The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
shows 
every show 44 of 44
Twitter's conflict-averse board never gave Williams negative feedback before firing him
“Somewhat ironically, the board of Twitter had a lot of conflict aversion. Because they never, never gave me that feedback to my face. I didn't know I was going to be fired at all, because no one ever told me I was doing a bad job. So there was a whole culture …”
Initial Twitter hackathon prototype included an audio feature that Williams removed
“I do remember a conversation where at first there was a version of what became Twitter presented that had audio, and I remember asking, what if it didn't have the audio piece?”
Jack Dorsey had never been a manager before becoming Twitter's CEO
“Jack went from individual contributor, he had never been a manager, I believe, before he became CEO of this very fast-growing company,”
Williams suspects Google has lost money running Blogger for 20 years
“Blogger, I'm happy to say, 20 years later, is still running. And anything written on Blogger 20 years ago, unless the author took it down or it was like a violation, is still up on the internet for free, and Google has, you know, Paid for that, and you know, p…”
Odeo's $5M pre-product seed round eliminated agility against Apple's podcast entry
“We made the mistake of actually raising too much money pre-product, really even pre-product, we raised five million dollars, which was a terrible mistake because it allowed us to grow the team to the point where We just weren't nimble enough to easily pivot”
Kevin Systrom and Jack Dorsey paired to build Odeo's desktop podcatcher
“We also had Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram. Was working for us as an intern. So, Kevin and Jack paired to write our, I think our installable podcatcher, as we called them.”
Odeo board rejected Williams' offer to return remaining $3M in funding
“I actually went to the board. I think we had three of the five million dollars left. And said, I can't sell you on the future of this company. Maybe we should just give the money back and go away. And the board was like, well, we didn't invest in podcasting. W…”
Pyra Labs staff entirely walked out after Williams paused salary guarantees
“And then I sat everybody down and said, we don't have any money to pay you past this next pay period. So you're welcome to come back. I think this is on Friday. You're welcome to come back. I'm going to keep working. If you come back and work, you know, we'll …”
Blogger's server costs dropped from $50,000 to $5,000 after staff departed
“Once everybody left, my costs went from 50,000 a month to 5000 a month still to pay for the servers, and I just wanted to keep building it, so I kept building it.”
Blogger was Google's first acquisition involving employees rather than just IP
“We were literally the first acquisition that involved people. They had bought some IP, but we're the first group of employees to come in who were Googlers, but not.”
Displaying live tweets on SXSW 2007 hallway screens created Twitter's tipping point
“Basically, everybody, everybody there got on Twitter. And, you know, it was a few thousand people, and again, lots of journalists, lots of bloggers, and so then they talked about it and wrote about it. It was a moment, just capturing lightning in a bottle amon…”
Twitter grew tenfold in valuation and headcount during Williams' CEO tenure
“The company grew 10 X in users and employees and valuation in the two years I was CEO”