The Ledger
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Williams claims he did not plan to take over as Twitter CEO
“He was pushed out, and then I became CEO, which It's hard to believe, but it wasn't actually my plan. I still didn't necessarily want to be CEO. And we talked to a few other candidates, but then I was like, okay, maybe I'm the best person to be CEO.”
Williams preferred Blogger going out of business over an enterprise pivot
“And so, like, company blogging, I was like, fine, maybe we can make money, but I'd kind of rather go out of business. It's, that's not interesting. Let's, let's not do that.”
Facebook offered $500M in stock for 30-person Twitter in 2008
“Facebook, of course, was private at the time, but based on their valuation, they could do a stock deal that may value us around Half billion dollars, and that was a lot of money, and we were maybe, no, we were we were 30 people at the time.”
Williams admits being conflict-averse and poor at relationship management at Pyra
“I would say, worse than that, I don't think I was good at relationships, which, even more fundamentally. I mean, management is a particular skill, but I wasn't good at relationships, i.e. How to deal with conflict, the most important thing, and I avoided confl…”
Williams owned 100% of Twitter through Obvious Corporation following SXSW 2007
“I still owned a hundred percent of it at that time through obvious, but it was clear that we needed to grow.”
Williams paid off $10,000 in back IRS payroll taxes from first startup
“By the way, when I got to O'Reilly, I was in debt To the IRS. Cause I didn't pay payroll taxes at my first company, but I made enough money to pay off the 10,000 dollars or whatever it is, which seemed insurmountable before that.”