History of Famous Startups. Blogger.com

Williams: One thing

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:59:55 -0700

Williams: One thing that I used to be bad at was paying attention to how other
people are feeling. So when problems came up with some of my coworkers, it
totally surprised me. That stuff shouldn’t surprise you, and it did.
I think I was also surprised by the success of something so simple. That’s a
mantra for many people in the technology world—simplicity. But what we built
wasn’t that amazing. It was the idea of putting a couple of things together and
being able to establish a lead by doing something really, really simple. How far
you can get…

me to go

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:59:55 -0700

me to go through all the bad stuff. As well as the fact that, at that point, it was
just pride. It was so public. If I would have stopped, that would have been very
public also.
Livingston: Were there any other really stressful moments?
Williams: That’s an understatement. I can think of many. For example, when
the site got hacked on Christmas day. I was in Iowa, visiting my mom, and I
didn’t find out until the next morning. Someone was able to run an update on
the database that changed thousands of users’ passwords to the number 1…

Four months later,

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Four months later, we were sitting in Google.
Mind you, it wasn’t an easy decision. I struggled hard deciding if going to
Google was the right thing to do. We weren’t desperate. We actually had a term
sheet on the table for $1 million in investment from Joi Ito’s Neoteny (who
ended up investing in Six Apart). And after 4 years of pouring my heart into
Blogger, I saw a lot of risk in giving up control.
Eventually I decided Google was right. I really thought we could do huge
things at this point, and Google had done bigger things…

October 2002 was

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:59:55 -0700

October 2002 was when Google came knocking. We had a small office
downtown—more of a conference room than an office. It was Adaptive Path’s
first office, which we moved into after them. And we had brought on a tech
support guy and a sys admin. Then Google called us up. I forget how that
happened . . . I think that was O’Reilly again.
At this point I think it looked like Pyra came back from the dead. Blogging
in general had exploded all this time. We got a lot more competitors, but the
phenomenon just exploded. We were a…

friend.

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:59:55 -0700

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…

company called Trellix

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:59:55 -0700

company called Trellix that he later sold, which was a web publishing platform.
Trellix licensed Blogger in order to add blogging to their feature set. They did it
in such a way—Dan drove it in such a way—that if it was a traditional license
(months of due diligence and really figuring out if we wanted this), it wouldn’t
have helped and he knew that. So, he was like, “a) there’s a legitimate business
reason to do this, but b) we are going to push this through so it is really good for
you.” It wasn’t a lot of money—it was…

office.

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:59:55 -0700

office.
Livingston: How did you feel that morning?
Williams: That was a really bad time. Actually the day that everyone told me
they were leaving . . . I told everyone they were laid off and said, “Work with
me if you can.” And at the time, everyone had already missed one paycheck,
and they’d had it. These are, of course, my friends, and we were hanging out all
the time and we socialized together, so it’s much more than just the employees.
I think that same night I broke up with my girlfriend of 6 months.
Livingston: Sounds pretty…

people’s money. And

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:59:55 -0700

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…

we need to

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:59:55 -0700

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…

I don’t think

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:59:54 -0700

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…