using our product, and we were really excited.
We launched it in August and we had a dilemma on our hands right away, of
course, because we now had a product that people were using, but it wasn’t the
“real” product.
The problem was, we didn’t see a business in Blogger. This was during the
boom, but we weren’t one of these companies that was just, “Let’s get eyeballs.”
We talked a lot about the stupidity of a lot of the dot-coms and raising too much
money. We were very product driven. We...

thing.” They were aware of Blogger, but we were still doing Pyra, too, and they
agreed to invest.
Livingston: So, you had Blogger out there but you weren’t totally focused on it.
Were you worried that competitors, since it was a simple thing, would try to
copy it?
Williams: There were a couple other products out there, but they weren’t very
substantial. No one was really paying attention to it. It’s hard to fathom now, but
blogs took a really long time to be taken seriously. But, yeah, we felt we needed
...

is a native form for this medium, just like all new mediums start out imitating
what came before them and then they kind of find out what they are good for.
We even looked at Blogger and, technically, it was trivial (at least until it
came to scaling it). It wasn’t based on any new technology. But that made sense
to me because it was not that the technology was new, it was that we had figured
out this medium, at least one of the native forms of what the Web was good for.
...

I don’t think it dawned on a lot of people. We just wanted to build momentum
with this $500,000 and then raise more money later in the year.
At the time it was pretty much the belief that, if you have buzz and you have
users and you have good seed investors, you can raise more money. We said,
“We’ll make money, but this is down the road so we don’t need to focus on that.
We are going to focus on building more features and getting more users.”
We just went on that...

we need to do is charge money from the consumers, just to have a Blogger Pro,”
which was always in the plan, and everyone said, “We can’t make money doing
that. No one pays for stuff on the Web.”
In late 2000, we built a version with many more features but never felt that
we had it to the point where we could feel comfortable charging money for it.
So, we talked to a couple of companies about merging—private companies who
had funding. We had a couple of serious conversations and came close to...