Evan Williams Quotations

My strong belief - in being in blogging before Twitter - is that in trying to create more information out there, in trying to create the democratization of media in general, is that the more voices there are out there then the likelihood is that the truth bubbles up to the top.

Every time you start a company - and I've started five or six - you have the opportunity to screw up in whole new ways.

I like to think of the world as a sort of a casino, except the house doesn't have the advantage. If you're smart, you have an advantage. It behooves you to place a lot of bets.

When I meet with the founders of a new company, my advice is almost always, ‘Do fewer things.’ It’s true of partnerships, marketing opportunities, anything that’s taking up your time. The vast majority of things are distractions, and very few really matter to your success.

I've always had a tendency to be much more optimistic about people than I should be. I'd like to be a little shrewder.

The promoted tweet is a real tweet that a company may have sent out that they want more distribution for. They will buy key words for it. If people are looking for something related, it will show up.

Every major communication tool on the Internet has spam and abuse problems. All email services, blogging services and social networks have to dedicate a significant amount of resources and time to fighting abuse and protecting their users.

Twitter was designed to be this system that you just scan for information that's important or useful to you and then walk away, and if you wanna take a break you take a break.

The things that keep nagging at you are the ones worth exploring.

People are fans of Dunkin' Donuts. They have a relationship with the company, they go there every day. Dunkin' Donuts is using Twitter to communicate with those people. There are people who are finding value in that. There's thousands of people, I don't know how many thousands now, following Dunkin' Donuts.

After high school, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but I stayed only a year and a half. I felt college was a waste of time; I wanted to start working.

My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I've always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism.

Google started out when the dot-com boom was happening. It grew under the radar of big companies that were competing in but basically ignoring search. Then they were able to really invest during the bust for a long time.

If you look at the Internet, the vast majority of start-ups are not successful. But the ones that are, are very very successful. So you can't point to the unsuccessful ones and say, 'There's no hope for this field.' It's just that they had the wrong idea or they had bad execution.

People want to do good things, they just need a prod sometimes, and what Twitter and other technologies that connect people are showing us is that if you make it a little easier for people then you will enable them to do what they want to do, to help people out, to form groups and do good.

A key element of Web blogs is the community element. Most blogs are not self-contained; they are highly dependent on linking to each other.

Twitter isn't a social network, it's an information network.

Blogging and traditional media work together. Twitter complements traditional media.

I subscribe to about 200 blogs. I look for insights and good writing, and I look to get smarter.

Blogging got the concept of personal publishing, but it didn't really take advantage of the network.

I think Twitter will be a fundamental part of how people interact with their government.

Most of the great businesses of our time have experimented. Like Google.

Twitter is a very easy way to keep in touch.

What the Internet is great at is building networks.

Where you are defines what you're interested in.

While GeoCities isn't cool, it isn't a bad thing. It did a great thing - enabled great people to instantly publish to the Web.

I have a love for the hospitality industry.

Mass spectrometry is one of the most sensitive methods for finding drugs, chemicals, pollutants and disease, but the problem is that you have to extract a sample and treat that sample before you can analyze it.

It is designing for thousands of people. It's always a joy when visitors enjoy a property and want to return.

I think there's few cases in history where the C.E.O. steps down and is also the founder and reports to someone and that works.

I was broke for more than 10 years. I remember staying up all night one night at my first company and looking in couch cushions the next morning for some change to buy coffee.

My brother was an advisor to Michael Manley and they wanted to do a project in McIntyre Lands. It was about 1972. I volunteered to design a scheme and the next thing I knew the PNP won (the general election).

My brother was the consummate Nebraska boy - the football star who went to the university, was president of his fraternity, hunted with my dad all the time.

Traditional news is often full of mistakes, but I think that people are getting more sophisticated in knowing what to trust and what not to trust.

The only reason Twitter itself would be a fad is if someone comes along and does it better.

'Vanity pages,' is somewhat of a derogatory term; personal pages are still the heart of blogging, but now there are more topic-oriented blogs. It's really about personal expression, and that's just gotten bigger and broader.

Unfortunately, 'climate' has become a dirty word - obviously in politics, but even to some degree in my world, in venture capital. People hesitate if they see something that's purported to be green. That's not a reason to invest for many people.

There's something about just hanging around when it comes to success on the Internet.

The paper pointed out to us we did not advertise that we were having a conference,

I used to tweet about the most mundane things - like 'I just bought a soya latte' - but now I try and make it a bit more interesting.

I never closed my practice -ÊI just did not take any new commissions until recently.

I'm not a big-company guy. I need freedom and control.

I mistrust anyone... if they're saying, 'Well, that market wants this,' and you're not part of that market.

I had a blog for many years. Once you develop your readership on your blog, and you can put something out there or direct traffic or get attention - it's like a super power.

I've done a lot of stupid things, but in most cases I can't complain about the outcomes.

In the best cases, Twitter makes people smarter and faster and more efficient.

Anything I've done that really worked happened because, either by sheer will or a lack of options, I was incredibly focused on one problem.

'What is Twitter?' has always been a tough question to answer.

I believe that companies that are independent are more competitive, ultimately.

Hard things are valuable; easy things are not so valuable. Reaching the mountaintop is rewarding because it is hard. If it was easy, everybody would do it.

Take care of yourself: When you don't sleep, eat crap, don't exercise, and are living off adrenaline for too long, your performance suffers. Your decisions suffer. Your company suffers. Love those close to you: Failure of your company is not failure in life. Failure in your relationship is.

News in general doesn't matter most of the time, and most people would be far better off if they spent their time consuming less news and more ideas that have more lasting import.

The vast majority of things are distractions, and very few really matter to your success.

Marketing, when done well, is about story telling.

Assume the best but hire paranoid people.

Change the world. Build a business. Have fun.

Failure of your company is not failure in life. Failure in your relationships is.

Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.

When you’re obsessing about one thing, you can reach insights about how to solve hard problems. If you have too many things to think about, you’ll get to the superficial solution, not the brilliant one.

Our problem wasn’t that it blew up and was impossible to scale, but there were some bad choices made. One of the biggest lessons time after time was to focus. Do fewer things.

User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's undervalued and underinvested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board.

I tried to be a ski bum when I stepped away from Twitter, and I wasn't a very good skier.

I suspect there's a lot of validity to the premise that big companies aren't going to attract entrepreneurial talent.