Evan Williams | |
---|---|
Born | Evan Clark Williams March 31, 1972 |
Occupation | Internet entrepreneur |
Years active | 1993–present |
Known for | Blogger Medium |
Spouse | Sara Morishige Williams (divorced) |
Children | 2 |
Evan "Ev" Clark Williams (born March 31, 1972) is an American billionaire technology entrepreneur. [1] He is a co-founder of Twitter, and was its CEO from 2008 to 2010, and a member of its board from 2007 to 2019. [2] He founded Blogger and Medium, two of the largest blogging internet platforms. In 2014, he co-founded the venture capital firm Obvious Ventures. As of February 2022 [update] , his net worth is estimated at US$2.1 billion. [2]
Williams was born in Clarks, Nebraska, as the third child of Laurie Howe and Monte Williams. [3] He grew up on a farm in Clarks, where he assisted with crop irrigation during the summers. He attended the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for a year and a half, where he joined FarmHouse fraternity, then left the school to pursue his career. [4] [5] [6]
After departing from college, Williams took on various technology jobs and start-up firms in Key West, Florida, and in Dallas and Austin, Texas, before returning to his family farm in Nebraska. In 1996 Williams moved to Sebastopol, California in Sonoma County to work for the technology publishing company O'Reilly Media. He started at O'Reilly in a marketing position, later becoming an independent contractor writing computer code, which led to freelance opportunities with companies including Intel and Hewlett-Packard. [5] While working at O'Reilly, he also started a website called EvHead.com, where he first began blogging about his thoughts. [7]
Williams and Meg Hourihan co-founded Pyra Labs to make project management software. A note-taking feature spun off as Blogger, one of the first web applications for creating and managing weblogs. [8] Williams coined the term "blogger" and was instrumental in the popularization of the term "blog". [9] Pyra survived the departure of Hourihan and other employees, and was later acquired by Google on February 13, 2003. [10]
In 2003, Williams was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. [11] In 2004, he was named one of PC Magazine's "People of the Year", along with Hourihan and Paul Bausch, for their work on Blogger. [12]
Williams officially left Google on October 8, 2004, [13] to co-found Odeo, a podcast company. [14] In late 2006, Williams co-founded Obvious Corporation with Biz Stone and other former Odeo employees, to acquire all previous properties from Odeo's former backers. [15] In April 2007, Odeo was acquired by Sonic Mountain. [16]
Among Obvious Corporation's projects was Twitter, a popular, free social networking and micro-blogging service. Twitter was spun out as a new company in April 2007, with Williams as co-founder, board member, and investor. [17] In October 2008, Williams became CEO of Twitter, succeeding Jack Dorsey, who became chairman of the board. [18]
By February 2009, Compete.com ranked Twitter the third most-used social network, based on their count of 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits. [19] As of February 2013, Twitter had 200 million registered users. [20] It gets 300,000 new users a day and, as of August 2015, was ranked twelfth in the world. It receives more than 300 million unique visitors and more than five billion people in traffic a month. 75% of its traffic comes from outside of Twitter.com.
In October 2010, Williams stepped down from the CEO position, explaining that he would be "completely focused on product strategy," and appointed Dick Costolo as his replacement. [21]
Following the announcement of Twitter's initial public offering (IPO) in 2013, the company was valued at between US$14 billion and US$20 billion. [22]
On April 6, 2017, an article announced Williams would sell 30 percent of his stock in Twitter, for "personal reasons." [23]
In February 2019, Williams stepped down from his role as a board member of Twitter. [24]
On September 25, 2012, Williams created the publishing platform Medium. Initially, it was available only to early adopters, but was opened to the public in 2013. [25]
On April 5, 2013, Williams and Stone announced that they would be unwinding Obvious Corporation as they focused on individual startups. [26]
On July 12, 2022, it was announced Williams would step down as Medium's CEO and become the chairman of the board. [27] [28] [29]
In 2014, Williams co-founded the venture capital firm Obvious Ventures with James Joaquin and Vishal Vasishth. The firm is focused on companies they believe can make a positive change in the world. [30] [31] Since its inception the fund has raised about $585 million—$123 million in its first round, $191 million in its second and $271 million in its latest round. [32]
Williams lives in the San Francisco area. He has two children with his ex-wife Sara. [33] [34] He is a vegetarian, [5] and has invested – through the Obvious Corporation – in a plant-based meat alternative, Beyond Meat. [35]
Williams has been quoted as having a philosophy that it is important to conserve time, do fewer things, and to avoid distractions. [36]
Williams presented at the 2013 XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon, and explained his understanding of Internet commerce. [37] During his XOXO session, Williams also likened the Internet to "a lot of other major technological revolutions that have taken place in the history of the world," such as agriculture, and asserted that the Internet is not a utopia. [37]
After President Donald Trump credited his election win to the use of Twitter, Evan Williams stated that if true, he was sorry. [38] He also said that the internet is "obviously broken because it rewards extremes". [38] Williams told the Associated Press that he was wrong to think that an open platform where people could speak freely would make the world a better place. [38] His musings about future business objectives include considerations about the effect of the Internet upon society. [39]
A blog is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. In the 2000s, blogs were often the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Blogger is an American online content management system founded in 1999 which enables its users to write blogs with time-stamped entries. Pyra Labs developed it before being acquired by Google in 2003. Google hosts the blogs, which can be accessed through a subdomain of blogspot.com. Blogs can also be accessed from a user-owned custom domain by using DNS facilities to direct a domain to Google's servers. A user can have up to 100 blogs or websites per account.
The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community or as a social networking service in which everyday authors can publish their opinions and views.
Matthew Haughey is an American programmer, web designer, and blogger best known as the founder of the community weblog MetaFilter, where he is known as mathowie.
Meg Hourihan is the co-founder of Pyra Labs, the company that launched the Blogger personal blogging software that was acquired by Google.
Pyra Labs is a subsidiary of Google (Alphabet) that created the Blogger service in 1999. Google acquired Pyra Labs in 2003.
Paul Bradley Carr is a British writer, journalist and commentator, based in San Francisco. He has also—as he wrote on his official website—"edited various publications and founded numerous businesses with varying degrees of abysmal failure."
Odeo was a directory and search destination website for RSS-syndicated audio and video. It employed tools that enabled users to create, record, and share podcasts with a simple Adobe Flash-based interface.
Kevin Rose is an American Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Revision3, Digg, Pownce, and Milk. He also served as production assistant and co-host at TechTV's The Screen Savers. From 2012 to 2015, he was a venture partner at GV.
While the term "blog" was not coined until the late 1990s, the history of blogging starts with several digital precursors to it. Before "blogging" became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software, such as WebEx, created running conversations with "threads". Threads are topical connections between messages on a metaphorical "corkboard". Some have likened blogging to the Mass-Observation project of the mid-20th century.
Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone is an American entrepreneur who is a co-founder of Twitter, among other technology companies. Stone was the creative director at Xanga from 1999 to 2001. Stone co-founded Jelly, with Ben Finkel. Jelly was launched in 2014 and was a search engine driven by visual imagery and discovery. Stone was Jelly's CEO until its acquisition by Pinterest in 2017.
OpenMicroBlogging is a deprecated protocol that allows different microblogging services to inter-operate. It lets the user of one service subscribe to notices by a user of another service. This enables a federation of new communities, as potentially an organization of any size can host a service. OpenMicroBlogging utilizes the OAuth and Yadis protocols and does not depend on any central authority.
Jack Patrick Dorsey is an American Internet entrepreneur, philanthropist, and programmer, who is a co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, Inc. from 2015 until 2021, as well as co-founder, principal executive officer and chairperson of Block, Inc., which is the developer of the Square financial services platform. As of October 2023, Forbes estimated his net worth to be $3.1 billion.
Howard Lindzon is a Canadian Author, financial analyst, technical analyst and super angel investor. Lindzon manages a hedge fund, serves as managing partner of the holding company Social Leverage, limited partner at Knight's Bridge Capital Partners, and is the co-founder of StockTwits. Lindzon was named one of The Best Tweets for Your Money in 2013 by Barron's.
Noah Glass is an American technology entrepreneur and software developer, whose early work included launching Twitter and Odeo, a podcasting company that closed in 2017. Glass is credited for coining the name "Twitter", which began as "Twttr".
Richard William Costolo is an American businessman. He was the CEO of Twitter, Inc. from 2010 to 2015; he also served as the COO before becoming CEO.
Matter is the online magazine published by Matter Studios, a multi-platform content studio owned by Twitter founder Evan Williams
Medium is an American online publishing platform developed by Evan Williams and launched in August 2012. It is owned by A Medium Corporation. The platform is an example of social journalism, having a hybrid collection of amateur and professional people and publications, or exclusive blogs or publishers on Medium, and is regularly regarded as a blog host.
Twitter, Inc. was an American social media company based in San Francisco, California, which operated and was named for its flagship social media network prior to its rebrand as X. In addition to Twitter, the company previously operated the Vine short video app and Periscope livestreaming service. In April 2023, Twitter merged with X Holdings and ceased to be an independent company, becoming a part of X Corp.
The history of Twitter, also known as X, can be traced back to a brainstorming session at Odeo.