All the value I and my teams have ever created is from someone saying, 'Hey, wouldn't it be cool if like the...' And yet if you're good at that, if you're lucky and good and you're able to execute and you're able to create the cool thing basically from this internal feeling, then what inevitably happens is you get money and you get employees and then the job becomes make the numbers go up.
Welcome back to the Eric Ries Show. Today's guest is a legend whose products have probably shaped your daily life more than you realize. Ev Williams has an extraordinary track record of turning groundbreaking ideas into internet mainstays. He created Blogger, the original blogging platform acquired by Google and kept running for over 25 years, revolutionizing online publishing for millions of people, including my blog, Startup Lessons Learned, which still runs on Blogger to this day. But he's most famous for being the co-founder of Twitter, which has fundamentally reshaped global communication, politics, and culture. And on top of all that, he's also the founder of Medium, now a hub for millions of thinkers and writers worldwide. In this rare conversation, Ev shares powerful lessons on why strong personal relationships are crucial for long-term success. Drawing from his own experiences with Google and Twitter, he reveals how resisting short-term pressures, especially from investors, can lead to stronger, more resilient companies, and why placing intuition and craftsmanship alongside data is essential for true innovation. Ev also dives deep into the pitfalls of blindly following metrics using real-world examples from Groupon and Medium, and highlights the importance of empowering creative voices within every organization. Most importantly, Ev reflects on his multi-decade journey from obscurity to being a person who has shaped the lives of billions of people. Whether you're building a company, creating content, or just fascinated by the hidden behind-the-scenes mechanics of what drives Silicon Valley, I hope you find this conversation interesting, full of practical insights from a true master of the digital age. Please enjoy my conversation with Evan.
Ev, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate taking the time.
Thanks for having me here. My pleasure.
Now, I have a confession to make. It is true that even after all these years, my main blog, Startup Lessons Learned, is still on Blogger.
I'm a diehard old school Blogger user. And somehow miraculously through all these years, Google has not taken it out. It still runs and it's still run on Blogger.
That's nice. I'm happy to hear that. I was thinking about that recently. I actually wrote something that I didn't publish, but last year was the 25th anniversary of Blogger.
And I believe, you know, people talk about hosted services and whatnot, and in that time, in 25 years, nothing's ever been taken down. It's been hosted for free. Nothing's ever been taken down other than, you know, violations or by the user. So I mean, thankful to Google for most of that time. Why they've kept it running is another question. Why they acquired it is another question. But, you know, millions of people have put their thoughts out there thanks to that.
Well, including me. So thank you. I can't tell you how many times people have tried to talk me into doing some new fangled thing instead.
Yeah. You know, ported over to this, ported over to that. And, you know, of course, I've considered it, but I never quite, maybe just inertia, never quite got around to doing it. And like several of the things I would have ported it over to have come and gone in the 25 years that Blogger has just been this like pillar of the internet infrastructure.
And I just, yeah. How does it feel 25 years later to have created something like that?
It's nice. It feels really lucky, you know, to in this world to create something that actually has that longevity. And that was my broader contemplation about I've been lucky to be involved in a few things that have lasted for a while in the digital world. Even my venture firm, Obvious Ventures, turned 10 last year as you know. And, you know, Twitter is, you know, maybe no longer Twitter, but there's been a few things that it just feels nice to build something and have it last even if it changes because it's just such a, you know, everything kind of disintegrates. You put so much work into it and then it disintegrates and maybe serves its purpose. But yeah, I'm appreciative of that.
Well, I wanted to start with that because I think it's actually kind of unusual in the tech world to have had that experience of such longevity of like multiple different projects that have lived and also have outlived your personal involvement. And, you know, I feel like we've been suffering from an epidemic of short-term thinking of late as everyone who heard me talk the last 10 years already knows and certainly you have as well. But I'm just curious what you think is behind that. Like obviously there's luck, there's fortune, but like do you feel like there's something about the way you built those things that allowed them to have that kind of longevity?
Well, I would attribute to a couple things maybe in a few cases. The ones that have lasted are the right idea at the right time. And then so much of it though is about the relationships that allowed it to continue. You know, whether or not they didn't all continue and probably most of them didn't continue because they were great businesses that couldn't possibly be shut down. It's because I was lucky enough to form relationships and hand them off to people who were willing and able to shepherd them. And, you know, that wasn't always a smooth transition, but like I was just saying, Google bought Blogger in 2003. I'd been working on it for four years. And the relationships actually weren't great with my co-founder and employees. And then I had to lay everybody off. And then it was just by myself for quite a while, starting to rebuild the team. And Google, you know, rang in late 2002. And honestly, I was like, you know, this is pre-public Google. This is when Google is still thought of as totally a search company. And they came knocking and our thought was, oh, they want to search the blogs, you know, maybe there's some sort of partnership. And then there was like, well maybe you just come here and I was like, why would Google want Blogger? And actually debated quite a bit about whether to sell it and it was, you know, all stock deal thankfully, but at the time I didn't know what that was going to amount to. But it was really like the top of mind because I had spent so much, you know, relatively of my life and career on Blogger at that point and worked so hard. It was what's going to be the best thing for this product, this company that I still believe in a lot and I still want to see be much bigger and more successful and that the stability of Google is going to increase the odds of it lasting over time. And of course not everything at Google has lasted, but I think they've actually done a pretty good job with most of their acquisitions. And, you know, most of the things that they've shut down have actually been internal projects whereas a lot of other companies like the big internet pillars are kind of famous for acquiring something and they decide it doesn't, you know, that I mean maybe hundreds of companies that's happened with AOL or Yahoo. And so even though Google didn't yet have a reputation for doing that when we sold because we're actually the first company to sell to Google, you know, I really am appreciative of them for shepherding that. And then with other things, you know, Twitter, I, you know, sort of had a rough exit from Twitter, but, you know, Twitter was definitely a business at the time that had a lot of momentum. I left pre-IPO but I stayed on the board for another 10 years. Obviously Dick who took over as CEO after me, he was my COO.
And I'm going to bring it back to relationships because the reason the Google deal happened was purely about relationships. Because Tim O'Reilly was an investor of mine in Blogger. He was an investor because I worked at O'Reilly and what was then called O'Reilly and Associates when they were primarily a book publisher. Kind of very well respected. That was my first job in California. And I went and worked at Tim's, a highly respected but small little company up in Sebastopol in Sonoma County. I wasn't a good employee, but I got to know Tim a little bit enough that when it came time to raise money for Blogger, I came back and he put money in via his newly formed fund. And because of that and he knew Larry and Sergey and was talking to them and in a conversation I think Blogger just came up and he was like, 'Hey, think about Blogger.' No way it would have happened without those relationships. So that relationship I made with him, the relationship he had with them. It was just like and that's, you know, how so many things work and I've just learned time and time again. And even Dick Costolo who became the CEO of Twitter was someone I knew 10 years beforehand and had pinged him when I knew I was going on paternity leave for Twitter and he ended up taking it public. And Medium which we haven't mentioned yet. Medium is now 12 years old. And doing very well as a business. And that was I handed the CEO reins over to a guy named Tony Stubblebine who worked for me at Odeo, which was 2005. And however many 15 years later, he becomes CEO of Medium. And then Obvious just to round it out, James who I formed Obvious with I knew for 10, 15 years. Vishal is one of our next partners, I didn't know before but then Andrew, Vishal and James and I knew each for 10 years before he joined the firm as heading our climate practice. And so that really to me is the through line through all this. And I haven't always managed them well. In fact, most of my mistakes in business have become not knowing how to manage relationships. But the longevity and so many of the success really I attribute to these very long-term relationships.
So it's funny. I had forgotten that you were an employee at O'Reilly and Associates back in the day until I was prepping for this interview and I was like, 'All right, that's the connection.' Now, we had Tim, he did an episode of the show and talked a lot about, you know, his ethos of creating more value than you capture and a bunch of the other ideas that have been foundational to so many people's careers in Silicon Valley. But I just wanted to get a sense of, you know, you grew up on a farm, right? Like you were not from the tech world at all. I can imagine, you know, the sense of isolation you might have had growing up. You, I don't want to project onto you, but like a lot of us, I think maybe felt a little bit different growing up. Like just how on earth did you wind up at O'Reilly and Associates from where you started? Like that seems like a crazy story to me.
Yeah, it was quite a leap, you know, multiple stages. I did, I grew up as rural as you can be, middle of the country on actually on a farm outside of a town of 400 people. And of course, this was pre-internet, so I wasn't connected to the world. My family didn't really travel. I didn't see the ocean until I was 20 years old. I was very isolated. And I think that's possibly why I had two very strong benefits from that. One was a sense of independence. My dad was a farmer, his dad was a farmer, that infused you, I think, with a very strong sense of independence and resourcefulness. And so it's, you know, farmers are entrepreneurs. And so starting a company, not working for other people, that felt very natural to me. But I knew I wanted to do something completely different. I wanted to get out of that world and I had this deep sense of curiosity and the sense that I could figure anything out. So when, and very lucky again with timing because it's like growing up in the late 70s and the 80s, personal computers were happening. One of the things I'm still amazed at to this day is in this tiny little town, you know, a high school of 60 people, we had a computer lab in mid-80s, '88. I think I was a sophomore, something like that. And there's a lab with maybe half dozen Apple IIs. And Apple II is incredible for its penetration into public schools, an obscure place.
So many people have that story. Yeah.
And, you know, my dad was actually somewhat of an early adopter as a farmer. He actually had a PC.
Yeah. He had a pretty big farm and farmers were adopting PCs just, you know, for accounting, keeping track of stuff. And I was very curious and I wanted to learn it and I was reading the manual. I was like, how do you program it? And the manual didn't say how to program it. And I was frustrated. I didn't have anyone to learn from.
But then would have been what like the beige IBM XT era like kind of box. What kind of manual was it?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We were reading the same manual. That's funny. But then we had these Apple IIs. And not only was there a computer lab, there was basic programming was mandatory, at least a semester of it, and the math teacher taught it. And I just took to it like that. And I would, to the extent where I would multiple times I was in the computer lab and the entire school was shut down. The janitor left, the lights were off and I was still in the computer lab by myself and I ended up just helping, you know, teach the class as much as the teacher was helping all the students with their projects. And that's when I knew, okay, so that was one very important piece. And then a few years later started learning about the internet just reading magazines and stuff and through, you know, just trying to figure out something to do. I ended up starting a company but I was still in Nebraska. I had gone to college at the University of Nebraska which is in Lincoln, big city compared to where I grew up. And then I tried to start a company. It didn't go anywhere. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I had never worked in a company. I had literally worked on the farm and at a fast food restaurant and then I tried to start an internet company and I didn't really yet know how to program even though I had been doing that when I was a teenager. There wasn't really any throughline for that. Taught myself HTML, was trying like, okay, what can we do with the internet? Recruited some friends. My dad very thankfully helped fund that and gave us some money but it was an utter failure like just didn't do anything. But it taught me a lot. I just spent night and day learning about the internet and then when that ran into the ground finally I was just like, I guess I need to go to California. And why I didn't do that sooner I think was mostly fear. I was like, you know, I had still never been to California. I was maybe 20, I was 22 to 24 during that period. And I was reading everything I could and every magazine, every website about the tech boom that was starting to happen, the dot-com boom as it became, and I was just enthralled. But it wasn't until like I just hit a wall there, actually moved back to the farm, lived with my dad for a while. I was sort of like just wallowing in pity and despair after that failure but kind of creating what in retrospect was my first blog. Then you're still coming up with ideas, still learning how to code, well I had learned by then how to build web apps. And I was just like, all right, got to go to California and then finally come back here. I was like, I'm going to, I need a job. I didn't have any money. I knew I wanted to start another company or companies, but I was like, okay, maybe I'll just get a job to get me to California. And started applying to jobs. And one of them, and I didn't have a degree at all. Knew how to build some stuff but not super well to get like a real software job. And so the job I applied for at O'Reilly was a marketing job. It's like a junior level marketing coordinator. I was like, I can do that. How hard can that be? And flew out to Sebastopol, got the interview, got the job, and yeah, that's how I got out there. And the joke I like to make is when you're in Nebraska, Sebastopol looks like Silicon Valley. It's just a couple degrees out.
For those who know, Sebastopol is a small town bigger than the one I grew up in, but it's rural and I never thought about that. Kind of a good transitional portal if you're used to being in a rural environment.
Yeah, I went from the farm to another rural environment. Very beautiful. But it wasn't where things, O'Reilly is really the only, literally the only tech company there at the time.
Yeah, it's quite remote. So but it was a great stepping stone and, you know, thankfully I met Tim and who I both learned a ton from and was this, you know, critical supporter down the road.
So I can really vividly remember the idealism of those days and the feeling that the internet was going to be transformational. And I think, you know, I don't know if you feel this way but I feel like kind of a naive sense that as the internet would roll through disrupting and changing one thing after another it would basically always make them better. Like it would take the values they already had and then it would add transparency and openness and connectedness and especially for those of us I think who felt isolated and for whom the internet was like an awakening or an opportunity to connect with other people especially the early internet, you know, before it became what it is now like you got to see kind of the whole arc of this enterprise, like this global enterprise, this movement, you know, from its most earliest idealistic beginnings to what's happened now. So just like from the vantage point now being able to look back on it like what do you remember about how it felt in those days like to be part of that early enthusiasm?
Absolutely, you know, resonate with the idealism comment. That was my assumption, I think that was a lot of our assumptions. And there's a narrative that was put down by early thinkers in the space who, you know, had a lot of connections to like hippies and the whole like that movement and just saw the potential of personal computing technology and then certainly the internet and connectivity as an overwhelmingly positive thing, at least potential for this overwhelming positiveness. And I completely bought into that. I mean, I was always idealistic and, you know, still am, but it was, there was a strong motivation to buy into that narrative, I think, because we wanted it to be true, you know, we wanted to be part of it. We wanted to be like, yes, we're part of this thing that is not only new and exciting and going to be big, but it's going to change the world for the better. I mean, why would you not believe that if you can believe that and you're young and hardworking and you're like, 'Yeah, that's a great story. I completely buy in.' And there's all these things, all these reasons why it seemed like it should be true. And, you know, looking back, it's, there were similar stories about lots of other waves of technology from, you know, the telegraph to the radio to the television. They're all like connecting, you know, bringing people together, spreading knowledge, spreading education, you know, even roads and all kinds of things that have changed the world both for good and bad. And the story is always complex. There were similar stories and similar assumptions from their early proponents because, you know, those people want to believe and I don't think there is much, and it wasn't cynical, it was just like, yeah, this is going to happen, it's obvious if you really deeply understand it. And so the way I look at it now is just everything's more complicated. Everything's more complicated generally in life is kind of one of the things that I think most people learn when they get older and, you know, just like evolution, nature, the nature of things is to get more complicated and very few things are black and white and people are complicated and, you know, you grow up thinking there's good people and bad people, there's my friends and not the friends, there's our team, there's their team, there's our country and everything's more complicated. So, of course, the internet's more complicated and the level of impact is extreme on, you know, every side. And if you really zoom out and think what's it been 30, you know, 30 some years that the commercial internet's existed and changed basically every aspect of society. It'd be silly to think we understand it.
Yeah. I mean, it's such a short blip in time and, you know, there's not even a generation that was born with it that's, you know, fully grown and come into power. So, it's, we just don't know is now the way I look at it. It's like, and I stopped for a long time when things started to be clearly more complicated than we thought. I was like, was, you know, has what I've helped create good or bad, you know, and now I don't wrestle with that question because I just think yes, it is. It is all these things.
I'm sure you've seen the famous Reddit meme of Anakin Skywalker and Padme where she's like, he's like, 'I want to change the world.' And she's like, 'For the better, right?' Like, 'For the better, right?'
I don't think I've seen that.
Oh, you haven't? Okay. Well, we'll include a link in the show notes. I will send it to you. I feel like it's like the meme of our time basically. Like I want to, because like I can remember talking to people like, 'Yeah, I want to change the world.' I wrote in my books this is tools that are going to help people change the world and like it was only later I was like, did we specify for the better? Do we, like, is it possible that we forgot a really important like clause in the sentence? And I think we just viewed it as obvious that that's what everyone was trying to do and it seems like maybe not everybody was.
And I think even, I still think most people were. Some people are just in it, you know, for personal gain. And very few were looking to change for the worse, it's just that we don't know, you know, we just don't know like what effect complex systems are going to have. And it would have been very, very hard to predict, say we were less naive, say we're more careful, etc. I don't think we would have said, oh, obviously, you know, like look this in 2025, this is what it's all going to lead to, this state of the country. I don't think anyone would have predicted that. I mean, some people did perhaps. But I think actually your quote reminds me, I want to attribute this to Stewart Butterfield, but I also want to attribute it to myself. So I don't know who said it, but something like, 'Entrepreneurs want to change the world and they want to do it before anyone else does.' So it's like, that's a great quote.
God, that's so true. Not entirely altruistic. It's like, yes, yes, it's for, you know, even change the world for the better, but before someone else, before somebody else.
Well, what I love about that is so many pitches, and I've done that, I'm as guilty of it as anybody like as a startup pitcher. Like this massive transformational wave is inevitable. So therefore, like I need, like you should back my company to be part of this where it's like, wait, if a wave is going to happen anyway, what do we need you for? Like it's like, look, there go my people. Well, I need to run to the front so that I can lead them, you know, like I don't want to show, it's like, wait a second, what are you doing? I think that's great to flag that because there is a kind of, there's an ego selfishness that can get bound up in entrepreneurship and where the rhetoric of changing the world and all this stuff like kind of becomes cover for just I want to do the thing I want to do.
Yeah. And I think I felt like we were very vulnerable to that kind of deception because we all just wanted so badly to believe in it. And it's a, I think, a strong aspect of Silicon Valley culture is I've noticed, and maybe this is why Stewart Butterfield's in my mind because he had this great manifesto I think it was Flickr or Slack or one of his companies that said something like, we want to win. It was like, we want to play, we want to create great things and we want to win. It was like acknowledging the fulfillment one gets from doing great things and winning which struck me at the time as, it's like, that's so great because it's so honest. And where there's like, in what I noticed again is this black and white thing with a lot of Silicon Valley rhetoric is either people talk about the mission and changing the world like we're all altruistic or the people who are like, 'Oh, that. I'm just like I'm here to make money or here to do the business.' And I think Stewart's thing, and I'm mangling it, but it wasn't just we want to win like be the competition, it was we want to create great stuff. It's like that creative impulse. We want to put amazing things out into the world, which over time I've realized like that's what I want to do. That's always been my number one motivation even and I may have couched it in we want to, you know, the mission or we want to, and it was more of the artistic motivation for lack of a better word of I see something that I want to put into the world and yes I believe I'm like out of all the things I can put into the world I want to do the thing that will help people that will make people's lives better that I'll be proud of over something that is none of those things. And so everybody and then to recruit employees, everybody wants to be part of something good. So you reinforce that narrative every chance you get and you justify, you can kind of justify anything. Humans are amazing at doing that.
Unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. And even back like Google, I worked at Google at a time when the 'don't be evil' thing was taken very seriously. I'm not saying it's not now. I just haven't worked at Google in a long time. But I worked there. I was actually really impressed at how seriously people questioned things that...
Oh, it was a very powerful part of the ethos in those days. Very powerful.
And it, but I sense also like the whole ad thing. AdWords obviously was brilliant and funded this incredible information research that the world's benefited from. So I have nothing against that especially in the early forms. But there was this narrative in the company that the ads are helpful too because there, you know, sometimes people are looking for what's in the ad. And I was like, can we just say it's to fund the search? Because if the search was perfect, the ads are pointing to web pages that are in the index. So if the search was perfect, you wouldn't put the, you're distorting the quality, you have to be distorting the quality of the search with the ad. But the story was no, we're making the search better, we're making the experience better because of the ad. And that always bothered me as a, it's okay. Just say like there's a little bit of a tax on the ranking of results and we're going to make that clear and label it for people. I'll say that because it's the better result.
Oh yeah. In the index. That reminds me of the study that they've done that shows that companies that strongly believe they are a meritocracy have the most bias in them. Like if you just measure it objectively and it's not that being a meritocracy is bad, it's that having the ideological commitment that you are a meritocracy like takes away the desire or the motivation to improve because you're already perfect. And I just feel like that's such a great example of that at Google because if they had been more honest about what they were doing, I bet the search would have been better today. Like they basically, that argument by saying that it's always making it better has allowed them to degrade the search to the point now where it's like basically unusable and the ads dwarf the whole screen. Like I just feel like the early Google ethos would have looked at today's search and vomited. I think like what a disaster that's been because you brought up the 'don't be evil' thing. I really want to get your take on this because to me that's like the incredibly shrinking motto. And I feel bad. I've picked on Google a lot in these conversations and I feel bad because Google's actually a great company. I have a lot of respect for them. It's just they are an easy target because we all had such incredibly high hopes for what they could have become and, you know, over time I like 'don't be evil' was like such a strong part of the ethos and then it's just been kind of shrinking like so like it was very prominently on the website for a while and then it kind of got rid of it and then they kind of had like a thing that's like, well we used to say 'don't be evil' but now we say anyway. I saw this story and I just got to get your take on it. There was a story where they had basically the last place in Google the 'don't be evil' motto was in the employee handbook. You know, the end of the handbook. It basically said like despite all these policies and whatever, like if you see something that you think is evil, don't forget the motto is 'don't be evil', da da da. And then some employees sued them a couple years ago because they were, I think, wrongfully terminated or something. I think they sued them saying that they were violating their employee handbook that they had tried to call attention to something that was evil and they got terminated for it and so they basically sued for violating the motto of 'don't be evil', which is never a good look for any company. And they actually, I couldn't believe this, they had to settle the lawsuit which I kind of read as a tacit admission that like yeah they kind of did succeed, the lawsuit they made it go away. And among people that I talked to at that time there were two really different reactions and I want to see what camp you're in but also just like what does this mean to you that to see this as kind of like a proxy for the whole tech industry. Half the people said to me, 'See, that's why you don't put stuff like that in your employee handbook because you're just going to get sued.' And the other half are like, 'See, that's why you should have stuff that in there and then actually do it.' Like the problem wasn't the motto. The problem is they didn't institutionalize that intention. It was just something they told themselves to make themselves feel better, but they didn't really take the steps that would have been necessary to safeguard it over time. Like how does that line up with what you have observed? You've had the inside look at this.
I will try to comment just with the caveat. I know nothing about this case or the details.
Oh yeah, yeah, don't worry about the case but just more just like the broader trend of the industry going through this transformation.
I've had and I'm sure you and many listeners like challenges with employees before who have accused me of being evil even though it wasn't a motto. And so I'm like, I wouldn't at all assume that it means they weren't walking the walk. I mean based on someone suing them and settling because, you know, like lawsuit. Sure. We don't absolutely, and I have no inside information here. In terms of whether it's a good idea to proclaim such stuff and I also, I think Google gets a lot of flack as you were saying because they've done a pretty incredible job for being like a huge, huge company. And I have no idea what it's like there today but I do have a lot of respect for them and I think it's, I still think, still declare that sort of stuff. Maybe 'don't be evil' is not the most elegant way to put it, but I think writing down values, principles, whatever it is that holds you to a high bar and building a culture that reinforces that is one of the most effective things you can do as a company. And if you occasionally people disagree, I think that creates a healthy debate. I think that is probably worth having even though it'll be super messy and sometimes you may wish that you said, 'Okay, just make the numbers go up.'
Okay. Something I really wanted to ask you about because I've been counseling a lot of AI entrepreneurs lately as you can imagine going back to, you know, when...
Are there any other kind?
Oh, yeah. Really? Well, there's two kinds. There's people that have added AI to their pre-existing pitch deck. And then there's the handful that actually know something about AI. But, you know, but I remember like when the team that became Anthropic when they left OpenAI, for example, and were talking to me about like how should this company be governed? How should it be structured? I've had that conversation with basically all of the big AI players and tons and tons of little guys. And what's interesting about this generation of entrepreneurs, a very common sentiment is they're like, we do not want to see a replay of what happened with social media for AI, which I think is really fascinating. Like if you talk to investors about social media, they're like, 'Social media was the best.' Investors made a ton of money and very warm and positive feelings about social media.
The rest of the world, you know, not as much, you know, it's not the feeling. And certainly among entrepreneurs, there's this fear that like there's this feeling that something went wrong. And that we kind of, it was okay for it to go wrong for social media, but the stakes for AI are a lot higher, which I don't know if I even agree with that. Stakes for social media turned out to be pretty high also. But like you were there, you've been on the inside of this from its very inception and so, you know, you've had the benefit of, you know, having all these lessons, see all kinds of things go right, all kinds of things go wrong, like what advice would you give people who are like how can I do what you've done but avoid the pitfalls, avoid the downsides of it? Is that possible?
It's such an interesting just assumption or set of assumptions and I have heard it as well. I was at a talk recently, an AI talk, and that kept coming up. It was just a given that like you said something went wrong. How do we make that not happen? And so if we look at, okay, let's take it as fact, some things did not turn out for society as positive as we hoped. I, the first question was, was that preventable with social media? I'm not actually sure it was. I think it's kind of like the argument that everybody should pause their AI research until we work out all the, you know, potential bad implications. And the counterargument is like China's not doing that. No, you know, no one's doing that. If anyone does that, then we lose and it's actually worse. So I think if you look at social media and like what was bad was like, okay, could we have built systems that maybe, you know, were less, yeah, promoted, you know, better quality content, had less superficial metrics, had like maybe healthier dialogue. All these things that you may think like would be a better design only works if there's one company doing it. And so people ask me how would it change Twitter, we spent a lot of time believe it or not trying to think about how to create the healthiest system possible. I remember there was a talk I was at a very small event right as Elon was public about buying, you know, trying to buy Twitter and saying how he just wants to create a place, you know, that has healthy dialogue and, you know, where knowledge is spread and all these things and I was raised, I was like, what the...
I think we were trying to do like, how are you going to do that? And like, is the whole free speech thing? It's not, it is clear in retrospect, don't get me wrong, that there's lots of things that we could change the system design, be better I think. But you take that to the extreme, Twitter wouldn't be Twitter, or you know, Instagram wouldn't be Instagram, or Facebook, it just something else would have done that because what we were exploiting human nature.
And um, in this, like compare it to say, you know, processed food. It's like had 7-Elevens not, you know, said, you know what, maybe selling all this sugar into like the masses is not good. Maybe we shouldn't do that. Would that have changed the obesity epidemic? No. Because the masses wanted the sugar and someone else would have done it.
You think it's inevitable? The exploitation inevitable?
I think social media was inevitable. I think it's an extension of media. I think for years I got the question like, you know, what happened with democracy in America? Why is it so divisive, etc. And they blame social media. I was like, look at Fox News. Fox, they didn't need social media for that. Yeah, they didn't need social media for that. And um, you know, it still affected more people for a long time than social media did even when we were getting those questions. And so I don't say that as a justification of like, you know, let's sell cancer sticks because if we don't someone else is going to do it. I'm just saying if you look at a whole, like how could that have been prevented? I'm not sure it could have been.
Um, and you know, as a company that was really focused on trying to create something really good and um, you know, making some good choices and some bad choices and learning as we go and then having the incredible pressure. And this is where you're the most interesting person to talk to about this because certainly once it became a public company and probably even before that, the pressure to just make the numbers go up had very negative impact.
But that's again on one company. And as a whole, you know, Facebook had incredible numbers the whole time. They didn't say, 'Oh, well, how can we change our product,' at least I don't think, and all evidence suggests the contrary, 'to be more healthy for people, maybe less addictive, maybe like not destroy people's self-esteem, not divide people.' They could afford to do that. Um, and still didn't, and they didn't do that.
So that's, you know, the danger, like technology becomes what it wants to become and what humans respond to in a, you know, free capitalist society. And that's, and we when we build things can and I hope do make as, you know, careful choices as possible about the impacts on people. A lot of those are unpredictable.
But I don't know what's going to happen with AI, but I don't think necessarily that, that's where I think that's where the analogy makes sense is that, um, you know, there, this talk I was actually at where they were comparing, this was with, um, I forgot the name of the company but it was one of these that's making character. It wasn't Character AI, but it was, which I guess just had that unfortunate event with a teenager that committed suicide. And it was a company that does that and the CEO was very honest and um, I was actually really impressed by her. She said, 'We see the potential downsides.' She actually referenced this before the Character AI incident, that receiving a letter about it saving, literally saving someone's life who was going to commit suicide. And then on the other hand you have these other implications. And so if you're in that driver's seat, I'm hoping those people are thinking long and hard about how to do more good than harm and um, and maybe even like creating industry conversations about it.
Um, which also, you know, one of the little known things, as much flack as like the trust and safety teams get at all these companies, there's a very tightly knit, very supported, very thoughtful community across companies of trust and safety people in Silicon Valley who work really hard on policy and, you know, sharing information, best practices. And still we're in the state we're in.
Well, but let me push back a little bit because you're telling me you don't think that if Twitter had been a public benefit corp and you guys had had dual class shares and the ability really to resist these Wall Street pressures, you don't think that would have made a difference in how it played out?
Certainly would have changed the Elon conversation shortly. From what I understand about why the Elon thing happened, yeah, would have changed that. Um, I was off court at that time.
So, no. And I don't want you to give me any inside information. I just, you know, but this is your, it was your baby. Like, how does it feel? I want to get your perspective on it. Yeah. People are looking to you and saying like, 'How do I be like Ev?' And there's a lot of people like, 'How do I not be like Ev?' Like, they want to know. Tell them what to do.
All right. I don't want to say it will just be what it is. Just give the people what they want. That is definitely not my message. Um, I just don't know the answer. I think 100% if the story is Twitter had this like, if Elon buy and Twitter made it worse and if that had to happen because the board had to, uh, okay it because if not they were, um, not doing their fiduciary duty for shareholders, then yeah, what totally makes sense that a public benefit corporation or some other governance structure that did not force them to make that sale.
Every founder I know finds that story horrifying. I mean, just so you know, because you just like, and take it away from Elon because obviously that's polarizing right now. But I, you know, the thought exercise I often ask people to do is like, you tell me who you think the most evil company in the world is. My father's a pulmonologist. So growing up, Philip Morris is always the most evil company in the world. You know, the way I was raised. So like if Philip Morris wants to buy your company and they're willing to pay more per share than it's worth, you know what do you think you should have to sell to them? And every founder's like, 'Oh, of course not.' Because and you even said it earlier, you said, 'Well, the reason you felt good about selling Blogger to Google is you like that was ultimately going to be good for the product, for the super organism for this baby that you created.' And it listen, 25 years in, it worked out. Yeah. It worked out pretty well. So like having the freedom to make that choice and not have it forced on you to me seems like one of the fundamental rights every founder should demand.
How do you, yeah. Imagine you've formed a company that's saving the rainforest from demolition by the beef industry and the beef industry comes and buys you because they can and so I mean to shut it down.
Yeah. To shut it down. Um, and such things have probably happened.
