And how do you feel about that?
: Ev Williams, a founder of Pyra/Blogger, just announced that he’s leaving the company, now owned by Google. Time for the next thing. I saw him here at Web. 2.0 and made fun of him for one aspect of his announcement: His therapist told him to take time off.
Ev did many amazing things — not just helping create Blogger but also stubbornly keeping it alive and with it this wonderful world of ours. We should all be grateful to him for that amazing grit. As some of you know, I got our company to invest in Pyra (along with O’Reilly, by the way). It wasn’t much money. The company never had much money, until the end. It suffered through traffic and complaints about how that traffic brought the service down and Ev kept pushing on, like a pioneer heading west in a blizzard.
It’s one thing to have a great idea. It’s another to actually start it. It’s quite another to have the courage to keep it alive until it is successful. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what made America great. And blogs, too.
I’ll be eager to see what he does next.
