I don’t think...
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 path, and in the fall we knew that we were running out
of money and started trying to have some conversations with folks. I also wasn’t
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sophisticated at all about how you do that. We felt connected at that time, but it
wasn’t necessarily to the money crowd, and we probably wouldn’t have been
able to talk the talk of VCs anyway. So the money wasn’t coming. We scrambled
around. We decided we could launch some for-pay stuff.
Other companies at the time were going into enterprises, since companies
had money. At the time it was like, “Consumers aren’t spending money. Go to
companies—they’re the ones with money.” So many companies at the time took
their consumer Internet thing and made it an enterprise Internet thing and
then died anyway. We debated that a lot. We had a good story about why this
was really useful inside companies, and we had a friend at Cisco who wanted to
use it and we got it installed inside of Cisco. It was just a pilot and we started
saying on our site, “We have enterprise Blogger.” But there was a lot of pressure
internally, a lot of debate about just doing enterprise, which I was pretty
adamant that we didn’t want to do because, whether or not it would make
money, I thought it was pointless. At this time I was very much excited about
the idea of democratizing media and that’s what mattered. It mattered more
than the company, really. When you are in that mode, it’s hard to say that the
company doesn’t matter, since everyone’s heart and soul is in it, not to mention
their livelihood.
Livingston: But you’re changing the world?
Williams: Yeah. I didn’t think we could do enterprise and still do the consumer
site well, even though we had talked about it from the beginning. I sort of realized
later on that, if we do enterprise, we are going to have to focus on enterprise
and the consumer stuff is going to suck and that doesn’t sound fun. Also,
we probably won’t be good at enterprise, because we don’t know how to sell and
service companies. So, we had lots of arguments about that. Then I said, “What
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