Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams
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How did you feel when you found out that you were being let go as CEO? I was devastated. I was also shocked. I didn't even think it was possible. And 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 did.

Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a college dropout from Nebraska moved to California, started two major blogging platforms, and somewhere along the way, co-founded a little company called Twitter.

One day, far in the future, there's a possibility you'll find yourself in a bookstore and come across a history book about this time, about our era. When that happens, thumb to the index section, and I'm pretty sure you'll find lots of entries under the word Twitter.

Now, just to get the elephant out of the room here, I don't think Twitter is entirely guilty of the things that it gets accused of. Misinformation, polarization, cancel culture, etc. But I do think that over the past 10 years or so, Twitter did help to shape the politics and culture, at least in the United States, in good and bad ways.

None of this was anticipated by Ev Williams. Twitter was never supposed to do any of this. And it's possible that Ev and Jack and Biz and Noah, the original founders, were just naive.

And the product they came up with, like many successful products, wasn't even supposed to happen. At the time, Ed was pursuing, believe it or not, podcasting. In 2004, Ev co-founded a podcasting platform called Odeo. Now, going into podcasting at that time was a little like getting into electric cars in the 1990s, just a little too far ahead of its time. So not surprisingly, Odeo didn't work out.

But a side project of Odeo, one that was being worked on by Jack Dorsey, did. And that side project would become Twitter. Twitter, of course, became Ev's best-known brand. But he also founded Blogger and later Medium, three hugely influential products in the era of social media. Along the way, Ev learned what it meant to be a really bad people person, something he spent much of the past 10 years working to get better at.

Now, like a few well-known tech founders, Ev Williams is a college dropout. He barely made it through two years before striking out on his own. Ev grew up on his family's corn and soybean farm in a rural part of Nebraska. It was a tiny place, only about 400 people.

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 of going from farm boy to entrepreneur

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...

like align with some institution. That seemed like a much stranger idea. 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, I wasn't into it. I didn't like it. I was like, that's not what I want to do. So, all right. So you're, and would you describe yourself, obviously you're smart, but would you describe yourself as a good student? Were you a standout student in high school? No, I was never a good student. I wasn't rebellious and like I was getting in trouble with the law or doing anything super dangerous, but I really didn't want to,

do 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 gonna try hard and get good grades I'm not I mean I'm just not gonna do that and so I never did any homework I also for some reason I think I didn't sleep at night and I fell asleep in every single class in high school so yeah it was a bad student

But I read that you were, like growing up, you were really into computers, right? And then eventually when you went to college, I don't think you majored in computer science or had any specific kind of plan, right? In fact, I think you dropped out. And I guess you lasted about a year and a half or so at the University of Nebraska. Why? I mean, why did you drop out? I was just in such a rush. The whole time...

I was like, I got to 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. And 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 in a really embarrassing situation.

Get rich mail order ideas. I was like, you know, like drop shipping. I would read Entrepreneur Magazine and order stuff out of the back. Or Success Magazine. There were all these multi-level marketing things. 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 was sort of like pre-internet. So when you dropped out, what was the first thing you started to do to support yourself? 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 would 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. What was his name? His name was Gary Halbert. Okay. Okay.

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. And he's like, okay. He thought I was joking. He was a, I'm just looking, I've just looked him up. He was a copywriter. He was a famous copywriter. 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. Okay. But in retrospect, I was like, that was really, it's a sketchy and cheesy thing to be a part of. But I didn't know. I was a farm boy from Nebraska. So yeah, I was just like, I'm going to, I want to write for you or with you or whatever. And he gives me an assignment to bring back in the morning and

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. And again, he thought it was, 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, I'll pay you to write.

I'm looking into Gary Halbert, and I mean, he's kind of a legend. So you said that I didn't know he was, but like apparently the most legendary copywriter of all time died in 2007. But but this was your first kind of mentor. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. How long did you end up staying in Key West? Seven months. OK, so pretty relatively short time. And I guess I guess after that.

you go back to Nebraska to kind of try your hand at a couple businesses and, you know, they don't really pan out. And then you land on this idea eventually to start a website business. This is around, I guess, the early 90s to sort of make websites for local businesses. Is that right? Yeah. With my friend Paul and Craig and we figured out how to make websites and

So that's when we really got started on the internet. 93, 94, ended up doing some website development for companies in Lincoln. And did that pan out? I mean, there's lots of, we've had people on the show who started that way in the 90s and really built successful businesses that way.

Totally could have. I think it was poor execution. Also, location-wise, we could have been selling website development to anyone, but 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. So

We, you know, we barely, you know, we were not paying the bills with that. Was really broke the whole time. Was very broke. But you're a young guy. You were a young guy. I mean, you eventually moved to the Bay Area in 97, I think. And this was, you were what, 25 at this point, maybe a little older, actually. No, I was 25 when I moved. 25, yeah. But no degree? No.

No degree. But you had a couple of failed ventures behind you. So when you came out to California, did you come out with a job? Or did you just come out and say, I'm going to look for something? I actually did get a job. So after we really shut down that company in Lincoln. The internet? The internet company we called Plexus. And then finally shut the doors on that. I felt...

I 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.

And so she moved to San Francisco and I had never even been to California. But of course, by the time I was like every, 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, 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 I-80 goes straight from basically the farm into the heart of San Francisco. Yep. And then I drove over that Bay Bridge and like, holy shit, this is where it all happens. Yep. And then I went home and I was like, maybe I could go. And yeah, and so you do. Eventually you do move to the Bay Area and get a job here.

I think you got a job at a software company called O'Reilly Media, which is just north of, about an hour north of San Francisco in the town of Sebastopol, which I love. I know it very well. And I think that you were hired to do marketing, right? Like to write ad copy and that kind of thing. So was that good? Was that interesting? 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, oh, so this is what a meeting is like.

Having spent a couple of 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. Yeah. Which is a tip that I would recommend to most people. But so that's very important advice. And here you are, 25, for the first time you're working for a company rather than your own startups. And how did you do in that environment? I mean, you described yourself in high school as just kind of like,

an outsider a little bit and somebody who is not really good working within the confines and structures of

other people's rules. And so here you are now in a company. How did you do in that environment? Not great. Not great. Unlike high school, I tried very hard. I worked my butt off the first few months. Well, 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 have lots of opinions about what the company's strategy should be because I'd read 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 release the product. I was like, doesn't everybody love a 25-year-old who does that? Oh my gosh. The new employee. Oh my gosh. Cringe. Cringe.

And by the way, if you're listening and you're 25 and you do that, do that. It's okay. There's nothing wrong with it. I'm just saying that you will piss everybody off, but that still doesn't... Still, you should do it. All right. So you're like...

You're trying – and while you were there, I guess, something else you started to do on the side for fun was – wasn't it called blogging? But you were starting to like put your – I guess you started your own website. And you started to just write your own thoughts on it. Well, tell me what this website was. Yeah, it didn't quite overlap. I did have my own website from –

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 homepages 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. What else? Yeah.

I don't remember. I think a lot of it, for a short while, I wrote just like kind of newsy technology updates. At this website, evhead.com. Evhead.com. And you would just post things. This is before people used the word blogging, 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 thing.

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. Right. I got it. Okay. And so by that time, I knew how to code.

I wrote software to do it. A lot of people were doing weblogs 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, and a little form would pop up, and I could type something and hit a button, and boom, it was at the top of my webpage. And that...

was just, I can still picture that moment because that was new and different. Like having a thought and then putting that on the worldwide 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. So meantime, okay, so that's happening. That's one thing kind of happening, but

But meantime, you had left O'Reilly and you had...

some programming experience, right? You're not a, you weren't a, I think by your own, even your own account, you weren't a great programmer, but you were getting, probably getting better at it. Yep. And you met this woman named Meg Horahan. This is in the late 90s. And I guess she was a developer and designer living in San Francisco. You meet her and I guess by chance, and the two of you decide to start a business together. Tell me about, about that, what happened? Yeah.

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 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 called PyroLabs. We called it a project management or productivity app that was web-based and

Collaboration. Collaboration, project management, that space. How did you finance that? I mean, this is the end of 98, I think, and this is the height of the dot-com boom. Was there, was it, I mean, as a 20, I don't know, now 28, 26-year-old, was it easy for you to raise money? No, it was. And it was frustrating because everything you read is like, oh, it's so easy to raise money just rolling down the sandhill road. Yeah.

I didn't know anyone. Especially time is very, very much a connection game. So I was like, I don't know. 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 programming. Paul was your high school friend. My high school friend. Yeah, he moved out. Yeah. So, and did you ever find any customers to sell this software to? No. And we never charged for it. Yeah, there was just a handful of users. It was very beta-based.

And so from what I understand, fairly early on in the company, you made a pivot. You moved away from project collaboration, project management software to this other thing, which was this side thing that you'd been working on, which was basically web logging. Yeah.

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, it's 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. And the product was, what was the product called? It was called Blogger. Blogger. Yeah. So you go to blogger.com, create an account.

put in where your website was, and then easily post. I imagine that the word blog or blogger was not yet popularized at that point. No, not at all. Especially blog. Even weblogs were quite niche and...

I remember for a few years, the hardest thing about Blogger was explaining what it was. Okay. I guess on the strength of this, you did manage to raise some money for it, about half a million dollars. 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. So you raised half a million dollars. The crash happens. And that's probably not going to be enough money to keep this company going for that long. So did you go out and try and raise more money? I mean, in that environment? 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 a million dollars. That was 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.

Because you had no revenue. You weren't selling this. You were just giving it away for free. What was the business plan? How were you going to make money? 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. Figure it out. Yeah, this maybe. And then it was in the fall of 2000 when things started getting really bleak, and

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 because it was bothering me. I didn't like that path. And I think this, in retrospect, was a very important moment because we

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. It was a very powerful idea. It's what really got me most excited about the internet in the first place. I loved what we were doing. I loved the idea of bringing that to millions of more people

And so like company blogging, I was like, fine, maybe we can make money, but I kind of rather go out of business. It's, that's not interesting. Let's, let's not do that. Um, I guess you did basically get close to going out of business, right? Because at a certain point, Pyra, um, you stopped, you stopped being able to pay employees. That 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. Um,

And then eventually it just got to a 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 and said, we don't have any money to pay you past this next pay period. So you're welcome to come back. I think this is on 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. When we come back in just a moment, how Ev brings Blogger back to life and then heads into a whole new venture, which does not go anywhere until it turns into Twitter. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

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Hey, 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 had 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. 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 it's,

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. I 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.

Did you, this is, you know, 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. Yeah.

Was 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. So 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 or bust. Bust, yeah. And that was part of the reason that I didn't want to give up. 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. Actually, 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 are writing about their experiences, including a lot of people in New York,

And it was hard to find out, 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 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.

So by 2002, you were able to actually start charging for Blogger 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 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.

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. 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. Yeah.

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. And so we were just kind of plopped in there and...

trying to figure out how to survive. And to their credit, tons and tons of big companies bought these tiny internet things at the time and then they would just die. It killed them. 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, you know, paid for that and, you know, 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. And 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 –

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. And then...

Biz Stone, later co-founder of Twitter, he worked with me at 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, 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. Yeah, Adam Curry, the former MTV VJ, a lot of people don't know, is truly the pioneer of podcasting. Totally, 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. 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. So that was it? Yeah. Yeah.

And so we built a – Odeo.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. Exactly. 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 that we raised money to do. We made the mistake of actually raising too much money pre-product, really even pre-product. We raised $5 million, which...

was a terrible mistake because 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 compete. We'll do it better, whatever. But they had an insurmountable advantage. Like people, they had the software. Yeah. So when that happened...

What did you do? I mean, you raised $5 million 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. And so what did you do? 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'd 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. 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. He 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...

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. Instagram, yep. 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? 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 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 come up with something. You have other ideas. And I always prided myself on having lots of ideas and,

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 a status update service.

And the first version 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 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, I should mention. Right. 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. 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. 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, 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 them in 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.

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. 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 was like March of 06 when it was like it went live, but it was still tiny. It was just a part of the podcasting business still. It wasn't. OK. And you guys had already called it Twitter by this point.

Twitter, in my opinion, one of the best names, may it rest in peace, for a tech product. I think Noah came up with that on a list of names. Noah Glass, he came up with the name. I remember seeing an email where he had been brainstorming names and it was on a list. I'm like, ooh, Twitter, 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. Twitch was also good. Could have been Twitch. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, we called it Twitter, but Odeo 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 it was sort of like, yeah, you're stalking your friends. You're seeing what they're up to all the time. But we still had Odeo. And Biz said this very wise thing at the time, which was, even though we were only a dozen people, Twitter was such a nascent idea. It was 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. Imagine the very first days, 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 I've come to realize is the most important thing. And 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...

and send these real-time updates. We used 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.

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Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz.

So it's around 2006, and Ev 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 Odeo with. Right. And just to clarify, you, you buy it and obvious is the company you form that includes both Odeo 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 eventually but did you know in your mind that

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, 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. 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 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 and

you just kind of, you downplay that. It's like, ah, well, there's no evidence to back up what I'm feeling. 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 Twitter is this thing that you really start to pursue. I think by the end of 2006, you're,

You had about 60,000 users. And it was initially, right, 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 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 the 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, or what became known as tweets, were limited to 140 characters, I think it was in...

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 the turning, really the turning point happens in March of 07, which is South by Southwest. Right. You take Twitter to South by Southwest. It becomes a turning point for many companies, Airbnb, Amazon.

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. There was a screen that had these little tweets floating by of people saying,

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. 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. 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. And 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 like 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. And 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, too.

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. But 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, 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. You know, let's keep working on it. Tell me a little bit about because you 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. And 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 secret, it's been written about, there was a falling out. Yeah, so the course of events was Twitter and Odeo were just products inside of Obvious, which I ran.

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. So 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 take, 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, but maybe you were frustrated with his leadership when he was CEO. He was frustrated with your meddling. That's a, that's a, that's an old story that's happened in every company. Yeah. I think, yeah, I think we were frustrated with each other and, and,

It 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. 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. 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. You had some experiences with failure, to say the least. Yes, 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. And that, I'm assuming, was that the end of your relationship? Was that more or less kind of the break? That was the break. 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 became CEO, which...

It's 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.

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 I was on the board for multiple years.

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. Yeah. So he left, you became the CEO, and this would be kind of a two-year relationship.

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. 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 the sale never happened. What happened? Yeah.

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 I 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...

half a billion dollars. And 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 a 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 that

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, you need someone to do it for you or you're in trouble. Um, so there's famous cases like YouTube sold to Google, obviously amazing acquisition for Google, but YouTube was, was really in a lot of trouble both with, um,

copyright infringement and the scaling and infrastructure costs of YouTube really needed this

the shelter that Google could provide and lost money 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 the 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? Like 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 Twitter.

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, in the...

you know, millions of column inches have been written about Twitter. That'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. If I felt something...

intuitively, but every like the evidence or the data or the logic, everyone was arguing something else that I would just I got frozen. Or if the decision was about a person and I was 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 conflict aversion is, for some people, it's a character trait and one 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, especially if you have imposter syndrome and look, I'm a farm boy from Nebraska who was running this company. I was like, I'd 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, like for entrepreneurs, so, so important to realize like 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. I 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 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 ton of fear. I had 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? Was 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. And so...

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.

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? How? What? Couldn't believe it. And then I was very upset and very mad. Went through all the stages of grief.

It's interesting because from one perspective, people might say, well, who cares? You're going to walk out of this a 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 it 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. Okay. So this chapter of your life is over, but you clearly...

You 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. 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 the whiteboard and I wrote medium. I was like, I don't know what it is, but we should call it that. Yeah.

And then 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 webpage and didn't fan it out, if there wasn't this follow mechanism, it wouldn't be very interesting. It would essentially just be Blogger. So it's the distribution system that created all the value.

And this is why I call my companies obvious. It was obvious to me that that should exist. So the idea of Medium was basically to, I mean, how was it going to be different from what Blogger was? It was 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 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 your – how the rest of your life and career unfolds. And you probably – I don't know. You have no idea. But you're not old. I mean, you're in your early 50s. And, you know, you've achieved incredible success and built amazing, well-known brands, blogger, bloggers.

Twitter medium. I mean, very few people can say that you 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?

So 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...

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. 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'm do a little philanthropy and,

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 you were at the right place at the right time?

A whole lot of both, a whole lot of both for sure. And I, and I think anyone who doesn't, 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, like to the point of decreasing returns for sure. And,

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. That'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 Ramteen Erebloui. 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. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

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From Picasso to Cleopatra, the podcast Legacy looks at the lives of some of the most famous people to have ever lived and asks if they have the reputation they deserve.

In this season, they take a closer look at J. Edgar Hoover. He was the director of the FBI for half a century. An immensely powerful political figure, he was said to know everything about everyone. He held the ear of eight presidents and terrified them all. When asked why he didn't fire Hoover, JFK replied, you don't fire God.

From chasing gangsters to pursuing communists to relentlessly persecuting Dr. Martin Luther King and civil rights activists, Hoover's dirty tricks and tactics have been endlessly echoed in the years since his death. And his political playbook still shapes American politics today. Follow Legacy Now wherever you listen to podcasts. You can discover more to the story with Wondery's other top history podcasts, including American Scandal, Black History for Real, and even The Royals.