Evan Williams

Cofounder of Twitter

• Born: March 31, 1972
• Place of Birth: Clarks, Nebraska

Primary Company/Organization: Twitter

Introduction

Evan Williams is a computer programmer and entrepreneur from Nebraska who has been involved with two of the Internet's most visited sites: Twitter and Blogger. He has worked at a number of prominent Internet companies on both full-time and contract bases but has become best known as one of the three founders of Twitter, which was rebranded X in 2023. Twitter has hundreds of millions of users and has revolutionized online communications for many of those people. Twitter and tweet have entered the lexicon as terms familiar to nearly everyone with a mobile phone or computer, and few news, entertainment, and other major corporations do not offer interactive communications with viewers and listeners via their websites and social media pages.

Early Life

Evan “Ev” Clark Williams was born in Clarks, Nebraska, on March 31, 1972, and lived and worked on a farm during his childhood and teenage years. Although he attended the University of Nebraska for a year and a half, the isolated agricultural lifestyle did not appeal to him, and he longed to invent and create in a more technologically sophisticated environment. This led him to a variety of positions across the country, where he sought to make a mark for himself. Initially he was involved in marketing and publishing, but, at O'Reilly Media in Sebastopol, California, he was given the opportunity to switch to programming, which yielded further opportunities on contract bases with various well-known computer and Internet companies. Contacts he made during this process and the confidence and skills he acquired from the various jobs he performed facilitated the major stage of his career, which was to take a role in start-up companies providing new products for the Internet world.

Life's Work

In 1999, Williams and Meg Hourihan founded Pyra Labs as a company that would produce project management software. Almost serendipitously, the concept of blogging was introduced from a note-taking application that was intended to be part of a larger suite of programs. Williams rapidly became involved with popularizing this application, Blogger, and is credited with inventing the term; today, many millions of people use blogging software to record their opinions on a wide range of subjects, and the term and concept have been embraced in commercial and organizational circles as important means of communication with stakeholders as well as marketing and public relations.

The Pyra Labs version of blogging was comparatively limited in scope, but it was successful in grasping the imagination and thereby enlisting the energy of users in developing the initial premise. Google recognized the further potential of the application and in 2003 purchased the company in its entirety. This was just as well for Williams, because investment money had already run out and most employees had either left or were on the verge of doing so, some of them with harsh words to say about Williams's management style and his seeming unwillingness to put human interests above business ones, as is common in situations when staff are expected to work without pay.

Within a year, Williams had left Google to start new ventures. These included Odeo, a company involved with producing podcasts. Again, this was a venture that provided a new medium that sparked the enthusiasm of people interested in both producing and consuming content. However, as in the case of Blogger, it was not clear to users why they should pay for such services when elsewhere user-produced content (albeit often not of the highest quality) was being made available for free in such profusion.

From 2003 to 2007, Williams was involved not just with Odeo, but with a variety of other start-up companies as well. He became part of the cluster of talented entrepreneurs and engineers living in California and forming networks with one another to find complementary resources and competencies in the hope of discovering the next big Internet idea. Williams was at different times an investor, innovator, and manager.

Twitter emerged as an independent company in 2007, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Williams, who supplanted Dorsey as chief executive officer (CEO) shortly thereafter. The single product that Twitter offered, the eponymous microblogging service, became enormously popular. Subscribers could send messages, called "tweets," through the service, which were limited to 140 characters to meet the requirements of mobile device short-message services; many, already accustomed to texting short messages, found the format and character limit compatible. Twitter took off among users interested in rapid communication without any particular intellectual content and thereby overcame the initial skepticism about the professional communication industries, in the same way that blogging had done. Twitter subsequently fine-tuned the product, but the essential service remained the same and continued to be provided for free to all registered users. Third-party applications relying on Twitter began to proliferate.

In 2010, Williams stepped down as Twitter's CEO, remaining to work on strategy. The new CEO, Dick Costolo, had been chief operating officer and had joined the board the previous year. This move seemed to make sense from a personal point of view: Williams was considered to be more of a technical expert than a manager. Williams described Twitter as a maturing high school student, which had achieved physical size but lacked organizational sophistication. He focused on strategy issues such as the realization of income from users (in such a way that people do not feel alienated by, for example, intrusive advertisements or blatantly inauthentic tweets), as well as privacy issues and the ownership of tweets, which can have commercial value. The importance of Twitter had already become apparent. In 2009, the US State Department requested that the company postpone some scheduled maintenance work on the system because it would have coincided with important moments in the Iranian elections, and it was thought that many people, not relying on official sources of information, were using Twitter as a means of social and political organization while avoiding official scrutiny and government censorship. Subsequently, any large-scale social gathering has routinely had the extensive use of Twitter ascribed to it, whether it is the protesters of the Arab Spring in 2011 or the rioters in parts of London later that year. It is certainly true that Twitter has become a leading application for citizen journalists and for those caught up in natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and other events of great and immediate public importance. And in 2017, feverish tweeter Donald Trump was inaugurated president of the United States, beginning what some have called the first "Twitter presidency."

One of Twitter's principal benefits is the use of the hash key (#), which users append to messages with a short “tag” or text string that indicates the subject of the message. Tweet aggregators can easily identify these tags and thereby provide summary reports that reveal both the most popular subjects people are discussing at any moment and important user or customer feedback for companies and marketers. The ubiquity of tweets on radio and television programs inviting interactivity has brought the terminology into general use, and numerous academic studies have sought to consider what impact the process has had on people and society. Although it is not clear to what extent Williams was fully aware of all the implications of the new technology, from a commercial point of view it really does not matter. What he has achieved is to provide communication tools—blogging and tweeting—that many millions have felt inspired to develop for a wide variety of purposes.

After Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, Williams stated that he was no longer a shareholder of the company. He said he felt sad about the direction Musk was taking Twitter, which Musk later rebranded X. In 2012 Williams launched the online publishing platform Medium, which allows users to publish personal essays and other writings. Williams served as Medium CEO until July 2022, when he stepped down. He remained chair of the company.

Personal Life

Williams has been described as an independent thinker, creative and innovative with respect to technology, if less interested in the fine but necessary details of organizational management. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Sara Morishige Williams, and their two children.

Bibliography

Arthur, Charles. “Twitter CEO Evan Williams Steps Down.” Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 4 Oct. 2010. Web. July 2012.

Burgess, Jean, and Nancy K. Baym. Twitter: A Biography. NYU Press, 2022. Print.

Chang, Emily. "Twitter Co-Founder Williams Says He Was 'Sad' After Musk's Purchase." Bloomberg, 8 June 2023, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-08/twitter-co-founder-williams-says-he-was-sad-after-musk-s-purchase. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Diaz-Ortiz, Claire, and Biz Stone. Twitter for Good: Change the World One Tweet at a Time. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2011. Print.

Grossman, Lev. “Iran's Protest: Why Twitter Is the Medium of the Movement.” Time. Time, 17 June 2009. Web. July 2012.

Jansen, Bernard J., Mimi Zhang, Kate Sobel, and Abdur Chowdury. “Twitter Power: Tweets as Electronic Word of Mouth.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60.11 (2009): 2169–88. Print.

Miller, Claire Cain. “Putting Twitter's World to Use.” New York Times. New York Times, 14 Apr. 2009. Web. July 2012.

"Profile: Evan Williams." Forbes, 2024, www.forbes.com/profile/evan-williams/?sh=7392b9f92134. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Thomases, Hollis. Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day. Indianapolis: Wiley, 2010. Print.

Williams, Evan. “Evan Williams on Twitter.” Interview. Economist. Economist, 5 Oct. 2010. Web. 15 Aug. 2012.