For Twitter C.E.O., Well-Orchestrated Accidents
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
By the measure of Blogger and Twitter's popularity, Evan is obviously skillful, regardless of whether or not Twitter is purchased by Google or some other entity. He focuses on an area relevant to all humans, communication. He makes his services easy for everyone to use. He has the foresight to see potential value in something unexplored, and he has the tenacity to work problems long enough for the results to prove if his hunches are right.
But perhaps most important he tries over and over, failing more often than he succeeds. That seems to be the real lesson here, it's not that Evan just luckily makes some mistakes and comes out on top, it's that he tries over and over.
Success has very little to do with luck, a bit more to do with circumstance and mostly to do with trying, and trying and trying some more.
So perhaps that is why the Times asked Evan Williams write a sort of autobiography. But nothing was really all that meaningful.
He could have talked about why he believed giving investors their money back was the right decision. He could have talked about why Twitter was worth investing more time in. He could have even talked about what he learned from his previous failures.
Evan Williams doesn't sound like that interesting of a person, but props to him for developing one of the next big things in online communication.
You can't conclude this just because you don't like the style in which the New York Times writes its "The Boss" column.
A lot of entrepreneurs I know try and try again and always come up short(myself included, though the success rate has steadily improved). This can be really discouraging because after a few attempts you start to wonder if you have the right characteristics necessary to create a successful startup. It's not like basketball where if you're 5'8" you can quickly figure out you're not going pro and can move on to other things. So in this story you've got a guy who "was broke for 10 years", made a ton of mistakes, then went on to start 2 really really successful companies.
I thought that's really inspiring and I'm glad he shared.
Another way to look at it is, Twitter may have been already acquired by Google had not Evan Williams already had one company bought by Google. This may have stopped it from getting to the point it is now judging by some companies success after that event.
One major success is probably lucky, TWO is probably skill, or else a complete craziness by consumers. But what it is looking like is Evan Williams has created 2 successful companies in one bubble and coming out the end of the bubble it appears twitter might have some of the best value built in.
Also - he technically has this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaiku
Blogger was close to the brink and only survived because of his dedication. I think Twitter is another example of him getting more focused over time.
Maybe he's not overly engaged by mediocre opportunities, but that's a long way from saying he isn't able to focus.
I just wanted to point this out in case there were any potential founders who thought their ADD was an asset.
I first met him in 2001, at Blogger's low point, so I don't know what he was like four years earlier.
I filled in the rest based on the comment above and on memories of people calling Odeo unfocused. I just wanted to kill any notion that Ev's successes come from being unfocused. Really, it was Ev's focus, keeping us from getting tied down by biz dev deals and refusing to settle for a middling success even when we got positive feedback, that set the groundwork for Twitter.
We'll lose money on each unit sold, but make it up on volume!!
What I fail to see, is how twitter won't be replaced by some open source library that does the same thing. Just as you can install blogging software on your own server and use aggregators to aggregate.
But they're the current dotcom darling, so they can do no wrong.
Twitter already has, in my opinion, a quite large (mostly techie) user base, the numerous whales would approve.
Figuring out how to make money out of it would be nice for them now, probably with advertisement tweets.
But it is a fun opening line.