Evan Williams – Twitter

Originally started a small CD ROM company

Learned early that you need to start projects and finish – don’t start 30 projects you never finish

Started Pyra to build and release Blogger

Blogger was a roller coaster of a business – was all happening around the boom/bust

Pride and fear kept him going – mega optimism in the dark times

Almost need to blindly believe that everything is going to work out

Struggled for 4 years before Google came around

When Google showed up there was fear and uncertainty about the future of Blogger

Sold b/c he wanted to ensure the success of Blogger – saw it as the best long term option for the health of Blogger

After Blogger he fell into Odeo

Odeo was supposed to be the democratization of radio

Odeo was a pioneer of podcasting and early in the business

Odeo more or less failed when Apple entered the podcast business

Is very hard to embrace failure – based on his public discussion of his “screw ups” with Odeo

Twitter flowed out of Odeo

All of his companies seem to morph into new things

Ideas started to bubble as SMS became mainstream

There was no justification for doing as part of Odeo, but is was just too compelling

It is very common for you not to deliver the product you originally start out with. You need to find a way to embrace these anomalies

With Twitter is was hard to make the move to restructure due to existing staff, board of directors, angel investors

Had to rebook Odeo in order to reform a company around Twitter and sell off Odeo

The most major screw up on the Twitter side was technology

Symptom of being a side project and not originally being super serious about it at the start

They never caught up form that initial proof of concept stage b/c it got too popular too quickly

Have invested in a larger engineering team to solve the scaling problems

Bought Summize b/c it fit perfectly with where they are going and they had a great team with a great cultural fit – Ev is still nervous and cautious of aquisitions

Doesn’t worry too much about the competitive landscape since his products tend to be first movers

Blogger and Twitter both had first mover advantage

In an emerging area when you have competitors follow it more or less validates you are on to something.

Matt Mullenweg – WordPress

Started working on WordPress at the young age of 19

Was bored and blogging on the B2 open source blogging platform

His blogging software was not being updated and he decided to take the open source B2 code and began to turn it into WordPress

At the end of the day he just wanted a better blogging software

Started to reach out to the other B2 forks and tried to start an official “continuation” that would do justice to B2

On the internet no one knows you are a 19 year old kid in Houston and you can do amazing things

Felt right to give back to Open Source

WordPress was slow organic growth – very incremental

Automattic currently has about 26 people employed around the world

Global collaboration worked well and the first staff members were the ones who originally contributed to B2

Competitive market made it hard to hire everyone from Silicon Valley – looking globally made it easier/affordable to find talented people

Is very hard to socialize when you are distributed – they need to get together a few times a year to help build bonds and company culture

They like to break down projects to very very small projects

Important to find people who absolutely LOVE what they are doing

Need to setup ways to help people work in their best possible way

Important to try and not let people fail too badly

Most of his ideas come out of his personal frustration – wants to make his life better and as simple as possible

Was originally going to make WordPress a non-profit organization and just take a small salary

Are really focused on staying small – felling that 25ish people is the perfect size and does not feel the need to grow rapidly

Focusing on being a little more proactive – tracking the growth of plugins and considering putting the most popular plugins into the core

Starting to look at experimenting with social features – funding the Canadian guy who is building BuddyPress

Mena Trott – SixApart

MoveableType started as a personal thing

With her husband they literally worked together out of their apartment during the dot com bust

Had a personal commitment to keep MoveableType going – had to finish what they start and would not just drop it when they got bored

Felt lucky when it took off and became a job for them

Started as an LLC b/c they did not want to investors – funding was too scary and troublesome for them.

Originally started to make money doing custom installs of MoveableType – $40 for an install and $20 for a donor key. Keys lasted up until 2004.

Had a lot of anxiety – especially around launching TypePad the hosted service. Expectations and pressure was very overwhelming.

For the first few years they really didn’t do anything other than work but kept on going b/c at the end of the day they did really like what they were doing.

Were very ambitious and that is what pushed them to end up taking funding later down the road

Currently SixApart is about 200 people

Have re-invented themselves 3 times already

Focusing on failure can paralyze your company – need to make mistake, acknowledge your issues, and move along

There are a lot of ideas floating around and the really important part is execution. You can do things in stealth mode but at the end of the day a small and agile team can move a lot faster than bigger organizations