Evan Williams is an American entrepreneur who co-founded some of the most popular internet businesses, including Twitter and Blogger. Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Twitter, he now serves on the board of directors. He was raised on a farm in Nebraska, where he worked with crop irrigation during the summer. As a young man at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, he joined the FarmHouse International Fraternity, Inc., a professional agriculture fraternity, due to his passion for farming. However, he did not attend university long enough to earn a degree because he was eager to become an entrepreneur as quickly as possible. Together with his father, he established a short-lived company that provided teaching material about the World Wide Web. Before co-founding Pyra Labs, he worked as a web developer for many computer companies. Soon thereafter, Pyra Labs created the blog-publishing service Blogger, which became a massive hit and was eventually acquired by Google. His entrepreneurial spirit prevented him from remaining at Google for long, and he eventually departed to create other companies, including Odeo and Obvious Corp. launched the microblogging service Twitter as a project.
Youth and Early Life
Evan Clark Williams was born on March 31, 1972, as the third child of Monte Williams and Laurie Howe in Clarks, Nebraska, United States. His upbringing on a farm fostered an early interest in farming.
During the summers, he would assist with agriculture irrigation while attending school. After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for one and a half years before dropping out. As a university student, he joined the professional farm fraternity FarmHouse.
Evan Williams’s Career
Evan Williams has always desired to be an entrepreneur. After dropping out of college, he and his father founded a company to supply Web-based training materials.
He then chose to gain experience by working for computer corporations and startups. Before returning to his family’s farm in Nebraska, he worked as a web developer for corporations in Florida and Texas for several years.
In 1996, Williams relocated to Sebastopol, Sonoma County, California to work for the technology publishing business O’Reilly Media. Even though he was first hired for a marketing position, he worked his way up to become a freelance computer code writer. Eventually, he was able to secure freelancing positions with businesses such as Intel and Hewlett-Packard.
In the late 1990s, he felt it was time to start his own business and teamed up with Meg Hourihan to form Pyra Labs, a software company that specializes in project management. One of the numerous projects he developed at Pyra Labs was Blogger, one of the earliest web apps for creating and managing weblogs. The software was an instant success, drawing the attention of Google, which acquired Blogger in 2003.
However, Williams was not satisfied at Google. In 2004, he left Google in search of the exhilaration that only entrepreneurship could bring. Now, he co-founded Odeo, a podcasting firm. The year after, Christopher Isaac “Biz” Stone joined Odeo.
Jack Dorsey, a software developer, approached the pair with the notion of utilizing text messaging and instant messaging to stay in touch with pals. Together, they created a prototype that would eventually serve as the basis for the Twitter platform.
Williams, Biz Stone, and Jack Dorsey co-founded Obvious Corp. in late 2006. A few months later, Odeo was sold to Sonic Mountain. In 2007, Twitter Inc. was spun off from Obvious Corp as a distinct company. Twitter was a free microblogging and social networking service.
Williams was an investor and board member of Twitter Inc. at the time of its establishment. He became Twitter’s CEO in October 2008. Twitter quickly become a wildly popular social network with millions of individual and corporate users. In addition, numerous celebrities joined Twitter, which dramatically increased the site’s popularity. Williams resigned from his role as CEO in 2010.
In 2012, he co-founded Medium, a platform for blog publishing. Its publications include the online music magazine Cuepoint and the technology publication Backchannel. The medium was founded with the intention of encouraging longer posts than Twitter’s norm of 140 characters.
Evan’s Major Opera
In 1999, his business, Pyra Labs, introduced the blog publishing service Blogger. As one of the original specialized blog-publishing platforms, it gained tremendous popularity and was quickly acquired by Google. Blogger is offered in other languages, including Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Vietnamese, Nepali, and Faraci.
Evan Williams is one of the co-founders of Twitter, a microblogging website and social networking service that allows users to post and read 140-character messages known as “tweets.” It is one of the most frequented websites in the world, with over 500 million users as of May 2015.
Personal History and Legacy
Evan Williams has two daughters with his wife, Sara M. Williams.
Estimated Net Worth
American internet entrepreneur Evan Williams has a net worth of $600 million. Evan Williams was born in Clarks, Nebraska on March 31, 1972. He co-founded Pyra Labs, Blogger, Odeo, and the Obvious Corporation, which evolved into Twitter, a microblogging and social networking website. Twitter Inc. is a San Francisco-based company.