Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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How did you feel when you found out that you were being let go as CEO?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:34)
I was devastated. I was also shocked. I didn't even think it was possible. I went from owning 100% of this company to being kicked out.
At the height of my success, I was just kneecapped, and it felt like nothing I did before mattered, because I failed at the biggest thing I ever did.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:07)
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a college dropout from Nebraska moved to California, started two major blogging platforms, and somewhere along the way, co-founded a little company called Twitter.
One day, far in the future, there's a possibility you'll find yourself in a bookstore and come across a history book about this time, about our era. When that happens, thumb to the index section, and I'm pretty sure you'll find lots of entries under the word Twitter.
Now, just to get the elephant out of the room here, I don't think Twitter is entirely guilty of the things that it gets accused of. Misinformation, polarization, cancel culture, et cetera. But I do think that over the past 10 years or so, Twitter did help to shape the politics and culture, at least in the United States, in good and bad ways. None of this was anticipated by Ev Williams. Twitter was never supposed to do any of this. And it's possible that Ev and Jack and Biz and Noah, the original founders, were just naive. And the product they came up with, like many successful products, wasn't even supposed to happen. At the time, Ed was pursuing, believe it or not, podcasting. In 2004, Ev co-founded a podcasting platform called Odeo. Now, going into podcasting at that time was a little like getting into electric cars in the 1990s, just a little too far ahead of its time. So not surprisingly, Odeo didn't work out. But a side project at Odeo, one that was being worked on by Jack Dorsey, did. And that side project would become Twitter. Twitter, of course, became Ev's best known brand. But he also founded Blogger and later Medium, three hugely influential products in the era of social media.
Along the way, Ev learned what it meant to be a really bad people person, something he spent much of the past 10 years working to get better at.
Now, like a few well-known tech founders, Ev Williams is a college dropout. He barely made it through two years before striking out on his own. Ev grew up on his family's corn and soybean farm in a rural part of Nebraska. It was a tiny place, only about 400 people.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:42)
I feel very fortunate that that's where I grew up. I think there's tons of great stuff that I drew from that, from a values and character perspective that was just fundamentally ingrained in me and very fitting with being an entrepreneur.
To a lot of people, the juxtaposition of going from farm boy to tech founder sounds weird, but the things that are very aligned are these ideas of independence and self-reliance. And all farmers are basically entrepreneurs and that ethos of figuring things out yourself, actually having to be fairly innovative. That was what I saw my dad doing from birth. And there was just, so the idea of starting a company was very natural to me because it was just like, well, why would you go like align with some institution? That seemed like a much stranger idea. So in many ways, I adopted those values and didn't question them at all.