Anything Could Happen

Some 25,000 people, mostly techies and entrepreneurs, look at Evhead each month. (Many of these readers also follow his Twitterings.) Dorsey had followed Williams's blog for years. He knew it so well that when he spotted Williams on the street in San Francisco, he recognized him immediately and decided to apply for a job. "It was the first time I'd seen him in person," Dorsey says, as if he were talking about a celebrity he had never considered a real person. "I took it as a sign." In the online world, Williams is seen as a truth teller, an engineer who's not afraid to stick it to the suits and the venture capitalists. He's someone who actually understands the process of invention and who values it more than he does the bottom line. To read his blog is to watch the growth of a human being: You see Ev nearly lose his company, bring it back from the dead, strike it big, struggle with the tech support for his new cell phone, and get married. In Williams, a new generation of entrepreneurs has a mascot.

It's January 31, 2001, and Evan Williams is alone in his apartment, writing a blog post for Evhead. It's a big one. His company, Pyra Labs, is on life support, and Williams has just laid off the entire staff. (His co-founder and ex-girlfriend, Meg Hourihan, quit rather than be laid off.) The trouble is partly the result of the Internet bust--the Nasdaq has been tanking for months, and Williams's investors have told him he must make do with what he's got--but it's also, in a strange way, a result of his company's unlikely popularity.

Williams and Hourihan started Pyra, in 1998, with a plan to develop and sell project management software. They did contract Web programming for Hewlett-Packard to pay the bills while they developed their product. So they could keep track of each other's progress, Williams created a piece of software he called Stuff, which, it turned out, was a far simpler and more useful collaboration tool than the one he was building for Pyra. Stuff allowed him to quickly upload text to a webpage by filling out a simple form, and it organized the text by date. He and Hourihan joked that it worked better than their actual product. Only Williams wasn't joking. While Hourihan was on vacation, in August 2000, he put it online as Blogger.com.

Blogger took off. Online diaries had existed since the birth of the Internet, but they had been difficult to maintain and organize and were therefore limited to serious techies. Blogger made communicating your thoughts to the world much easier and more satisfying: Fill out a simple form, click a button, and--bang--you're a published writer. By 2001, Blogger had attracted 100,000 users and the beginnings of what seemed like a healthy buzz, even though it made no money and had no model for changing that.

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."

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