Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams

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29:26Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2001, and Ev Williams is determined to get Blogger up and running, even if he has to do it alone. Yeah, I couldn't imagine stopping. Once everybody left, my costs went from$50 ,000 a month to$5 ,000 a month, still to pay for the servers. and I just wanted to keep building it. So I kept building it. And just by yourself working on this site, updating it, trying to improve it. Yeah, it was both really sad and very freeing. And it was sad because, I mean, you reach that point in a company, there has been a lot of stress and a lot of angst.

30:18And 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 everyone was mad at me at the end. And I felt really bad because I felt like I failed. They were mad at you when it failed. They were 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 wasn't talking to anybody, but I was able to show up at work every day and not explain anything to anybody, not have to argue.

31:05I was just like, I am going to build whatever the heck I want. And that felt great. And that feeling of creation was really what always drove me. And so that was very liberating and very fun. So did you – this is a little bit complicated, but I think that at the time, some of the people who had left Pyra felt like burned, right? Your view was, well, I stayed. I kept running this thing. So like what do you expect? But some of the people said, Ev doesn't know how to manage teams. And by the way, I say this as somebody who still struggles to manage people. It's really hard. But you were criticized.

31:49Was that a fair criticism that you just were not good at, I don't know, at managing teams? 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. Because I never worked at companies, I never saw.

32:33So yeah, I was terrible, terrible in those days at dealing with people, for sure. I mean, Blogger eventually started to gain traction. What started to happen? I mean, you know, within a year, I mean, this is 2001. And of course, we know what happens in 2001, September 11th. I wonder if that had something to do with more people using it. It did. More people going to blogs. It did. What happened? Yeah. So blogging was kind of growing the whole time despite the dot-com boom and bust. Bust, yeah. And that was part of the reason that I didn't want to give up. The numbers were good. And then 9-11 was actually a big moment for blogs.

33:20And it's when, the way I would describe it, it's when journalists started taking them seriously. Actually, 9-11, the day 9-11 happened, I actually spent the day aggregating because there wasn't really a real-time search. And of course, there's no Twitter or anything. But people are writing about their experiences, is, 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 culling these posts as they're coming in from database and put up special pages about that. And some really big blogs emerged after that time that really covering the news.

34:00And 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 so by 2002 you were able to actually start charging for blogger um and and it started to bring in some revenue like you guys were getting people paying money to use it yeah somewhere along the line we 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.

34:42And 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. Of course, many people who know the story know where this is going because it attracted Google's attention. And they made an acquisition offer to you. And in February of 2003, they bought Blogger from you. And here you are, you're 31 and you come into some money. Yeah, that was pretty amazing. All right. So you go to work for Google, you become a Google employee because they acquired Blogger, which was a really big deal at the time.

35:24Did you, did you, was it clear to you soon after you arrived to Google that you were not fit to work in a big organization? Yeah, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. And I was like 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'd 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.

36:06And so we were just kind of plopped in there and, you know, 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. Killed them. It killed them. Yeah. 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. Yeah. So that's amazing and super lucky to have felt that, but I didn't know how to operate within Google.

36:49And so, yeah, after Google went public, I left. All right. So 2004, you leave Google and you start to noodle on a new idea because you made some money from Blogger and the new idea would become – you started a podcast platform in 2004 called Odeo, which must have been – I mean, this is before Apple Podcasts. This has got to be one of the first podcast. What even was a – did you call it podcasting? Did you say, hey, let's make an audio platform? Tell me about this idea. 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.

37:50And 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 started looking into it. It was like around the same time, people like Adam Curry and Dave Weiner had started talking about podcasting.

38:29Adam Curry, the former MTV VJ, a lot of people don't know, is truly the pioneer of podcasting. Yeah. Adam Curry was doing like a daily show, I think, around that. When nobody was listening. I mean, who even knew how to connect your iPod to the computer 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.

39:10I 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. So that was it? 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. So you built this entire platform to make it easy. There was nothing like it.

39:50Exactly. So you've spent the time and money on building this. And then Apple comes out with their own podcast service on iTunes. And what did that mean for your business? It basically obsoleted everything we 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 even pre-product we raised five million dollars which was a terrible mistake because it it allowed us to grow the team to the 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 we can compete we'll we'll do it better or whatever but they had they had an insurmountable advantage like people they had the software yeah so when that happened what did you do i mean you raised five million dollars to start a podcast company and all of a sudden the big 800 pound gorilla is like actually we'll take it from here yeah um and so what we what did you do we we tinkered for a few months like i said we We were like, okay, maybe we'll create tools for podcasters.

41:03And that was another big lesson for me because I listened to podcasts, but I'd never created podcasts. And one of my fundamental rules I've come to 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. All right. In this company, Odeo, that you started with Noah Glass, there was a guy you hired. and I guess he kind of approached you.

41:52He had written to you and sent you his resume and he was a young programmer named Jack Dorsey. And I guess you hired him on the strength of his resume. Tell me about him and what he was doing at Odeo. Yeah, we hired Jack just as a programmer and we liked him. I think around the same time, We also had Kevin Systrom, 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. And I guess Jack on the side had some kind of idea that he was talking about that was intriguing to him that was more about like not audio blogging but microblogging?

42:48Sort 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 Odeo. 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. and the board was like, well, we didn't invest in podcasting, we invested in you. So 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 what he had been thinking about, I guess, this idea for a while of like a status update service.

43:53And the first version that I heard, it was actually attached to audio. Like, 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 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 this is Biz Stone who also had worked with you on Blogger Biz came over to Odeo fairly early from Google and so Jack and Biz were working on a thing there was maybe three or four teams and then Noah the original founder of Odeo.

44:39So 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. So instead of just, but why would you just send them a direct text message? Because I guess it costs money. Well, you could send it to multiple people at once. That was harder to do at the time. That was harder to do. There were a couple of services that let you do that, create 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, like update your status like say like, okay, going to the park might be your status and you could see your list of friends you could see the order updated of their status and that was the whole thing 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.

45:41And 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. So at a certain point, this seems like, I mean, you guys had to make a decision like, well, let's pursue this thing. so even when it debuted because i think it it was like march of 06 when it was like it went live but it was still tiny uh it was just a part of the podcasting business still it wasn't okay and and you guys had already called it twitter by this point twitter my opinion one of the best names may it rest in peace um for this for for a tech product um i think noah came up with that on a list of names.

46:28Noah Glass, he came up with the name. 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. It was like, what's that feeling when you feel your pocket buzz? And it was like, it's like a Twitch. And he looked up Twitch in the dictionary and next to that was Twitter, which is a dictionary word. Another good name. Twitch was also good. Could have been Twitch. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, we called it Twitter, but audio still existed. So when 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.

47:05And it's sort of like, yeah, you're stalking your friends. You're seeing what they're up to all the time. Right. Okay. But 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's like, if we put everyone on this idea, this idea is like a small ember that if it gets too much oxygen, it's 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, and Twitter was another side project. And people still think Twitter is a dumb idea.

47:44Imagine the very first days, they're like, what? That makes no sense. And okay, so what are the numbers? Even after we launched publicly, it was 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 has, I've come to realize, is the most important thing. And like it's feeling is much more important than metrics early on. Why did it feel like a thing to you? 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.

48:29We use the term real time a lot then because the internet wasn't real time. Email was asynchronous. Web got updated kind of slowly. And so it was 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. When we come back in just a moment, how Ev makes the right moves to grow Twitter, but then fails to realize that he's no longer the right guy to run it. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

49:24Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2006, and F. Williams and his partners are juggling a few things. Odeo, a struggling podcasting service, and Twitter, a site that only a few hundred people are using. And Ev realizes that for Twitter to get off the ground, he has to change how the company is run. There was 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 right and just to clarify you you buy it and obvious is the company you form that includes uh both odio and twitter and yeah i mean very smart decision on your part i mean i think probably some investors wish that that they could have been a part of it you know maybe some some were or were eventually but did you know in your mind did you have an inkling that twitter i mean you say there was an energy there was a feeling you had did you already in 2006 feel like okay this thing i think could be the next blogger it could be bigger 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.

50:54And 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 and testing and people try to be very scientific about it. If 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.

51:43yeah and so i can't defend it but yeah there's enough i feel enough that i'm going to keep investing in it so you basically now are the owner of this new company and and twitter is this thing that you really start to pursue i think by by the end of 2006 you had about 60 000 users and it was initially right it was like it was like a status update like the question was what are you doing right that was the first thing and then you would just populate it with i'm at the grocery store whatever it is but but this is and it's still before the iphone comes out so people are doing this on most people are like i'm sitting at my desk working on my computer yeah or here's a link uh and this whole time we're 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 or 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 yeah i guess Really, the turning point happens in March of 07, which is South by Southwest, right?

53:11You take Twitter to South by Southwest. It becomes a turning point for many companies, Airbnb and others later on. But in 2007, you go to South by Southwest. And what did you do to attract attention there? 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 trade show floor is not where you wanted to be and that everyone hung out in the hallway. I spent many hours hanging out in the hallway at South by Southwest. So we contacted the organizers there and said, can we actually set up a screen in the hallway? A screen? A TV screen.

53:57There was a screen that had these little tweets floating by of people. Just scrolling, tweets scrolling up. 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. And so what happened? I mean, people started to see other people. Basically, everybody there got on Twitter. And, you know, it was a few thousand people.

54:40And, 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. Wow. And so when you left South by Southwest, how big did it grow? 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.

55:33And I have to imagine that what happened at South by Southwest starts to attract a lot of attention. And so did you start to get investors kind of banging on your door, wanting to get involved? 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. Can I ask you about the broader idea of Twitter? As you started to see this thing really grow, and I've seen you talk about it at the time, already at the time saying things like, this is going to be a way for people to really build community and connect.

56:23And if there's like an earthquake in San Francisco, like this is a way. And some of that happened. A lot of that happened. Like there was an idealized vision of what this was going to bring to the world, that it was going to bring the world closer together and make us all happier and friendlier and kinder. But it really has been a force for Division 2. Did you in any way anticipate that that would happen? That Twitter would actually exacerbate division and tension? I did not. Certainly not in those very early days. You know, the team over the years has gotten a lot of flack on the trust and safety side.

57:06but those people are some of the most earnest, hardworking, integrity-driven folks I've ever seen in the world of business. And we didn't realize, it's sort of like, in some ways, 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. Tell me a little bit about – because basically you were running Odeo, but it was clear that Twitter was the product now in this bigger company. And Jack was – I think he had been named the CEO of Twitter. And you were the chairman of Twitter.

57:56and this is a little tricky i understand because we're talking about personalities and big personalities and people who were friends and you know and had falling outs but how did your relationship with jack dorsey begin to change because i know i mean this is no no secret it's been written about there was a falling out yeah so the the course of events was twitter and audio 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. And I was just like, I just kind of want to tinker and invent new things.

58:33So that was the time when we spun it out into Twitter Inc. that offered Jack the job of CEO. And I, again, like Jack is not here and others aren't here to, this is not a documentary show. It's a one person's perspective. The story that I've read is that he became frustrated because you were, you know, I don't know, maybe you were frustrated with his leadership when he was CEO. He was frustrated with your meddling. That's an old story that's happened in every company. Yeah, I think we were frustrated with each other. And it goes back to what I said earlier about being not good at relationships.

59:15I 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 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. Our stuff kept breaking. We couldn't handle the growth. Facebook was always looming over us and felt like they could eat our lunch at any time and they were trying to. So the stress was incredibly high and Jack went from individual contributor.

1:00:04He 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. You had some experiences with failure, to say the least. For sure. For sure. And so, yeah, we didn't see eye to eye. We're very different, actually. We both desperately, desperately wanted it to succeed and both thought we were correct and we didn't talk about it in a healthy way. Yeah. All right. So eventually the frustration got to a point where you asked the board to relieve him of his duties. And he was this is well known. He was basically kind of pushed out.

1:00:49And that I'm assuming was that the end of your relationship? Was that more or less kind of the break? that was the break though yeah that was the break for sure um and again my i 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 became ceo which is 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.

1:01:27So understandably, he was hurt and upset about that. Have you guys ever talked since then or repaired your relationship or not really? Yeah, we've talked. I was, you know, long story in the Twitter saga. As you know, he eventually came back as CEO. And you were on the board. And I was on the board. I had gotten pushed out 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 as 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.

1:02:12Yeah. So he left, you became the CEO and this would be kind of a two-year stint for you. You didn't know that at the time. You also, I guess, were approached in 2008 by Mark Zuckerberg to buy you out. Yeah. What, I mean, what happened? What was the story? Because from what I understand, you guys said, well, you know, we think we're worth half a billion dollars and Mark Zuckerberg was like, okay, yeah, that sounds right but but the sale never happened what yeah what happened uh yeah there's a story that biz tells about biz and i going down to palo alto and meeting with mark um and it was just mark and biz and i like 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.

1:03:22And that was a lot of money. And we were maybe, no, we were 30 people at the time. So yeah, that was serious. We had to take that seriously. We of course didn't know what Facebook would become either. Eventually that half billion would be, who knows? I don't know if you did the math on that. But I went to the board and I thought about it very deeply and I came up with this, 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. You need someone to do it for you or you're in trouble. 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 the shelter that Google could provide and lost money for years and years and years.

1:04:29And 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. All right. I want to go back to your leadership. And just to point out, being CEO of Twitter is like being an Italian prime minister, right? Like you don't last that long, okay? And that just was the theme, right?

1:05:05Like it's a hard horse to ride. You're just not going to last that long. But there was a rap on you. And I say this not to make you feel bad or criticize you, but I'm curious just from a self-reflective perspective on what you think about it and whether you learned from it if it's in retrospect helpful. But the rap on you was you're too slow to make decisions. and also you were prone to hiring people you knew, which is a big no-no for some people. Again, not saying that's right or wrong. That was the criticism that's, you know, and the massive, you know, millions of column inches have been written about Twitter.

1:05:48That's come out. Do you think that's fair? 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 if I felt something intuitively but the evidence or the data or the logic everyone was arguing something else then I would just, I got frozen.

1:06:51Or if the decision was about a person and I was lacking the confidence to really upset people. And that was a huge weakness for sure. And so how did you overcome that? Or did you ever over, I mean, we'll go on to your next company. I got better. having having conflict aversion is for some people it's a character trait and and and what i respect because i identify with it yeah it's not like embracing conflict is a great character trait either but i think conflict aversion comes from fear fear of what fear of rejection i think i think especially if you have imposter syndrome. And look, I'm a farm boy from Nebraska who was running this company.

1:07:44I was like, I never had a job where I rose through the ranks. Even with the success that you had and the psychological kind of, let's say, foundation of wealth that you had built, you still had that? 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, for entrepreneurs, so, so important to realize what is driving you and where are 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.

1:08:30I didn't know I was going to be fired at all because no one ever told me I was doing a bad job. So there was a whole culture of conflict diversion. 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 ton of fear. I had both a lot of confidence about what 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. It was just really about being called out for not knowing what I was doing. How did you feel when you found out that you were being let go as CEO? Were you devastated?

1:09:14Was it a dark time? I was devastated, devastated. I can't like describe how... I was also shocked. I didn't even think it was possible. I went from owning 100 % of this company to being kicked out. That was my own fault. 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. I was like, oh, we're all on the same side. I knew I was barely keeping things together, but it's also the nature of fast-growing companies. The company grew 10x in 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.

1:10:06And 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? How? What? Couldn't believe it. And then I was very upset and very mad, went through all the stages of grief.

1:10:30It's interesting because from one perspective, people might say, well, who cares? You're going to walk out of this rich guy and who cares? But personally, it felt like a failure, like you had not succeeded as running this thing. 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 I was really sad about that. But I was also terribly embarrassed. And I spent years trying to prove myself. 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 did.

1:11:23Okay, so this chapter of your life is over, but you clearly have an energy and a drive, and you clearly were going to do something else, which you did. It's no secret to people listening it was going to be medium, which is kind of amazing because it's like the thing that you first really had success in, which was blogging, you kind of go back to that. It's like a 360 return. Tell me about what did you want it to do? The seeds of Medium were really planted while I was still at Twitter. And the initial genesis is 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.

1:12:13so 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? I walked up to the whiteboard and I wrote medium. I was like, I don't know what it is, but we should call it that.

1:12:31Then the idea was essentially what we had learned from social networks was that the value was in the connectivity. like if twitter just did what blogger did and posted your tweet to a web page and didn't fan it out to if there wasn't this follow mechanism it wouldn't be very interesting it would it would essentially just be bloggers so it's the distribution system that created all the value and that's why i call my company is obvious it was obvious to me that that should exist so the idea of medium was basically to i mean what how was it going to be different from from what Blogger was? It was the network.

1:13:11It 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 webpage, you couldn't follow the webpage. And there's no real reason to write on Blogger versus anywhere else because there's no audience on Blogger. Tell me about how the rest of your life and career unfolds. And you don't know, you have no idea. But you're not old. I mean, you're in your early 50s. And you've achieved incredible success and built amazing, well-known brands, blogger, Twitter, medium. I mean, very few people can say that.

1:13:55You obviously, as a result of that, became incredibly wealthy. You can't possibly spend a fraction of the money that you earned in your lifetime. How do you imagine the rest of your life unfolding? I mean, starting more businesses, investing, how do you think it's going to go?

1:14:20so after I stepped down from Medium which was almost coming up on two years a guy named Tony Stubblebine also someone who I've known for a very long time I hired him to run that company he's doing a great job, doing a better job than I was doing running Medium 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, I didn't want to run another company. I am not running it.

1:15:00I'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. When you look back on your career so far, because so far you still have a long life ahead of you. How much of where you got to do you attribute to the work you put in, the grind? And how much do you think happened because you were lucky?

1:15:42You were hit the right place at the right time? A 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 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 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.

1:16:36That's Ev Williams, founder of Blogger and Medium and co-founder of Twitter. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's free. This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson with music composed by Rumtin Ereblewe. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Carla Estevez. Our audio engineers were Gilly Moon and Josh Newell. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Chris Massini, Casey Herman, JC Howard, Sam Paulson, John Isabella, Catherine Seifer, and Malia Agudelo.

1:17:12I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

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