Evan Williams Quotes

My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I've always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism.

After high school, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but I stayed only a year and a half. I felt college was a waste of time; I wanted to start working.

Failure of your company is not failure in life. Failure in your relationships is.

Marketing, when done well, is about story telling.

I subscribe to about 200 blogs. I look for insights and good writing, and I look to get smarter.

Every major communication tool on the Internet has spam and abuse problems. All email services, blogging services and social networks have to dedicate a significant amount of resources and time to fighting abuse and protecting their users.

I think there's few cases in history where the C.E.O. steps down and is also the founder and reports to someone and that works.

Assume the best but hire paranoid people.

When you're obsessing about one thing, you can reach insights about how to solve hard problems. If you have too many things to think about, you'll get to the superficial solution, not the brilliant one.

Every time you start a company - and I've started five or six - you have the opportunity to screw up in whole new ways.

I'm not a big-company guy. I need freedom and control.

My brother was the consummate Nebraska boy - the football star who went to the university, was president of his fraternity, hunted with my dad all the time.

Twitter isn't a social network, it's an information network.

When I meet with the founders of a new company, my advice is almost always, 'Do fewer things.' It's true of partnerships, marketing opportunities, anything that's taking up your time. The vast majority of things are distractions, and very few really matter to your success.

The things that keep nagging at you are the ones worth exploring.

Life's too short to wait to read.

Twitter was designed to be this system that you just scan for information that's important or useful to you and then walk away, and if you wanna take a break you take a break.

People are fans of Dunkin' Donuts. They have a relationship with the company, they go there every day. Dunkin' Donuts is using Twitter to communicate with those people. There are people who are finding value in that. There's thousands of people, I don't know how many thousands now, following Dunkin' Donuts.

Traditional news is often full of mistakes, but I think that people are getting more sophisticated in knowing what to trust and what not to trust.

Our problem wasn't that it blew up and was impossible to scale, but there were some bad choices made. One of the biggest lessons time after time was to focus. Do fewer things.

'Vanity pages,' is somewhat of a derogatory term; personal pages are still the heart of blogging, but now there are more topic-oriented blogs. It's really about personal expression, and that's just gotten bigger and broader.

News in general doesn't matter most of the time, and most people would be far better off if they spent their time consuming less news and more ideas that have more lasting import.

Blogging and traditional media work together. Twitter complements traditional media.

I suspect there's a lot of validity to the premise that big companies aren't going to attract entrepreneurial talent.

Where you are defines what you're interested in.

Twitter is a very easy way to keep in touch.

Most of the great businesses of our time have experimented. Like Google.

I used to tweet about the most mundane things - like 'I just bought a soya latte' - but now I try and make it a bit more interesting.

People want to do good things, they just need a prod sometimes, and what Twitter and other technologies that connect people are showing us is that if you make it a little easier for people then you will enable them to do what they want to do, to help people out, to form groups and do good.

There's something about just hanging around when it comes to success on the Internet.

I think Twitter will be a fundamental part of how people interact with their government.

What the Internet is great at is building networks.

While GeoCities isn't cool, it isn't a bad thing. It did a great thing - enabled great people to instantly publish to the Web.

A key element of Web blogs is the community element. Most blogs are not self-contained; they are highly dependent on linking to each other.

Anything I've done that really worked happened because, either by sheer will or a lack of options, I was incredibly focused on one problem.

Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.

User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's undervalued and underinvested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board.