#46 - Ev Williams, Founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium

Ev Williams has revolutionized the internet as we’ve come to know it. With Blogger, he made blogging easier for everyone; with Twitter, he helped people share ideas from anywhere; and with Medium, Ev has created a digital network of curious minds. Thirteen years after co-founding Twitter, Ev Williams is still trying to reinvent online conversation. The billionaire Medium founder sees the present as another big moment—and he is ready to pounce. Born in Nebraska, Ev grew up on a farm where he assisted with crop irrigation in the summer. As a young man he was so interested in farming that he joined the FarmHouse International Fraternity, Inc., a professional agriculture fraternity, while he was studying in the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. However, he did not stay long enough in the university to complete his degree as he was very much interested in becoming an entrepreneur as soon as possible. He teamed up with his father to set up a company to provide instructional material about the World Wide Web which they ran for a short while. He then worked as a web developer for several computer companies before co-founding Pyra Labs. Soon Pyra Labs developed the blog-publishing service Blogger which became a huge success and was ultimately acquired by Google. His entrepreneurial spirit did not allow him to stay with Google for long and he left the company to found other ventures like Odeo and Obvious Corp. The micro-blogging service Twitter was created as a project of Obvious Corp.