Evan Williams (Internet entrepreneur)

Early life and education

Williams was born in Clarks, Nebraska, as the third child of Laurie Howe and Monte Williams. He grew up on a farm in Clarks, where he assisted with crop irrigation during the summers. He attended the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for a year and a half, where he joined FarmHouse Fraternity, leaving to pursue his career.

Early career

After leaving college, Williams worked at various technology jobs and start-up firms in Florida, at Key West, and in Texas, at Dallas and Austin, before returning to 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, later becoming an independent contractor writing computer code, which led to freelance opportunities with companies including Intel and Hewlett-Packard.

Pyra Labs and Blogger

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 coined the term "blogger" and was instrumental in the popularization of the term "blog". Pyra survived the departure of Hourihan and other employees, and later, was acquired by Google on February 13, 2003.

In 2003, Williams was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2004, he was named one of PC Magazine's "People of the Year", along with Hourihan and Paul Bausch, for their work on Blogger.

Odeo and Obvious Corporation

Williams left Google in June 2004, to co-found Odeo, a podcast company. In late 2006, Williams co-founded Obvious Corporation 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.

Twitter

Among Obvious Corporation's projects was Twitter, a popular, free social networking and micro-blogging service. Twitter was spun out into a new company in April 2007, with Williams as co-founder, board member, and investor. In October 2008, Williams became CEO of Twitter, 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 February 2013, Twitter had 200 million registered users. It gets 300,000 new users a day and, as of August 2015, was ranked twelfth in the world. It receives more than 300 million unique visitors and more than five billion people in traffic a month. 75% of its traffic comes from outside of Twitter.com.

In October 2010 Williams stepped down from the CEO position, explaining that he would be "completely focused on product strategy," and appointed Dick Costolo as his replacement.

Following the announcement of Twitter's initial public offering (IPO) in 2013, the company was valued at between US$14 billion and US$20 billion. One media report anticipated that Williams, with a 30 to 35 percent stake in the company, would see his personal wealth grow from US$2 billion to US$8 billion in the wake of Twitter's stock flotation.

Medium

On September 25, 2012, Williams created a publishing platform, Medium (at Medium.com). Initially, it was available only to early adopters, but was opened to the public in 2013.

On April 5, 2013, Williams and Stone announced that they would be unwinding Obvious Corporation as they focused on individual startups.

XOXO Festival presentation

Williams presented at the 2013 XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon, and explained his understanding of Internet commerce. During his XOXO session, Williams also likened the Internet to "a lot of other major technological revolutions that have taken place in the history of the world," such as agriculture, and asserted that the Internet is not a utopia.

Personal life

Williams is a vegetarian. He lives in the San Francisco area with his wife, Sara, with whom he raises two children.

Future business plans

Despite having a net worth higher than USD $1B (generated from the acquisition or public offering of the companies mentioned above), and having a reputation for media business savvy, none of Williams' notable businesses have been profitable in conventional terms.

After Donald Trump credited his election to the use of Twitter, Evan Williams stated that if true, he was sorry and he was concerned that the Internet platform rewarded extremes. Williams told the Associated Press that he no longer believes in Internet free speech, although he did not indicate the exact censorship formats he would propose. His musings about future business objectives include considerations about the effect of the Internet upon society.