Evan Williams(Co-founder of twitter)

Evan Williams(Co-founder of twitter)

Evan Williams (born March 31, 1972) is an American entrepreneur who has co-founded several Internet companies, including Pyra Labs (creators of Blogger) and Twitter. where he was previously CEO. He also co-founded The Obvious Corporation and is working on a yet another publishing platform, called Medium.

He was born and raised on a farm in central Nebraska. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons. He likes long walks in the city, tofu, and burgundy.

Early life and education :-

Williams grew up on a farm in Clarks, Nebraska, where he assisted with crop irrigation in summers. He attended the University of Nebraska for a year and a half, eventually leaving to pursue his career.

Early career:-

After leaving school, Williams worked at various technology jobs and start-up firms in Key West, Dallas, Austin, Texas and again on his family farm in Nebraska. In 1996 Williams moved to Sebastopol, California in Sonoma County to work for the technology publishing company O'Reilly Media. He started at O'Reilly in a marketing position but eventually became an independent contractor writing computer code, which led to freelance opportunities with companies including Intel and Hewlett-Packard.

Pyra Labs and Blogger:-

Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan co-founded Pyra Labs to make project management software. A note-taking feature spun off as Blogger, one of the first web applications for creating and managing weblogs.  Williams invented the term "blogger" and was instrumental in the popularization of the term "blog". Pyra survived the departure of Hourihan and other employees, and was eventually acquired by Google on February 13, 2003. 

In 2003, Williams was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.  In 2004, he was named one of PC Magazine's "People of the Year", along with Hourihan and Paul Bausch for their work on Blogger.

Twitter:-

Among Obvious Corp.'s projects was Twitter, a popular, free social networking and micro-blogging service. Twitter itself was spun out into a new company in April 2007, with Williams as co-founder, board member, and investor.  In October 2008, Williams became CEO of Twitter, displacing Jack Dorsey who became chairman of the board. 

By February 2009, Compete.com ranked Twitter the third most-used social network based on their count of 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits.  As of 14 April 2010, Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users. It gets 300,000 new users a day and receives 180 million unique visitors a month. 75% of its traffic comes from outside of Twitter.com. On 4 October 2010, Williams stepped down from the CEO position, explaining "I’ll be completely focused on product strategy", and appointed Dick Costolo as his replacement. 

Following the announcement of Twitter's initial public offering (IPO) in 2013, the company was valued at between US14 billion and US$20 billion. One media report anticipated that Williams, with a 30 to 35 percent stake in the company, would see his personal wealth grow from US$2 billion to US$8 billion in the wake of Twitter's stock flotation.

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/evan-williams
http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/14/twitter-co-founder-evan-williams-lays-out-his-vision-for-medium/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Williams_(entrepreneur)