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 and it sucked. But somehow by the end of 2001 I started rebuilding. We
cleared up the legal thing, and things were looking up.
Evan Williams 121
Then eventually I started launching some for-pay features of Blogger.
Things that people would actually pay for. So 2 years into it, Blogger itself was
starting to make money—not directly but through some little ways. Like the
blogs we hosted, we had advertising, which never made any money because it
was during the time when web advertising didn’t make money. (After it made
money the first time and before it made money again.) I created a mechanism
to charge people to take their ads off and that actually made money. I said, “Pay
me $12 a year, and I’ll take the ads off your blog.” I started with this “product”
because it was probably the easiest thing I could build that I thought people
would pay for. And they did.
I did a couple other small things like that and got to a point where it was
paying the hosting bill. I had gotten rid of my office by then, and I had no place
to work at home. So I posted on my blog that I needed to rent a desk somewhere.
This company, Bigstep, offered me a free desk, which was nice.
Then I just started building more things. Working from the Bigstep office, I
designed and launched the Blogger API, which didn’t make any money, but
became important later. I actually hired a contractor programmer and had
started working with Jason Shellen on business development stuff. So things
were looking up. And then 2002 was a completely different year altogether.
We finally launched Blogger Pro, the paid-for version of Blogger. The paidfor
version of Blogger did very well for us and we brought in some other
people. With Jason’s help, we did a big deal in Brazil with this company that
wanted to license Blogger. So 2002 was a ramping-up year again. Everything
was on the uptick, and we had a completely different team. We were getting by
and the money was increasing and we were building new stuff and it was
looking good.

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• friend.