people’s money. And we have all of these users.” (The service was still running.)
This whole time, this service is growing. In terms of users, we were getting
more and more successful. Which also caused other problems in that we
needed more hardware and we had all of these scaling problems. In January,
right around the time that the rest of the company was being laid off, we did
what we called the Server Fund Drive. We posted it on our website and it said,
“Hey, we know Blogger is really slow. It’s because...

office.
Livingston: How did you feel that morning?
Williams: That was a really bad time. Actually the day that everyone told me
they were leaving . . . I told everyone they were laid off and said, “Work with
me if you can.” And at the time, everyone had already missed one paycheck,
and they’d had it. These are, of course, my friends, and we were hanging out all
the time and we socialized together, so it’s much more than just the employees.
I think that same night I broke up with my...

company called Trellix that he later sold, which was a web publishing platform.
Trellix licensed Blogger in order to add blogging to their feature set. They did it
in such a way—Dan drove it in such a way—that if it was a traditional license
(months of due diligence and really figuring out if we wanted this), it wouldn’t
have helped and he knew that. So, he was like, “a) there’s a legitimate business
reason to do this, but b) we are going to push this through so it is really good for
you.” It...

friend.
Williams: Which I think is a theme for startups in general because people live
and breathe them and become friends, date and merge their lives together. And
then, if things go bad, it’s bad in ways that are much more devastating than your
work going badly.
So that was pretty much 2001. The funny thing about Pyra is that every calendar
year was pretty distinct—’99 was the first year, we were self-funded; 2000
was the year we got money and ramped up; 2001 was the year that it was just
me...

October 2002 was when Google came knocking. We had a small office
downtown—more of a conference room than an office. It was Adaptive Path’s
first office, which we moved into after them. And we had brought on a tech
support guy and a sys admin. Then Google called us up. I forget how that
happened . . . I think that was O’Reilly again.
At this point I think it looked like Pyra came back from the dead. Blogging
in general had exploded all this time. We got a lot more competitors, but the...