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Evan Williams : The Man Behind Major Startups Including Blogger, Twitter, and Medium

Leave a Comment / Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Entrepreneurship demands skills and experience, but for some people, it comes all by birth. They do not need much experience, instead, their passion helps them to reach their goals. One such name is Evan Williams, who is the founder of the biggest blogging websites, Blogger and Medium. He has also co-founded some other ventures and is one of the co-inventors of the largest micro-blogging website, Twitter. From a part-time farmer to an internet entrepreneur, Williams’ story, definitely, includes motivation for people.

Early Life

Evan Williams was born as Evan Clark Williams on March 1972 in Clarks, Nebraska, to Laurie Howe and Monte Williams. His family was into farming, so he also worked in the farms in the summer holidays as help. After completing high school from a local government school, Williams joined the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he also became a member of the FarmHouse Fraternity. But as he was more into starting his own business and making a career, he left college only after a year and a half.

Career

Blogger co-founder Evan Williams
Image Source: wefornews.com

Looking for a better work opportunity, Williams ended up working with a few startup companies based in various parts of Florida, Texas, and Austin. Later, he moved to Sebastopol, California, to join the marketing team of O’Reilly Media. While working at O’Reilly, he switched to the coding department of the company. He was successful in learning the required skills and developed a personal blog website EvHead.com. Eventually, he left the job to become a freelance coder. As a freelancer, he worked with companies, like Intel and Hewlett-Packard.

Founding Blogger

Evan Williams along with Meg Hourihan co-founded Pyra Labs. The aim behind founding the company was to create management software for businesses. The first product that the company produced was a web application named ‘Pyra’, which included a project manager, contact manager, and a to-do list.

I999, they used the elements of ‘Pyra’ and created a blog-publishing tool named Blogger. It was officially launched in August in the same year. The platform was entirely free, so it faced a lot of trouble to survive. But soon, when it started getting ads, it began to stabilise. Soon Williams added some premium features to the platform, to monetise it. Hourihan left the company just after a few years of the inception of the company.

In February 2003, Google acquired PyraLabs, and eventually, Blogger. With the acquisition, the premium features of Blogger also became free to use. Williams continued to work with Google for one year after the takeover and left the company in 2004.

With Google, Blogger got new redesigns every few years and became the number one blogging platform. Blogger has provided its users with the freedom to create blogs for free. It provides the users to create beautiful looking designs for their blogs, and also, buy a separate domain to host their blogs as a distinct channel.

After PyraLabs: Obvious Corporation, Twitter, Medium

After PyraLabs, Williams went on to found Odeo, a podcast company, in October 2004. Sonic Mountain later acquired the company in 2007. He also co-founded Obvious Corporation in late 2006.

The famous micro-blogging website, Twitter, was one of the various projects that Williams co-worked on along with other key members of Obvious Corporation. Later April in 2007, Twitter was spun off to become a separate company. Williams held the position of the CEO of Twitter, the most successful venture he has worked on, in 2008. After serving the company for two years, Williams stepped down as the CEO to focus entirely on product development. Williams holds around 30-35 per cent stake in Twitter.

After Twitter, Williams wanted to develop a platform that would provide the users with an increased character-limit to write their blogs, as in the beginning, Twitter allowed writing 140- characters. So, in 2012, he founded Medium. Initially, it was only open to the early adopters, but later, it was opened for public.

In the first two years of its inception, the platform did not have much of users, but by March 2015, the platform recorded over 1.5 million hours reading time by its visitors. The company hired a staff of writers and editors to put good content over the platform. In 2015, the platform was nominated for the National Magazine Award.

In May 2017, Medium.com had gained an average of over 60 million unique monthly readers. By this time, the company started paying the writers based on the likes and the number of readers their posts had on Medium. Williams added ad banners to the platform, such that to make some profits through ads, but this business model did not work for the company, and he had to remove those ads from the platform.

Personal Life

William is married to Sara Williams and has two children. He lives in San Francisco with his family. He has a net worth higher than $1 billion.

William got his name under the list of top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35 in the MIT Technology Review TR100, in 2003. In the next year, he was named “People of the Year” along with his partners Hourihan and Paul Bausch in one of the PC Magazines.

Harsh Agarwal : The Success Story of Indian Blog Scientist & the Founder of ShoutMeLoud

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

“Follow your passion and the success will follow you!” the phrase that has become quite common today, and actually has done wonders for many. Same is the story of Delhi-based entrepreneur, Harsh Agarwal, who left a job (many of us dream of) just to follow his passion, and indeed the phrase set true for him, too.

Early Life

Born on 22 June 1987, Harsh Agarwal was a curious child and was always into learning new things. When he was 14, he became interested in computers and started saving to buy one. In 2002, he along with his family moved to Delhi, where he joined the Laxman Public School to pursue high school. After completing his school education, he joined the Sharda University and pursued a B.Tech degree in Information Technology.

Like any other parents, it was expected from him, too, to get a good job in an MNC and settle for a regular life. But it was not what Agarwal had ever thought. Having a curious mind, he was always into creative things and even got a certification in ethical hacking while in college.

Career

Soon the time for the placements came, his knowledge and creativity landed up him getting a job with one of the biggest MNCs, Accenture, in 2008. Since there was enough time between his graduation and joining with Accenture, he started working for Convergys.

harsh agarwal
Image Source: Twitter

Along with his job with Convergys, he started writing about things he knew and the things he was learning, at the BlogSpot platform. At that time, blogging was not as popular as it is today. Soon he also received his acceptance letter and joined a regular job at Accenture.

Along with his job, Agrawal was continuously working on his blog. He was interested in network and computer security, so he started a community named Underground World on Orkut. Soon the community started approaching more people, and Aggrwawal decided to build a blog with the same name. He tried to get a domain with the same name on BlogSpot, but the domain was not available, so he started a blog with name virgintech.blogspot. The first paycheque that he received from his online job was of $10, and the first money that he earned from AdSense was of $40.

Soon, the blog was making enough money with AdSense and other sources, such that Agarwal was able to pay his daily needs. After six months of his blogging career, he decided to devote all his time to his blog and left his job. His prime focus was to work on his blog, so he migrated his blog to a WordPress website and chose Shout-Me-Loud as the name for his blog.

Turning Point

On 29th June 2009, Agrawal met with a terrible accident, and the doctors advised him to stay on bed for the next six months. The accident was so bad that doctors had informed him that he won’t be able to walk again. Agarwal was shaken and had lost all hopes. But all he could do was try. Being bedridden, Agrawal had plenty of time to study and work on his blog. Along with working on his health, he was constantly working on the growth of his blog. According to Agarwal, it was a life-changing experience for him.

After seven months of practice and treatment, he was back on his feet. In December 2009, he met with another Blogger from Pune and partnered with him for a new venture. The two started working on a new project, and Agrawal became the B.D.O. of the firm. In just six months the company was financially independent, but the partnership was not going quite well. So, Agarwal decided to end the partnership and move back to Delhi.

ShoutMeLoud Growth

When Agarwal moved to Pune, he hardly got time for ShoutMeLoud, but when he came back to Delhi, it was the only thing which he was dedicated to. Soon the blog came back on track, and Agarwal started blogging to create awareness about making money from blogging. In just two years, ShoutMeLoud became one of the best blogs in India, and in 2013, even won the “Best Indian blog by Indiblogger” award.

By the year 2014-15, Agarwal received recognition as a public speaker, too. He organised plenty of workshops, and also, organised a blogger awareness trip ‘ShoutMeet’ from Delhi to Kanyakumari, in 2015.

Currently, ShoutMeLoud is operating under its parent company ShoutDreams and other than ShoutMeLoud, ShoutDreams is hosting WPhostingDiscount, ShoutMeTech, WPSutra, and CoinSutra blogs. In the past ten years, ShoutMeLoud has grown to a company of its own name, and many other bloggers are getting inspiration from the success story of Harsh Agarwal.

Matt Mullenweg : The Founder and CEO of WordPress

Founder, start-up, Tech Story / By

Breaking the stereotype, many common people coming from nowhere, have become the most important and influential leaders of the tech industry. Few names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc., pop up in each person’s mind as their innovations are playing an so important role in our lives. These innovations have also introduced new trends. One such trend is blogging. And when we hear the word ‘blog’ how can anyone forget the name of WordPress?

WordPress is an open source platform for creating websites, preferably used by most of the bloggers, small businesses, etc. It is one of the best CMS available, which does not require much knowledge of coding language to set up one’s own website. Introduction of WordPress revolutionized the whole internet and today 30% of the internet sites work on the WordPress. That’s a huge achievement. And all the credit goes to the man behind the idea – Matt Mullenweg.

Early Life

Born on 11th January 1984, in Houston, Texas, US, Matt went to High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. He studied jazz saxophone in his school. Further, he went to the University of Houston to pursue the degree in Political Science. But, soon he dropped out in 2004 and accepted a job at CNET Networks. He worked at CNET for two years then quit to start his own venture Automattic.

Matt was never into computer programming. When he was just 18, he used to post blogs on b2/cafelog, an open-source blogging platform. But, after some time, he came to know that the lead developer of this platform had quit and the company had stopped developing it any further. This is when Matt decided to develop the b2 codebase blogging platform according to the web standards of that time. He posted this information on his own blog and soon was joined by his fellow coder Mike Little. They made some key improvements and added some more features to the platform, and this is how the revolutionary WordPress was born, in January 2003.

Rise of Career

Soon after, Matt and Mike were joined by the original b2 developer Michel Valdrighi in the development of WordPress. Matt was just a newbie in his college at that time, and he had already co-founded his another venture Global Multimedia Protocols Group, in March 2004. Next, Matt launched a hub, where one could get notifications about blog updates called Ping-O-Matic.

Matt Mullenweg
Image Souce: wikimedia.org

WordPress was still seeking a huge audience to get on the global level. In May 2004, a strong competitor of WordPress, called Movable Type, made some changes in their prices, which led thousands of people looking out for an alternate platform. Fortunately, WordPress was available and caught everyone’s attention.

Now that WordPress was receiving a good response, CNET offered to recruit Matt to work on WordPress for them. He grabbed the opportunity and dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. A couple of months later, came the big announcement of bbPress. And, in February 2005, Matt along with the WordPress team released WordPress 1.5 ‘Strayhorn’. It introduced several top features like themes, moderation features, and redesign of front and back end.

Matt left CNET, in October of the same year to focus completely on WordPress. Just within a few days, he announced Akismet – an effort to stop comment and trackback spam. Later, in December, there came another venture called Automattic, the original company behind all his other ventures. Matt under Automattic, recruited all the people who had contributed to the development of WordPress.

In January 2006, Toni Schneider was appointed as the new CEO of Automattic. Exactly two years later, the company raised about $29.5 million from Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and New York Times Company. This was due to the increasing popularity of WordPress among the bloggers and various other funding offers from investors. By that time WordPress had a team of 18 people working.

In early 2009, WordPress was growing faster than anyone had ever imagined and was witnessing 10% growth each month. The platform was hosting around 15,000 new blogs daily. The growth kept increasing each year, tremendously. In April 2012, it was reported that WordPress empowered more than 70 million sites and made a revenue of $45 million that year.

Matt took the CEO position in Automattic, in 2014, and raised $160 million to take the company’s value to a billion dollars.

Personal Life

Matt has won several awards due to his achievements. Business Insider named him among the top 10 most influential people for changing the face of the internet. In February 2011 he was listed in the Forbes 30 Under 30 for the impact, he has made on the blogging world.

Matt supports a number of non-profit organizations and philanthropic organizations like Archive.org, Innocence Project, Charity: Water foundation, and many more. He is currently living in San Francisco.