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 doing
a deal. Actually one deal was with Moreover, which did headline aggregation
before there was much RSS out there. It was started by Nick Denton, who is
the guy who runs Gawker Media. Nick and his cofounder, David Galbraith,
were fans of Blogger and wanted to buy us. It wasn’t a particularly attractive
offer, but we were on the brink and thought, “Maybe we can get in there and
everyone would have jobs.”
Everyone in the company wanted to do the deal but me. But I had conceded,
because I wasn’t going to be the asshole who denied the chance everyone
had to still be employed. We were out of money. Fortunately Moreover’s
board wouldn’t approve the deal. It was some ridiculously lowball offer—it was
something like a million dollars worth of their stock. But they’re a private company.
So it was basically like, “We’d give everyone jobs.”
Livingston: And your financial future is contingent on them getting acquired or
going public.
Williams: Right. After two years of pouring our hearts and souls into this, it
seemed like a crappy option. Fortunately it didn’t work out, though. There was
another company in New York that was a startup but that had some funding we
talked about merging with. And the group that was funding them actually gave
us a bridge investment. They gave us $50,000 while we tried to figure it out.
But that didn’t seem like a good deal either. They wanted to do it, but we
decided not to. (That company went away fairly quickly.)
Livingston: Then you ran into Dan Bricklin.
Williams: Yes. So this is December or January of 2001 and the second potential
acquisition hadn’t worked out, so basically we got to the point where we sat
everyone down, and I said, “OK, everyone is laid off as of today, including me.”
We had warned them a few weeks earlier that we didn’t have money in the bank
to meet payroll. Obviously when you are in that state, tensions rise a lot and
morale wasn’t good and relationships with my cofounder weren’t good. I said, “I
am going to stick around because I took a half of a million dollars of other