Four months later, we were sitting in Google.
Mind you, it wasn’t an easy decision. I struggled hard deciding if going to
Google was the right thing to do. We weren’t desperate. We actually had a term
sheet on the table for $1 million in investment from Joi Ito’s Neoteny (who
ended up investing in Six Apart). And after 4 years of pouring my heart into
Blogger, I saw a lot of risk in giving up control.
Eventually I decided Google was right. I really thought we could do huge
things at this...

me to go through all the bad stuff. As well as the fact that, at that point, it was
just pride. It was so public. If I would have stopped, that would have been very
public also.
Livingston: Were there any other really stressful moments?
Williams: That’s an understatement. I can think of many. For example, when
the site got hacked on Christmas day. I was in Iowa, visiting my mom, and I
didn’t find out until the next morning. Someone was able to run an update on
the database that changed thousands...

Williams: One thing that I used to be bad at was paying attention to how other
people are feeling. So when problems came up with some of my coworkers, it
totally surprised me. That stuff shouldn’t surprise you, and it did.
I think I was also surprised by the success of something so simple. That’s a
mantra for many people in the technology world—simplicity. But what we built
wasn’t that amazing. It was the idea of putting a couple of things together and
being able to establish a lead by doing something really, really...