He was born on March 31, 1972 and he is an technology entrepreneur who is the co-founder of many companies, including famous platforms also.
He was previously the chairman and CEO of Twitter. He also founded Blogger and Medium , two of the largest Internet platforms of their kind.
He is one of the most righ business men in the world.
Evan Williams Biography
He was born in Clarks, Nebraska , the third child of Laurie Howe and Monte Williams.
He grew up on a farm in Clarks, where he helped water crops during the summers. He attended the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for a year and a half, where he joined the FarmHouse fraternity , leaving to pursue his career.
However, the companies he worked for in the beginning were still startups. He then passed through several cities in the US, before returning to the farm where he was raised.
Evan Williams Career
After leaving college, he worked various tech jobs and start-ups in Florida, in Key West , and in Texas, in Dallas and Austin , before returning to his family’s farm in Nebraska. In 1996, he moved to Sebastopol, California in Sonoma County to work for the technology publishing company O’Reilly Media .
He started to work at O’Reilly in a marketing position, and then he became an contractor writing computer codes, which let him to freelance opportunities with companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard .
Meanwhile he worked at O’Reilly, he also started a website with the name Ev.Head.com, where he was beginning to make blogs about his personal thoughts.
Evan Williams Pyra Labs And Blogger
Him and Meg Hourihan co -founded Pyra Labs to make a project management software. He was taking feature emerged as Blogger , one of the first web applications for him to create and to manage weblogs .
He coined the term “blogger” and this was the instrutument in popularizing the word “blog”. The company survived the departure of her and other employees, and it was subsequently acquired by Google on February 13, 2003.
In 2003, he was named in the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the world’s top 100 innovators 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 his work at Blogger.
He officially left Google on October 8, 2004, to co-found Odeo, a podcast company.
In late 2006, he co-founded Obvious Corporation with Biz Stone and other former Odeo employees, to acquire all of the former properties of former Odeo backers. In April 2007, Sonic Mountain acquired Odeo.
Among Obvious Corporation’s projects was Twitter, a popular free social networking and microblogging service. Twitter was spun off as a new company in April 2007, with him as co-founder, board member, and investor.
In October 2008, he became CEO of Twitter, succeeding Jack Dorsey, who became chairman of the board.
Biz Stone, who had left his job at Google to join Williams’s new project, teamed up with an Odeo programmer named Jack Dorsey and together they came up with an idea so simple over the two-week hackathon deadline that it caused nonsense.
Few jokes between colleagues. It consisted of a system that allowed people to inform their friends about their mood or what they were doing at that moment. Updates were sent by SMS. The idea did not receive a great reception, but Stone asked him to allow them to continue working on it, and he agreed.
It was the seed of what is now Twitter , a company with a stock market valuation of more than 23,000 million dollars (17,000 million euros). It is told, in the first person, by one of its founders, Biz Stone, in the book Things a little bird told me , published this spring in the United States.
Stone debunks many of the myths surrounding the origins of the microblogging network , for example, that it was born as a communication system between employees. It was used by Odeo workers, but it was a program to keep up to date with what your friends are doing or feeling.
In February 2009, Compete.com ranked Twitter as the third most used social network, based on its count of 6 million monthly unique visitors and 55 million monthly visits. As of February 2013, Twitter had 200 million registered users.
It gains 300,000 new users a day, and as of August 2015, it was ranked twelfth in the world. It receives more than 300 million unique visitors and more than five billion people in traffic per month. 75% of their traffic comes from outside of Twitter.com.
In October 2010, he resigned from the CEO position, explaining that he would be “completely focused on product strategy” and named Dick Costolo as his replacement.
Following Twitter’s initial public offering (IPO) announcement in 2013, the company was valued at between $14 billion and $20 billion.
On April 6, 2017, an article announced that he would be selling 30 % of his actions in Twitter, for “reasons known just by him”.
In February 2019, he stepped down from his role as a Twitter board member.
On September 25, 2012, he was creating a publishing platform, Medium (at Medium.com). Initially only available to early adopters, it was opened to the public in 2013.
On April 5, 2013, him and Stone made an announcement that they were disbanding Obvious Corporation as they were focusing on personal startups.
As a vegetarian, he invested in Beyond Meat , an alternative based on plant-based meat, something that became well known also in the midst of the cause he participates in.
The co-founder of Twitter also acknowledges that, although they sensed that the dotcom could have significant potential, they never imagined that it would play such an important role in the US presidential elections, changes in political regimes in the Arab world or health prevention in areas of earthquakes .
Somehow, Twitter has been created on the fly, from the use that Internet users made of it.
Retweets , hashtags (#) and mentions (@) were invented by users themselves, so the company ended up developing methods to be able to retweet by pressing a single button (which prevented them from having to copy and paste the entire tweet) or to search for topics under the same hashtag more quickly.
The same terms tweet or tweeting ( tweet and tweeting , in English) arose from social use, since the company initially spoke of updates and tweeting , respectively.
Stone, who dropped out of college after taking a full-time job designing book covers, confesses to having a restless mind, always thinking about how to create technologies that would provide a useful and beneficial service to society.
Jack Dorsey and Evan , the other two founders of Twitter, have more rational and calm characters. In any case, Things a little bird told me is not only about how the company evolved, but about Stone’s learning from the beginning of his professional career at Little, Brown and Company until his departure from Twitter and the creation of his latest business venture: Jelly.
This book represents –perhaps taken to the extreme– the business culture that prevails among the younger generations . Values such as learning, social contribution and the freedom to create take on greater importance than money and stability.
This vision, common in Silicon Valley, takes on greater force in the mouth of Stone, coming from a humble family and plunged until the IPO of Twitter (with a brief exception while working at Google) in strong economic difficulties.
Stone is, above all, an idealist. At first glance, it combines apparent ingredients of irresponsibility, immaturity and to some extent arrogance with more admirable elements such as restlessness, illusion, transparency and infinite creativity – “imagination is like renewable energy sources; no matter how much use it, it never ends,” he says in his biography.
He wrote an email to him, when they did not yet know each other, asking him to work with him at Blogger, a company that had just been acquired by Google.
He moved to San Francisco assuming that Google would give him the job he wanted, went to the first job interview hungover, without even the slightest preparation, and dared to ask his interviewer for an aspirin. But somehow it worked. “You create your own opportunities,” Stone repeats over and over again.
The work at Little, Brown and Company also achieved this in a unique way. While studying at the University of Massachusetts, thanks to a scholarship, he got a job moving boxes for the publisher.
While his colleagues from the Graphic Arts department were out for lunch, he picked up one of the pending books, created a cover, and, without saying anything to anyone, included it in the pile of finished work for approval by the Department of Graphics.
Sales, located in New York. A few days later the art director asked who had done that design and offered him a full-time job. He then decided to accept the job and drop out of college, “one of the best decisions of my life.”
Evan Williams Presentation Of The XOXO Festival
He appeared at the 2013 XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon, explaining his understanding of Internet commerce.
During his XOXO session, he also compared the Internet to “many other major technological revolutions that have taken place in the history of the world”, such as agriculture, and stated that the Internet is not a utopia.
After President Trump was attributing his election to his use of Twitter, he stated that if this was true, he was regretting that and was worried that the internet platform would reward extremes.
Evan Williams Net Worth
According to the Forbes Billionaires Ranking, he is worth $2.6 billion, making him one of the richest people in the world . Known for being one of the biggest internet entrepreneurs, he grew up on a farm.
Evan Williams Private Life
He lives in the San Francisco area with his wife, Sara, with whom he has two children . He has been cited as having a philosophy that it is important to conserve time, do less and avoid distractions.
