Ruth Ann S. Basnillo                                                                                                6/10/2008

O0A

SYSANAL

Evan Williams

Founder, Pyra Labs (Blogger.com)

Story:

     Evan Williams decided to start Pyra in late 1998 while doing Internet stuff. He taught himself technically and managed to run a company for about three years. He went to college but dropped out after some time because he realized that he doesn't want to work for anyone. But then he moved to California to take a job with O'Reilly because he knew that Nebraska wasn't the place to be. He worked there for a few months teaching himself web development. He worked for various companies like Intel and HP as a web developer. That's the time when he got to the point of starting a company again, and that was Pyra Labs. Originally, Pyra intended to build a web-based project management tool. Around that time, he talked to his friend Meg Hourihan about starting a company and his friend, who used to be a management consultant, got interested to it. They started building the product with HP basically funding their company for the first year. They technically started the company in January 1999. Meg started full-time in February and then they hired their first employee Paul Bausch in May. They then got an office in Soma. At that time, blogs (or weblogs as everyone called them back then) were just beginning to be talked about as a distinct thing. They have their personal websites back then and Paul experimented on turning his site, onfocus.com, into a blog. Williams also wrote his own script before with the same functionality as Blogger. He used it to make an internal site, where he and Meg could do blogs even before Paul came, which they called "Stuff," and they just put stuffs in there. And when Paul came, he wrote a little addition to Stuff so that the things they post to their internal blog would also be put on their external company. Soon, they were like publishing news, random things they liked, and everything. That must have been around March of 1999 and that was also the time where Williams got the idea for Blogger. They decided to turn it into a product. It was launched on August while Meg was out for a vacation which made her got pissed off because she was also the cofounder. It was 2000 then that they started actually raising money. Since Williams had worked for O'Reilly as an employee before and he left a good impression on him, he was able to go back and show to them his stuff which, they agreed to invest on. They were also working on Pyra upon learning that blogging was going to dramatically impact the web. They then finally gave focus on Blogger full time. But as they went on that path, they realized that they were running out of money so they started trying to talk to some folks. At that time it was like other companies were going into enterprises since consumers aren't spending money. An opportunity came wherein one of their friends got their product installed in their company and so they thought that it was the start of enterprising Blogger. A lot of debate happened about just doing an enterprise but Williams decided that they pursue on doing the consumer site well. Williams thought of charging money from the consumers through Blogger Pro but everyone disagreed. In late 2000, they built a version of it with many features but still didn't feel comfortable charging money for it. They talked to many companies about merging and almost had a good deal with Moreover but Williams conceded for his employees to remain to have a job. In January, when the company was being laid off, they did Server Fund Drive. They posted it in their website informing the people that Blogger is really slow because they lack money for more hard drive. It surprisingly worked really well and many people sent them money. They got the site back up but Williams and Meg weren't getting along well so the latter decided to leave and everybody else did the same thing. So Williams remained as the only employee until Dan Bricklin helped him. The web publishing company of Bricklin - Trellix - licensed Blogger in order to add blogging to their feature set and Williams managed to bring the company back from the brink. He started building more things including the Blogger API which didn't make money but became important later. With his new team, he finally launched Blogger Pro in 2002. This paid-for version of Blogger did very well for them. By 2003, the Blogger had already one million registered users which attracted the attention of Google. Google started talking to them about considering acquisition and Williams eventually decided to take into consideration what Google offered and it made Pyra the first acquisition of Google.

THREE THINGS I LEARNED:

Honestly speaking, I could relate well with the cofounder of Pyra labs (Blogger.com).

     It is because just like him, I'm a kind of person with no focus on things that I have started. It’s really my weakness and just like William Evans, I always jump from one idea to another. It was like, “Oh! I think this new idea I have is so cool. Ok! Let me just turn aside this stuff I had and I'll finish it as soon as I'm done with this one." And just like a cycle, it keeps on happening all over again. But one thing that I've learned from what happened to Pyra Labs is that once you get focused on something, everything will completely turn out right just as what happened when Williams finally decided to focus on Blogger.

     The next thing I learned is that you should always do whatever you can to separate or resign from your work without leaving a negative impression to it so that you could still go back and it will welcome you with arms wide open. If in case William left a negative impression to O'reilly, he would not be able to show it and the latter will never invest on his company.

     Lastly, I learned that giving up should be a "no, no!" in a startup. Williams was faced with the struggle of having himself as the only employee in his company after all his employees including his cofounder left him. Not only that, but he also had that same night a breakup with his girlfriend which totally ruined his day. If William's principle would be, “It’s the end of the world," he would have never bring the company back from the brink.