people’s money. And...
people’s money. And we have all of these users.” (The service was still running.)
This whole time, this service is growing. In terms of users, we were getting
more and more successful. Which also caused other problems in that we
needed more hardware and we had all of these scaling problems. In January,
right around the time that the rest of the company was being laid off, we did
what we called the Server Fund Drive. We posted it on our website and it said,
“Hey, we know Blogger is really slow. It’s because we need more hardware. We
don’t have the money to buy it. So give us money and we will buy more hardware
and we’ll make Blogger faster.” Surprisingly, it worked really well. We had
a lot of goodwill and people liked us and we had a good brand within our users
because we were very personable and used the blog and we were just honest.
We just said, “We can’t buy hardware, but we have plans and we are not going
to go away if we can get past this hump, so send us some money.” So people
sent us money.
Livingston: What was the biggest check you got?
Williams: We used PayPal, and I think we got bigger amounts from fewer
people than we expected. We had several thousand users. 100 people or so gave
larger amounts, and I am not sure what the absolute biggest was. We suggested
$10, $20. Several people gave us $100, and then a company, CMP, which published
Web Techniques magazine, offered to buy us a server outright, up to
$4,000 worth. So between the users and them, we had around $17,000 to spend
on servers, which is more than we had ever spent on servers, so it was a
bonanza. It worked better than we had ever expected.
We told people we were only going to buy hardware, so I wasn’t going to use
that to pay people. I just spent that money on hardware, but it got the site back
up and running well and meanwhile we laid everybody off. Meg and I weren’t
getting along well at all and she decided to leave and everybody else decided to
leave too.
Evan Williams 119
Livingston: So you had a major difference of opinion?
Williams: Yeah. I think a lot of that came back to the enterprise thing, which
she and some other people felt strongly was our best chance of making money.
If I was the guy in charge and we were dying, it’s reasonable to conclude it’s my
fault. And certainly there were other things I could have done. So everybody
left but me. (A lot of them needed to leave since we couldn’t pay them anymore.)
Everybody left, and the next day, I was the only one who came in the
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