for clients around...
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 ideas about how that could be done better than
it had ever been done before.
Around the time I was thinking about starting the company, I was talking to
a friend of mine, Meg Hourihan. She got excited about the idea and said, “Hey,
let me start it with you.” She had been a management consultant and was really
smart, so I said OK. I had been contracting, so I had a little bit of money, so I
could coast for a little while, but we didn’t know anybody. We weren’t hooked
into the startup scene.
Everyone was getting funded, but it is still completely just a network. You
have to know the right people. Whether it’s good times or bad, you have to
know people and you have to talk their language, and we were just from a different
place and not hooked into that at all. So we just said, “OK, here is the
product we are going to build,” and we started building it. We actually kept contracting
on the side—I had a contract with HP. That’s how we paid the bills—
we turned my personal contract into the company’s contract and we did a little
work on that and we did a little work on our project, and that is how we started.
Livingston: What was the point where you really said, “I know this is going to
work and I am going to do this full-time”?
Williams: Well, for me it was always the point of no return. Meg actually kept
her other job, but only for a couple of months. We were pretty hardcore. So we
formed the company and said, “OK, we are building this thing.” We hoped to
raise money. We just didn’t know how yet. We focused on building the product
first.
Livingston: So, you built the product and then did you have to raise money or
did you keep relying on consulting fees?
Williams:Well, we kind of tried. We started talking to the few people we knew,
but we just didn’t have any inroads for that. We wrote a business plan, I think.
The first year was entirely self-funded. It was just doing this work mostly for
HP. HP basically funded Pyra for the first year, unbeknownst to them, because
| ← Evan Williams cofounded | at the time → |