Evan Williams cofounded Pyra Labs in 1999. Originally,
Pyra intended to build a web-based project
management tool. Williams developed Blogger to
manage his personal weblog, and it quickly became
an important mechanism for sharing ideas internally
at Pyra.
Once launched publicly, Blogger grew rapidly,
and Pyra Labs decided to focus on it full-time. But
Blogger.com did not generate a lot of revenue at first,
and as the Bubble deflated in 2001, Pyra seemed near
death. Williams remained as the only employee and
managed to bring the company...

for clients around their intranets and help them organize their work and personal
information. It is a web application where you would put your stuff, things
you are thinking about, things you had to do, things you wanted to share with
other people. There is not exactly a corollary to it today, but it is along the same
lines as Basecamp or Ta-da List (but more complicated). There are a lot of
products that are about organizing your work and stuff. That was what I saw as
the big idea, and I had specific...

at the time you could charge a decent amount of money for doing pretty simple
web application development. If one of us was working on that full-time, it
would pay for three of us (not that we were paying ourselves much). We started
working on things in November ’98. We technically started the company in
January. Meg started full-time in February, and we hired our first employee,
Paul Bausch, in May. Then we got an office down here in SOMA.
Livingston: So is that when you focused on developing Blogger.com?
Williams: No. We...

it’s the little thing that clicked in my mind: “This is that little tweak that makes
it kind of maybe a big deal.” Not that the future lit up in my head and I said,
“We are doing that.” It was just sort of a hint, more in retrospect than at the
time.
We took the script I wrote to publish my site, and we made an internal site
where we could do the same thing. So, even when it was only Meg and I, we
had this little internal blog we called “Stuff,”...

doing this kind of collaboration with Stuff. We actually said several times,
“Maybe Stuff should just be our product?” And we agreed, “That’s too simple,
that is too trivial.” And also we didn’t have the resources for two products. So
that went on for a long time, and it was in July, I guess, when we finally launched
Pyra, the app, and that actually got a pretty good, if limited, reception.
People started using Pyra and it was in evolving it that I came up with the
justification for why to do Blogger. That...