Ever wonder who created the whole blog movement? Super rad story in the latest edition of inc. Magazine. One of my favorite magazine’s by thee way. Its hard not to copy and paste the whole article into this post. I chopped and pasted some parts I couldn’t leave out. You can read the rest on their website or at any magazine stand.
[This is odd. Williams is the sort of person who can't seem to do anything, no matter how trivial, without blogging, photo-sharing, or text-messaging the news. He founded Blogger, the website that introduced the world to blogging and now attracts some 163 million visitors each month. He has maintained a detailed personal blog for more than a decade--posting pictures, explaining his latest theories on business, and huffing about the cable company. His new business, called Twitter, takes it a step further: It lets exhibitionists, techies, and--a hint of things to come--marketers blast their latest doings to cell phones. So he's not just a practitioner of hyperconnectedness; he practically invented the concept.
And it's not as if Williams doesn't have the money (he made a reported $50 million selling Blogger to Google) or the connections (Twitter's angel investors read like a who's who of Silicon Valley) to attempt something more ambitious.
Williams grew up on a corn farm in Clarks, Nebraska (population 379). He's a self-taught coder, having dropped out of college after only a year to start a company. But this wasn't Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). The college was the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the companies--there were three failures in five years--were un-ambitious, money losing, and admittedly dopey. Williams's most successful product was a CD-ROM for fans of the Cornhuskers football team. Finally, convinced he still knew little about how to run a business, he cut his losses, took a Web development job in California, and started writing about it.
The experience of shepherding Blogger through growth, then hardship, until he finally turned it into a real company cemented Williams's philosophy of business. He would be an entrepreneur who looked for value in things that seemed worthless. Faith--in one's ability, in one's chosen path, and, above all else, in the fact that there are always opportunities ahead--was a company's greatest need. Stick to your product, forget about scrambling for deals, and good things will happen.]-inc.
