Today is the 9th anniversary of this blog. Once a year I dig through old posts, remembering what the industry was like and the topics I was interested in. This time I found a link to a post Evan Williams wrote in 2001 as Pyra Labs and Blogger were struggling:
First of all, the company (Pyra) is not dead, and the service (Blogger) is not going away. However: We are out of money, and I have lost my team.
And:
Yes, things would have been very, very different if the Internet Bubble wouldn’t have burst and we were still in that…that, Other World in which we started. In that world, things that seem dumb now (such as launching a product and letting it grow for so long without making revenue from it a priority) made sense.
The full text is available on the Wayback Machine. I wish more CEOs blogged with even half the sincerity.
SXSW Interactive starts this weekend. When Evan wrote the above, the conference was a few rooms along a single hallway. Now it’s a monster conference, spread across multiple venues, with a speaker database so dense I don’t even know where to start. Still, I’ll be there and hope to catch up with any of y’all making it to Austin.
