So as he sits in his apartment and blogs, Williams finds himself in an odd place. He's running a company that's more popular and growing faster than he could have possibly imagined. It's also flat broke. Several weeks earlier, Williams had written a post that begged users to donate money to keep the servers running. It worked: He raised more than $10,000 in $10 and $20 money transfers made through PayPal. Now he's got to figure out how to save the company. Writing the blog post, which he titles "And Then There Was One," he describes the layoff, wishes his former employees well--"Hopefully our friendships will survive"--and then finally addresses his customers: "I'm still fighting the good fight," he writes. "The product, user base, brand, and vision are still somewhat intact. Amazingly. Thankfully. In fact, I'm actually in surprisingly good shape. I'm optimistic. (I'm always optimistic.) And I have many, many ideas. (I always have many ideas.)"
With no personnel costs, Blogger hung on. In March, there was a $40,000 licensing deal with Trellix, a business software start-up whose founder, a Blogger admirer, read about Williams's plight on his blog and decided he wanted to help save the company. By the late summer, Williams had a business model. He had been making next to nothing placing banner ads on people's blogs. Now he would charge those people $12 a year to remove the ads. Meanwhile, Pyra--and the phenomenon of blogging--grew like gangbusters through 2001. By the middle of 2002, there were 600,000 registered users. In late 2002, Google came calling. Sergey Brin and Larry Page offered to buy Williams's little company and let him run it inside their highflying (and still private) search start-up. Williams blogged the news of his acceptance while delivering a speech at a technology conference. "Holy Crap," he wrote, linking the words to a minutes-old article on the sale. "Note to self: When you get off this panel, you should probably comment on this."
The experience of shepherding Blogger through growth, then hardship, until he finally turned it into a real company cemented Williams's philosophy of business. He would be an entrepreneur who looked for value in things that seemed worthless. Faith--in one's ability, in one's chosen path, and, above all else, in the fact that there are always opportunities ahead--was a company's greatest need. Stick to your product, forget about scrambling for deals, and good things will happen.
The belief that faith is an important business attribute goes a long way in describing how Williams is able to see opportunities. "He has a stubbornness of vision," says Tim O'Reilly, the tech luminary who runs publisher O'Reilly Media and who coined the term "Web 2.0." O'Reilly was Williams's first employer in Silicon Valley and an investor in Pyra. "There are so many me-too start-ups on the Web, so many people saying this will be the next big thing, but the successful entrepreneurs are people who see the world differently." Williams's closest collaborator, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, says much the same. "He has a tendency to wait just a bit longer than everyone else would, to give an idea more time," Stone says. "It is patience and perseverance and hope--all those things rolled up into one."
After leaving Google at the end of 2004, with his fast-appreciating stock and a world-class education in business, Williams resolved to tread water until the right opportunity came along. "While I think I'm likely to start another company sometime," he wrote on his blog, "I'm forcing myself to be noncommittal at the moment. My goal is to develop some perspective, learn new things, rest, and explore." He promised to travel and to think about how he would change his life.
He didn't do much of either. His next-door neighbor, an entrepreneur named Noah Glass, was starting a podcasting company, and Williams began advising him in the weeks following his departure from Google. Advising turned into full-time work, and full-time work turned into being co-founder, seed investor, and, eventually, CEO. By February 2005, he had invested $170,000 and personally launched the company, now called Odeo, with a demonstration at TED, the invitation-only tech conference held in Monterey, California. That same day, a front-page article in the business section of The New York Times profiled Odeo and its famous founder. Williams, it seemed, was on his way to turning another weird technology phenomenon into the next big thing.
But Odeo had no real product--only a sense that podcasting was somehow going to be popular. The website that Williams unveiled at TED, an audio directory and a few simple tools for recording one's own podcasts, wasn't ready for the public until a few months later, and by then it had been overshadowed by Apple's release of podcasting features for iTunes. Odeo's strategy, if there was one, was to be a one-stop shop for Internet audio, offering a number of tools for podcasters and casual listeners. Being all things to all people required money, and there were plenty of eager investors who wanted in on Ev's next big thing. He raised $5 million from the venture capitalists Charles River Ventures and a number of high-profile angels, including O'Reilly, Google backer Ron Conway, and Lotus founder Mitch Kapor. The company quickly started hiring, and by the end of the year, it employed 14 people.
While he was trying to come up with a strategy for Odeo, Williams was processing the lessons of the past few years. In the fall of 2005, he wrote what he calls "my best blog post ever." It was called "Ten Rules for Web Startups," and it has since become something of an Internet classic. (Google the title and you'll get more than a thousand results, nearly all of which point to Williams's post.) The lessons were lifted from his experience at Blogger, particularly the first one, "Be Narrow," which urged entrepreneurs to "Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would be potentially useful." Other lessons were "Be Tiny," "Be Picky," and "Be Self-Centered," which discussed the importance of company founders using their own products.
