blogs, but we had ads on them. And the ads never made any money to speak of. There's like a very tiny trickle of money, but then the first thing I started charging for was you could remove the ads from your blog. That was the first thing. And that made a surprising amount of money for me at the time. Maybe I could pay my rent. And then I launched what I call Blogger Pro. And yeah, people paid for it.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, a 9 11 the day 9 11 happened, I actually spent the day aggregating because there wasn't really real-time search. And of course, there's no Twitter or anything, but people were writing about their experiences, including a lot of people in New York. And it was hard to find out, you know, hard to find this on-the-ground information. So I actually spent the day calling these posts as they're coming in from database and put up special pages about that. some really big blogs emerged after that time that were really covering the news. And then, of course, newspapers and magazines started creating their own blogs around probably after that time. And then, yeah, we continued to see growth for sure.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More people going to blogs. What happened? Yeah, so blogging was kind of growing the whole time despite the dot-com boom or bust. And that was part of the reason that I didn't want to give up. Like, it was the numbers were good. And then, yeah, 9-11 was actually a big moment for blogs. And it's when the way I would describe it, it's when journalists started taking them seriously.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say worse than that, I don't think I was good at relationships, which even more fundamentally, I mean, management is a particular skill. But I wasn't good at relationships, i.e. how to deal with conflict, the most important thing. And I avoided conflict, especially in those days. And I at the time really considered the people part of company building a necessary evil. And so I didn't invest in relationships. I didn't know how. I never had any model for that. I never, because I never worked at companies, so yeah, I was terrible, terrible in those days at dealing with people for sure.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mad at me when it failed. Yeah, and we had been fighting. And all my friends went away. It wasn't just my employees went away. My friends went away. I felt really guilty I didn't wasn't talking to anybody, but I was able to show up at work every day. Not explain anything to anybody, not have to argue. I was just like, I am going to build whatever.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was both really sad and very freeing. And it was sad because, I mean, you reached that point in a company, there has been a lot of stress and a lot of angst. And I think that's just natural. And my company was also my social life. And so there was this overlap with my roommate didn't work at the company, but dated someone who did and brother worked at the company. And so And everyone was mad at me at the end And I felt really bad because I felt like I've failed”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I couldn't imagine. Stopping once everybody left my costs went from fifty thousand a month to $5,000 a month still to pay for the servers. And I just wanted to keep building it. So I”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a very stressful time basically. We didn't pivot to enterprise. We didn't get any customers. We still didn't have any revenue. And then eventually just got to the point where it was like, look guys, we're not going to be able to. I think there was even a payroll we missed. And then I sat everybody down, said we don't have any money to pay you past this next paper. So you're welcome to come back. I think this on a Friday, you're welcome to come back. I'm going to keep working. If you come back and work, you know, we'll pay you when we make money, but we're out of money. And then the next Monday, I came back, and I was the only one there.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was just like, I don't want to build that. That's not why by that time I had gotten very excited about this idea that anyone in the world can share their ideas and knowledge to the internet was a very powerful idea. And it's what really got me most excited about the internet in the first place. And so I loved what we were doing and I loved the idea of bringing that to millions and more people. And so company blogging, I was like, fine, maybe we can make money, but I'd kind of rather go out of business. That's not interesting. Let's not do that.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this may be, and then it was in the fall of 2000 when things started getting really bleak. And then we started getting nervous. And a thing a ton of companies did, a ton of consumer internet companies did at that time was pivot to enterprise. We'll take our product built for consumers and we'll go sell it to businesses. And then there was a moment where Meg and I really had to come to Jesus. It was bothering me. I didn't like that path, and I think this in retrospect was a very important moment because”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is why it took us a while to drop the collaboration tool because we thought we could charge money for that. We didn't think we could charge money for Blogger necessarily. I'm not sure what the plan was. I think the plan was to raise more money. And then it was like, oh, yeah.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, although half a million dollars was more money than I'd ever seen in my life. So it wasn't clear. I was like, we can do anything on a half million dollars. It's going to last us forever. Of course, we stopped doing the contract programming. We hired a few people. I think we got up to six or seven people. And then you're right, in like six months, we're running out of money.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. We raised half a million dollars in, I think, April of 2000, which was technically right after the stock market crash from the dot-com. It was the beginning of the crash But we were still able to get the money. I think the crash took a while to reverberate.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not at all. Especially blog. Even web blogs were quite niche. And I remember for a few years, the hardest thing about Blogger was explaining what it was.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Paul and Meg and I were all into, we all had our own weblogs. I had that moment I told you about where I turned my own, I just wrote code to easily post my site. And that gave me the idea. I was like, this could be a product, but it's too simple. That's what I actually told myself. And we talked about it as a team. It's like, it's too simple. It's not interesting. Anybody could do that. Our collaboration thing was not simple at all. It's very, very complex. And I didn't appreciate at the time the power of simplicity. But eventually we didn't pivot at first. We just created another product as a three-person company that was bootstrapped and also doing outside stuff.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was, and it was frustrating because everything you read is like, oh, it's so easy to raise money just rolling down to Sandhill Road. I didn't know anyone. Especially time, it's very, very much a connection game. So I was like, I don't know, like people say money is easy. Where do I go? Whose door do I knock on? But that's why I was doing the contract programming. So that's how we paid for it. Entirely bootstrapped. And so was able to then Meg and then Paul, who joined later, were able to do some of the programs.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when I left O'Reilly actually I'd gotten paid enough. By the way, when I got to O'Reilly, I was in debt to the IRS because I didn't pay payroll taxes at my first company. But I made enough money to pay off the $10,000 or whatever it is, which seemed insurmountable before that. And then, and I had learned enough more programming that they actually hired me as a contractor at O'Reilly after I quit as an employee in marketing. And so I rolled that into some other contract programming jobs. I ended up working through agencies. That's when I met Meg. I had already decided to start a new company. I knew what it was. And we started what we call Pyra Labs. We call that project management or productivity app that was web-based.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so by that time, I knew how to code, I wrote software to do it. A lot of people were doing web logs by hand, like editing HTML and then uploading. And I just wrote software. And I made it so I could go to my own website. I could hit N or in a little form would pop up and I could type something and hit a button and boom it was at the top of my web page. And that. I can still picture that moment because that was new and different. Like having a thought And then putting that on the World Wide Web available for the entire world. Of course, no one's looking at it, but just that going from thought to something published publicly in a matter of moments. Felt like an entirely new thing.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think. Yeah, there wasn't a ton of writing, and there certainly were probably even fewer readers, but it wasn't quite a blog yet. The big blogging innovations came later where there's actually like a chronological scroll of posts. And so this was all hand-rolled. And it was a little bit later, and it was actually after I started my next company that I really turned it into a blog.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It didn't quite overlap. I did have my own website from even before I moved to California. And yeah, I had written some essays. I had some stuff on Evhead.com. We called them personal home pages at the time. There was a couple essays I wrote that were The only one I remember is why Amazon shouldn't expand beyond books, obviously very, very wise. Prescient, prescient.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not great. Not great. Unlike high school, I tried very hard. I worked my butt off the first few months while I was only there a few months. I worked really hard. I did good work, but I was not a good employee. I was rebellious, and I would like have lots of opinions about what the company's strategy should be because I'd run a bunch of business books and I would write Tim emails or memos about how we shouldn't be doing this or that. There was some product that I didn't think was very good that I was assigned to write copy for. And I sent an email to the whole team saying why it wasn't good and we shouldn't really release the product. I was like,”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I found myself in this company. I remember distinctly being in a meeting, this is conference room with maybe like a dozen people in it and thinking. So, this is what a meeting is like having spent a couple years trying to have meetings and after shutting down my own company and thinking, maybe you should work at a company before you start a company. Which is a tip that I would recommend to most people.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so she moved to San Francisco, and I had never even been to California. But of course, by the time I was like, I was consuming every bit of information there was in every magazine and on the web about Silicon Valley. And I so wanted to be a part of it. But I think I was just scared. And it was like, oh, and even though I was bold enough to start an internet company in Nebraska, but I was terrified of moving to California and trying to be a part of the real thing until she moved. And I actually drove her out. From along that I80 goes straight from basically the farm into the heart of San Francisco. I drove over that Bay Bridge. I'm like, holy shit, this is. Happens And then I went home, and I was like Maybe I could go.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The internet company we called Plexus and then finally shut the doors on that. I felt terrible, just felt like this big loser. And I went back and I was then living on the farm again with my dad. And my girlfriend, because of that company, she was helping for a while and then ended up getting a job at another internet company in Lincoln. And then they offered her a position or maybe she requested it in San Francisco.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally could have, I think it was poor execution. Also location-wise. Could have been selling website development to anyone, but we're because of where we were, we were trying to sell it to local businesses in Lincoln. And they weren't really that into it. And to their credit, they shouldn't have been. Their customers weren't necessarily on the internet. We barely were not paying the bills with that was really broke the whole time. Was very broke.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, with my friend Paul and Craig, and we figured out how to make websites. So that's when we really got started on the internet. 93, 94 ended up doing some website development for companies. In Lincoln, yeah.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Famous copywriter. Yep. He wrote copy for other people. That's how he made his name. And then he started selling his own newsletter and seminars and stuff. But in retrospect, I was like, that was really sketchy and cheesy thing to be a part of. But I didn't know as a farm boy from Nebraska. So, yeah, I was just like, I'm going to. Want to write for you or with you or whatever, and it gives me an assignment to bring back in the morning. Turns out it's Memorial Day weekend, so the office is closed for three days, and so I'm literally sleeping in my van in Key West, terrified, no money. And the first night I stayed up all night to write to do this assignment, finally bring it back on Tuesday. Again, he thought someone else did it. He thought it was like a He didn't believe I wrote it. And then he was like, okay, I'll pay you to write.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His name was Gary Halbert. So I showed up at Gary Halbert's office. He was like, who are you? And I told him I was there. I was going to, I wanted to write. I was like, I could write for you. He's like, Okay, he thought I was joking.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually moved to Key West Florida because there was this marketing guru there who I wanted to study under. So I wasn't necessarily, I just, I knew I didn't know anything. I had a very strong sense in my abilities, and again, that like kind of fearless independence, like, I'll figure it out. But I was aware I didn't know anything and I didn't have any money. And so there was this guy that I was like, I'm going to go work for that guy. I'm just going to show up and then I'll be able to do stuff.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was, I probably got into some multi-level thing, but yeah, there's multi-level stuff and mail order. Mail order was really... Like the get rich path that I was like, oh, I could do that because you can do it from home. It doesn't matter who you are. It's sort of like pre-internet”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or, like, I'm gonna, I would read entrepreneur magazine and order stuff out of the back or Success Magazine. There were all these like.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hey, uh... I was just in such a rush. The whole time I was like, I gotta do something in the world. I thought I am not going to get a degree and go get a job. That's just not me. I'm going to make something. I'm going to build something. That for some reason I was in a tremendous rush to do it. I always had some scheme or something that I Thought I was going to go do. I was into really embarrassing get-rich mail order ideas. I was like... drop shipping”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out student in high school. I was never a good student. I wasn't rebellious in like I was getting in trouble with the law or doing anything super dangerous, but I really didn't want to. What I was told, or in kind of in any regard. Like, I never lined up to institutions or anything. And I was like, I'm not going to try hard and get good grades. I'm just not going to do that. And so I never did any homework. I also, for some reason, I think I didn't sleep. Class in high school. So, yeah, it was a bad student.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in many ways, I adopted those values and didn't question them at all. I think the part that I didn't resonate with as much was really the culture. And it was very sports centric, literally every boy in my high school played football except for me. And that was, I was somewhat athletic, but I was fairly small. And I just didn't wasn't into it. I didn't like it. And I was like, that's not what I want to do.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel very fortunate that that's where I grew up. I think there's tons of great stuff that I drew from that from a values and character perspective that was just fundamentally ingrained in me and very fitting with being an entrepreneur. To a lot of people, the juxtaposition going from farm boy to tech founder sounds weird, but the things that are very aligned are these ideas of independence and self-reliance. And all farmers are basically entrepreneurs. And that ethos of figuring things out yourself actually having to be fairly innovative, that was what I saw my dad doing from birth. And there was just, so the idea of starting a company was very natural to me because it was just like, well, why would you go align with some institution? That seemed like a much stranger idea.”
2024-05-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was devastated. I was also shocked. I didn't even think it was possible. I went from owning 100% of this company to being kicked out 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