 Now we're on the bright state. All right. So there's a lot we can talk about. We can talk about how to build great companies. We can talk about taking companies public. Probably talking about how not to take companies private. But instead, what do you want to talk about? Well, I figure first talk of the day here, we should talk about why we're all here. From my understanding, this is a startup conference. It's my first slush. Very happy to be here. Good to see you all. And really what I've been thinking about lately is why startups. Why do we choose to do the things we do? Yeah, anyone building startups here knows that it's crazy, and you've built a bunch of them. So that means you're like repeat crazy. So maybe we should, to get to the why, maybe we should go back a little bit to the beginning. All right, you're from Nebraska, which is like the Lapland of the United States, or at least it's far away from a lot of other things. How did that shape the why for you? Yeah, so I grew up in, if you're not familiar, Nebraska is the middle of the United States. I grew up in rural Nebraska, which is even more middle. And I literally grew up in the cornfields on a farm. And so which I hated at the time. But I appreciate now, because I was very bored. And I think that boredom, as well as the sense of independence, my dad was a farmer, his dad was a farmer, is really entrepreneurship. It was what do you do when you are infused with a sense of self-responsibility and independence, and you're really bored, is that's a perfect setting to become a founder, I think. And I guess you were bored in college, because like a number of other great founders you dropped out and went West. How did you make, I mean that's a big decision, how did you make that decision, and why did you go where you went? Yeah, so I had never been to California, but I got into computers. And so I grew up without the internet and I'm old enough to remember those times. And what's amazing now is being here in Europe and in Finland, and the incredible representation of startups and countries here is that really Silicon Valley in the early internet days seemed like the only place. And I started an internet company in Nebraska and no one, before anyone knew what the internet was. So I realized I just felt that draw like a lot of people to Silicon Valley at the time. And so was there a moment when you knew I am a founder, I'm doing this and I'm gonna do this for a long time? I always assumed that I would start companies. I don't know if I use that term, but I remember, and I'm not sure why, I never, I just assumed I was not going to work for people. I specifically remember driving my hot wheels around and making a little sign that it was my empire and it was EC, see my middle name started to see, EC Industries was like my, at some age 10 or something. I was just imagined that I was building. So some kids like to play with trucks, you were just like, I'm going to go build things. Yeah, I'm gonna have an empire, I'm gonna have cars and trucks and engineer things. And did you know then that you were gonna try to do things that really mattered, that had a lot of purpose or did that come later? No, I think honestly, that was later for me. I think people approach entrepreneurship very differently. For me, I had a desperate need to just succeed at first and I wanted to create, I'm inherently, I'm gonna create things and I wanna succeed and I wanna create things that are good, but it wasn't like I wanna change the world in this particular way. And I think that kind of developed over time and as I got more opinionated about what kind of changed the world needed. But I think like a lot of entrepreneurs, there's just a, for me, there was a big hunger to prove myself, to get out of the area I was in and that came first for a long time. So you knew to prove that competitive nature and to drive to succeed, you knew you needed to be in the Bay Area, so you went West. And just maybe walk us through the founding stories there what happened next. Well, I had a job for a short time, but again, I was always assuming I would start my own thing. So I started a company called Blogger. Well, the company wasn't called Blogger, the company's called Pyro. We were doing something else. Blogger was a pivot before we really used that word pivot. It was a side project. And that was really the first thing I did that ever turned into anything. That was, I started that in 1999. And that was really scratching my own itch. Was just one of the big lessons for me over time because it was, I had this other much more complicated product that was project management, sort of an enterprise in the cloud thing that to use today's terminology. And it created Blogger really because I wanted to post to my own website. I had a personal website. I wrote some code to make it easy to publish to the website. And that was an epiphany. And I thought, oh, this is cool. Maybe other people would like this. But my assumption was that it wasn't a business. It wasn't, there wasn't a way to make money from it. But it was fun. And it was scratched my own itch. And the people on my team, there was only three of us liked it. And so we just followed that thread. And for a long time, we thought we needed to pay attention to the thing that had much more of a business case. And then eventually realized, actually this simple fun thing that we did for our own interest is what resonates with people. Seems like a thread throughout their career, especially the big wins, the more you focus, the more you narrow your focus, the more successful you were. That's true. But it's focused in a specific way. What I've found is the focus, to me, the compass is always what is the thing that I wanna put in the world? Mostly because I'm selfish and I wanna use it myself. And so where I've misstepped is when I thought, oh, I know a thing that a bunch of other people are gonna like and that's, and I think it will work. And that's the motivating factor rather than I just want to, I want this to exist. Right. So you want it to exist for you and hopefully for others. And that narrow focus let you make things that mattered. So you sold that company to Google, you were at Google for a little while and then you decided that you were, you still needed to build independently. What was that decision about where you went back out there to take all those big risks again to try to be a repeat founder, which is a tough decision to make? That was not for me tough at the time. I was still young enough. I still had a lot of energy. I still felt the need to prove myself. I was very happy to have landed at Google with Blogger. I was honored to be there. Smartest people I'd ever met. This was Google in the early days or hundreds of employees. And, but then I was in a company that I, you know, I wasn't even at the top of the company. I was just, it was someone else's thing. And so I knew immediately that I was gonna stay as long as I wanted to get Blogger on the right track. I really cared about what I had built and then I was gonna leave. But then I kind of fell into things too quickly. And so the next company was Odeo, which is a podcasting company. And that was a big lesson for me because that really didn't come from that desire to put something in the world. You say it like it was a podcasting company, sort of like you say Blogger was a blogging company. Blogger invented the concept of blogging and Odeo really invented or was one of the early pioneers in this thing that didn't have a name yet on podcasting. So maybe you could share that story because it didn't end in the way that you thought it would. Yeah, I mean, both were very early with emerging. You know, we weren't the only ones in either case, but Odeo, this was 2005. So Odeo podcasting was very, very emergent. And it, a friend of mine who was my neighbor at the time named Noah Glass who later helped to start Twitter, he was doing audio things. And I left Google with the intention to take a break and he just kept coming over to my house. And so we ended up co-founding Odeo together when podcasting, before there was iPhone. So from the name comes from the iPod and no one listened to podcast on the iPod, but we built a product for that. And to me, the lesson, what it wasn't as internally driven as I said, and I kind of fell into that because there was within a certain tech community a lot of hype about podcasting at that time. And I mapped it to what we had done with blogging. I thought, oh, this is, I kind of thought it would be an easy win, frankly. And that should be a red flag. Basically, I don't really believe in easy wins. And they're usually illusions. And if you're doing something because it's an easy win, it should really, even on the product level, that could be what the startup is. It could be like certain product tweaks. And it was a real struggle because we didn't have product market fit and we raised money because I was a second time founder and I was able to raise much more money than I needed. And then I was like, shoot, what am I gonna do? I have a team of like a dozen people. We don't have product market fit. We have a bunch of money in the bank and we're not doing something I'm passionate about. And it does, I mean, maybe it gets to that question of the why too. You had a very clear why in the beginning with blogging, maybe less of a why. There is another through line though, which is the reimagination of communication and media. And you did it with blogger. You did it with the podcasting. What came next in terms of that reimagination? And maybe you could talk about the inception story of Twitter and the why there. Yeah, well, yeah, so for those who don't know, Twitter was started within that company, Odio as a side project. And it actually came at a time when we were like, we need something to do something else. We have a bunch of money in the bank. This was in 2005. So a bunch of money then qualified as like three million bucks. And so we, and our board was like, well, do you have other ideas? And so we did a hackathon. Jack had this idea that became Twitter. He and Biz, my co-founders for Twitter worked on that. And that was a completely different thing. It was in the Odio case, I sort of intellectualized why this is a good idea. Twitter made no sense, you know, for many years, it was like, what is, that's very hard to understand. We can't explain why that's interesting, but we knew it was interesting because we felt it. And it was back to that feeling, and not terribly dissimilar from when I wrote that, that code to post to my blog, it was like, oh, this is different. We had no idea clearly where it was gonna go, but we felt something intriguing and we pulled on that thread. And a little bit of magic too, right? You sort of felt like, wow, this is something that we didn't all have before and we now have it and we can use it and it's our little thing and then it got bigger and bigger. And for you personally, what was ultimately with Twitter, what was the why? I mean, how did you see it having a real world positive impact out there? What was the vision? Well, our assumption, I can't say there was really a vision or a mission in the very beginning. It was really a felt sense that this was new and interesting. And then it's very easy to, especially back then, to make up all kinds of reasons why it's gonna be great for the world. Now I view it much more neutrally than I did at the time, but I believe the mission described later for Twitter is something about making, letting everyone share ideas and information without barriers and instantly. Which baked into that mission is the assumption that everyone sharing information without barriers is a good thing. And now I view it as a good and bad thing, but we just thought, oh, if there's new and easier ways to share information, of course, that can be tremendously good. So we didn't really question why it was good and we didn't really know where it would go, obviously. And then you went back to the broader form with Medium. So maybe you could talk about going back to, was it unfinished business with blogging? Was it just a way to expand the conversation? What was the why there? Yeah, so Medium was more of an intellectual, sort of theoretical, it was the combination really. So I would describe Twitter was just a feeling. It was like, oh, it feels like there's something here. Audio was, there's a lot of theory, but not a lot of feeling. And then Medium was both for me personally. I felt like everything I'd learned about the internet from between Blogger and Twitter and sort of observed, not just one of my own companies was, the network is what matters. And so with Blogger, we never built a network. It was a publishing tool. You got a static standalone website. And then the whole social networking thing happened. And then with Twitter, we realized at first we thought the novelty was the 140 characters and texting. But then we realized it's really the network. And so it's publishing, but with almost no software value on network value. And so Medium was like, okay, the network is central, but we need tools for more substantive content. And all the publishing tools at that time felt very dated and inelegant. And so there was a big design component. I wanna make something simple and elegant and beautiful for publishing more substantive ideas. And I wanna build a network out of it. And that was the theory from the beginning. And along the way, you also started Obvious or Obvious was a vehicle, but you started Obvious Ventures out of that. Yeah, so that was in order to try to achieve more than one thing at once. And when I decided after I left Twitter, I was in a state that maybe some people have been in where you wanna do a whole bunch of things. And it's very hard to decide, especially when you can fund things and have money, and then you have a bunch of ideas and opportunities. And then I think a lot of people suffer as I did from just like too many opportunities and never getting past the shallow layer. And to me, it was much more satisfying to dig into something, but that requires a choice. So I was investing in all kinds of things. I incubated a couple of companies and decided to focus on medium, but I still, I had cared a lot about climate and at this time and thought I would do something there if I had any good ideas, but I didn't have any good ideas. And so, but I thought, well, I can invest. At that point, I had money from Twitter. And so our partner, James and I were talking. I was like, who's investing in climate? Who can I put my money with? And there weren't nearly as many people as there are today. So that's why we formed the firm, Obvious Ventures. At the time we expanded the focus to world positive companies. And I spent most of my time on media in the last few years, but James and our partner Vishal and you have built this incredible fund and there we are. And yeah, so let's talk about what's next. And maybe we could also for founders in the audience, first time founders, repeat founders. At Obvious we see a lot of repeat founders who like you have had a lot of success and become very intentional the second time around. They really realize like, wow, now I have a chance to, I got it right before, but really get it right with answering that question of the why. So whether somebody's in a big company thinking about breaking out and taking all the risks that you and others have taken, or they're a repeat founder coming back and trying to nail the why. What advice do you have for how to, you've done it a lot of different ways. How do you center around what's most important? What matters for a company? I think for everybody it's different. And I talked to two founders yesterday. One was a first time founder who started from what are the big problems in the world and ended up at a software solution to address something. And I'd never done that. I never start with the problem in the world. And I thought that's very impressive and she was very impressive. And then I talked to another founder as a second time founder who filled a lot of pressure as I did when you go out the second time and really feeling this, like you gotta succeed. That's very important to a lot of second time founders and it was for me to prove that that wasn't a fluke or maybe things didn't go exactly right. So people are different, but I think the most important thing, and this doesn't just apply on the what company do you do level, but really every step along the way is do the thing, make the world better in the way that you really believe. And I think everyone would agree with that at a high level. I found it's very easy to get confused along the way and do things for the same reason I did Odeo and made a lot of choices, even with Medium because there's such pressure for growth and for success. And when things aren't going right, it's very easy to lose that inner compass and then start saying like, oh, okay, well, our customers are telling us this, which is great if you agree. But then it was like, oh, they're telling us this or investors are telling us this or a board is telling us this or this, other companies, you know, should we do crypto now? Is that the thing is, and it could be, but it's so easy to start being guided by other people's compass instead of your own. One example, just very simple example I did at Medium was, you know, we wanted to grow. Like everything was going, and we wanted the numbers to go up and we had a product team whose job was to get more people to sign up. And so what they found is that if you visit a Medium page and you put a pop-up in people's face before they could read the article, they're gonna sign up, guess what? Signups went through the roof. And when I first saw that, I was like, that's too aggressive. I don't like that as a user. That doesn't feel right to me. And so they made it more subtle and said, well, maybe it's just the second time and we made a compromise. And so Signups still went up a lot. I was like, okay, live with that compromise. And then several months later, I had a new, I had a marketing come in. And one of the first things she did was read what people on Twitter were saying about Medium. And there were all these complaints like, oh, it's spamming, it's like doing these pop-ups and paywall. And I'm like, well, that's terrible. And it's not worth it. And that, and I was kicking myself because I strayed from that gut instinct. As a user, we did something that as a user, I didn't want. And so I think that is now always the guiding compass is whether it's at the company level or the specific product or is like, just do the thing you want to exist. Okay, so let's talk about categories of things that we want to exist in the world that are move the needle, build the next. Tesla is at a $775 billion market cap. What are some of the categories where these folks might start the next Tesla? What are the big areas that you're looking for real growth in? Well, it's an incredible time. The market is tricky right now, but I think I'm a fan of when things there's not too much money and too much hype. It's a great time to build things. Wow. And so again, everyone has to make the choice for what really resonates with them. So I would hate to even say, what I think climate is the most exciting point it's ever been because it feels like a tipping point in terms of being able to make real change and obviously necessity to make real change, but sensing a lot of positive momentum. A lot of, there's rich ecosystems of solutions that are being built, a ton of cooperation. So I'm just getting up to speed in that area really, even though we've been investing for a long time. But any, whether you start with a problem or you start with an idea that pulls you towards something to make better in the world, I think everything connects. When it could be mental health, it could be knowledge, it could be what we do about climate. As long as it's something that you think really matters, I think it's worthwhile. Web three. Web three is super interesting. I've been intrigued. I think the, what I'm interested in particular is I'm not as interested in anything finance related. I'm interested in decentralization. I think the consumer web has lost a lot of the innovation we used to have 15 years ago because the major platforms suck so much attention. It's so hard to break away from them. And so I'm excited that there's actually some architectures that are emerging that will allow, my hope is a lot more innovation. And do you think some of that could impact some of the social graph and the ability of individuals to communicate and build greater networks and community power? That's the dream that we've had forever is that there can be portability and data ownership. It's been a tricky problem. And I don't know if the right solutions are out there, but I think right now there's some fractures with some of the big platforms. It's a great opportunity because now people are building things and other things have a chance. And I think from a consumer point of view, people are tired of the big platforms and there needs to be different. And they're tired of maybe the value systems driving those platforms. And people are open to new forms of expression, I think as well. I think we see a lot of that decentralization in climate as well, which is interesting. Even mobility, a lot of personal empowerment and taking power away from central systems. So it's an interesting sort of theme moving forward. We spent the last 30 years digitizing the global economy. Maybe we spend the next 30 decarbonizing it and decentralizing it. There's a lot of work to be done. Yeah. And now, unlike 20 years ago when I moved to Silicon Valley, you don't have to be in Silicon Valley. The knowledge has spread. The companies are everywhere. It's a big, and COVID obviously accelerated that. And now it's like everyone can collaborate from anywhere. Could be in Clark, Nebraska, Lapland, Helsinki, wherever. Doesn't matter. Okay, so find the purpose, stay true to your core ideas and do stuff like that. Great the thing you want to exist. Yeah, great the thing you want to exist. All right. Eve Williams, thank you very much. Thank you.