Twitter And Blogger.com Founder
Evan Williams
Evan Williams is an American
entrepreneur who was born on March 31, 1972 and has founded several Internet
companies. With his unique contributions and inventions he has made to the top of
many influential people lists around the globe in recent years. Two of the internet's
top ten websites have been created by Evan Williams' companies: Blogger.com, weblog-authoring
software of Pyra Labs and Twitter.com, where he was previously CEO.
Williams grew up on a farm in Clarks, Nebraska, where he assisted with crop irrigation
in summers. He attended the University of Nebraska for a year and a half, leaving
to pursue his career. After leaving school, Williams worked at various technology
jobs and start-up firms in Key West, Dallas, Austin, Texas and again on 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 but eventually became an independent contractor writing
computer code, which led to freelance opportunities with companies including Intel
and Hewlett-Packard.
Evan 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. Williams invented
the term ‘blogger’ and was instrumental in the popularization of the term ‘blog’.
Pyra survived the departure of Hourihan and other employees and was eventually acquired
by Google on February 13, 2003.
In 2004 Williams co-founded Odeo, a podcasting company. In late 2006, Williams co-founded
Obvious Corp. with Biz Stone and other former Odeo employees to acquire all previous
properties from Odeo's former backers. In April 2007, Odeo was acquired by Sonic
Mountain.
Among Obvious Corp.'s projects was Twitter, a free social networking and micro-blogging
service. Twitter itself was spun out into a new company in April 2007, with Evan Williams Entrepreneur as co-founder, board
member and investor. In October 2008, Williams became CEO of Twitter.com, displacing
Jack Dorsey who became chairman of the board. 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. As of 14 April 2010, Twitter had
105,779,710 registered users. It gets 300,000 new users a day and receives 180 million
unique visitors a month. 75% of its traffic comes from outside of Twitter.com. On
4th October 2010, Williams stepped down from CEO (to be taken over by Dick Costolo).
In his recent blog post he has said that he is focusing on a new, unnamed start-up
venture. Post Twitter, he is getting free time to work on new ideas - which begs
the question, what could be even ‘bigger and better’ than Twitter? He did not outline
what that project will be, only that it has now captured the majority of his attention.