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Step 1: Found successful startup (Blogger). Sell four years later to Google. Step 2: Wait ten years. Then, repeat step 1 with similar idea but different brandi

by temuze 11y ago

Step 1: Found successful startup (Blogger). Sell four years later to Google. Step 2: Wait ten years. Then, repeat step 1 with similar idea but different branding (Medium). At this rate, we have about 6 years until Ev does step 2 for Twitter. Maybe it'll be called Tiny :)

byoung2 11y ago
I've noticed this same pattern with other founders, notably Dennis Crowley with Dodgeball (location-based social network founded in 2000, sold to Google in 2005) and Foursquare (location based social network with different branding).
- temuze 11y ago
  It's not that surprising if you think about it. Some companies end too early because the technology or capital wasn't there to let it get to its full potential. Also, those founders tend to be the people who understand the space the best because they're the ones with the most experience.
- seiji 11y ago
  Happens with Cisco all the time too. Cisco acquires startup Y, founders vest for 4 years, founders leave Cisco and create Y+1, Cisco acquires Y+1, .... It helps to get re-acquired once you have all the existing connections and the acquiring company knows you're not snake oil and aren't screwing them over. There have been multiple Google->Startup->Google loops as well, but many of those are an acquihire-as-safety-net when the too hyped startup by too eager employees falls flat on its face.
- DannoHung 11y ago
  To be fair to him, Google drove Dodgeball straight into the ground. To be mean to him: Deciding to split Foursquare into Yelp-lite and a shitty social network was a terrible, terrible idea.
  - austenallred 11y ago
    Google also drove Blogger straight into the ground (though more slowly)
    - CuttlefishXXX 11y ago
      The absolutely worst two things which happened to Blogger during the last few years are, IMO: 1. What I percieve to be excessive use of JS. You can't even load a blog post there (well, at least, couldn't last time I visited a dot-blogspot site) without an on-page spinner and a bunch of stuff apparently happening in the background. 2. The tld-redirect crap. Admitedly, I had actually thought a similar mechanism to be benefitial prior to seeing an actual implementation of it but I mean, come on, does this not annoy others? What's the advantage of that anyway? Google is capable of geographical load balancing with IP addresses alone just fine, what's the deal? Disclaimer: These are my end-user reactions. I have never operated at the scale Blogger does so there may be reasons I am not aware of.
      - kemitche 11y ago
        What I hated about blogger was that for a "group" blog (say, the reddit blog, where different admins might post), any images added to the post get shown from the poster's google account (somehow). Which means if someone leaves the group, the images get hosed.
      - marktolson 11y ago
        I wouldn't say excessive use of JS was the problem. JS provides the foundations to tons of extremely fast websites and should (in most cases) assist with improving performance. I'd blame the overall implementation / design which led to scaling and performance issues.
      - xerophyte12932 11y ago
        Exactly. Blogs are mostly text sites and one would expect such to open at rapid speeds. That's one of the things I like about Svbtle, they load the blog as one single request/response with all the text, styles, JS(barely noticeable) inline making for very rapid load times
seiji 11y ago
You missed a step. Blogger (text posting on internet). Twitter (text posting on internet). Medium (text posting on internet). Nice hat trick. But, if anybody deserves internet funny money, it's ev. He's the most genuine and least evil founder of internet things I've seen.
- angdis 11y ago
  While those are all "text posting on the internet", they're VERY distinct forms of text. He certainly has a deep understanding for writing and how writing can work on the internet. More power to him !
- vas1 11y ago
  am I the only one that read that as "least evil founder of internet of things" ?
- volaski 11y ago
  yeah i guess, to you, nonfiction (text writing on paper), fiction (text writing on paper), poetry (text writing on paper), short story (text writing on paper), biography (text writing on paper), diary (text writing on paper), they're all the same old same old.
open-source-ux 11y ago
"Found successful startup (Blogger)" Speaking of Blogger...what's hapened to it? Wordpress, Tumblr and Medium are perhaps the three most popular blog platforms. Blogger, however, seems to have completely fallen off the radar. If you go to blogger.com, you don't even get a landing page for the service, just a Google sign-in. This gives me the impression that Google doesn't want to promote it or encourage new sign-ups. Perhaps they don't know what to do with it? Or perhaps they'd like to retire the service but can't because of all the sites and users that currently exist?
- austenallred 11y ago
  > Speaking of Blogger...what's happened to it? Google bought it. RIP.
- gohrt 11y ago
  G+ happened to it.
- gibrown 11y ago
  Blogger has 2.8% marketshare and mostly flat growth based on number of domains: http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/...
austenallred 11y ago
I think Ev is pretty clear about how this is different than Blogger. You may not buy it, but I appreciate his thinking, and find it very interesting. From https://medium.com/the-story/medium-is-not-a-publishing-tool-4c3c63fa41d2 https://medium.com/the-story/medium-is-not-a-publishing-tool...: > Understanding Blogger as we did at the time — as a software tool for creating and publishing web sites — we found ourselves in the race many software makers know well: Add features, get more users. Competitor adds more features, lose users. (Marketing and others factors have some effect, depending on the market. In blogging, that was minimal.) (skipping a few paragraphs) > Chris Dixon had a great post a while back — Come for the tool, stay for the network — describing how, unlike Twitter, some platforms started out with tool value and transitioned into network value (which, ultimately, became a much bigger part of the equation, such is the case with Instagram). We had an inkling of this and were just getting started on the network piece of Blogger when I left 10+ years ago. It’s not that Blogger immediately suffered. Its ease-of-use continued to attract users in the tens of millions for many years. (According to Compete, blogspot.com had 63M visitors just this March.) But it was a pretty big missed opportunity for Google. (Don’t worry, they’ve done fine.) > It will not surprise you that these observations reveal a lot about what we’re trying to do with Medium. We started out by building a great tool for writing. And it’s not even the editor itself that created the main value. It was the fact that you could easily write and share a story without the setup, overhead, or commitment level of starting a blog. It’s clear that there are many more people who occasionally have valuable perspectives to share than there are people who want to be “bloggers.” These people love writing on Medium, even if they see it as just a tool to create a nice page to point people to from Twitter. > However, that’s not the point. Or, at least, that’s not the end. In the last few months, we’ve shifted more of our attention on the product side from creating tool value to creating network value. What does this mean? Obviously, one form of that value is distribution. And there’s no doubt that something published on Medium has a higher likelihood to find an audience than the same thing published on an untrafficked island on the web. I think that makes sense. You can use Blogger or Wordpress or whatever to create a blog, but the difficult part is getting traction. Similarly to how Github is not only a place to host your .git repo, but also a "network" for finding/distributing those repos, Medium is not only a place to host your content, but a place to find and distribute that content.
- 11y ago

by temuze 11y ago

byoung2 11y ago

I've noticed this same pattern with other founders, notably Dennis Crowley with Dodgeball (location-based social network founded in 2000, sold to Google in 2005) and Foursquare (location based social network with different branding).

temuze 11y ago
It's not that surprising if you think about it. Some companies end too early because the technology or capital wasn't there to let it get to its full potential. Also, those founders tend to be the people who understand the space the best because they're the ones with the most experience.
seiji 11y ago
Happens with Cisco all the time too. Cisco acquires startup Y, founders vest for 4 years, founders leave Cisco and create Y+1, Cisco acquires Y+1, .... It helps to get re-acquired once you have all the existing connections and the acquiring company knows you're not snake oil and aren't screwing them over. There have been multiple Google->Startup->Google loops as well, but many of those are an acquihire-as-safety-net when the too hyped startup by too eager employees falls flat on its face.
DannoHung 11y ago
To be fair to him, Google drove Dodgeball straight into the ground. To be mean to him: Deciding to split Foursquare into Yelp-lite and a shitty social network was a terrible, terrible idea.
- austenallred 11y ago
  Google also drove Blogger straight into the ground (though more slowly)
  - CuttlefishXXX 11y ago
    The absolutely worst two things which happened to Blogger during the last few years are, IMO: 1. What I percieve to be excessive use of JS. You can't even load a blog post there (well, at least, couldn't last time I visited a dot-blogspot site) without an on-page spinner and a bunch of stuff apparently happening in the background. 2. The tld-redirect crap. Admitedly, I had actually thought a similar mechanism to be benefitial prior to seeing an actual implementation of it but I mean, come on, does this not annoy others? What's the advantage of that anyway? Google is capable of geographical load balancing with IP addresses alone just fine, what's the deal? Disclaimer: These are my end-user reactions. I have never operated at the scale Blogger does so there may be reasons I am not aware of.
    - kemitche 11y ago
      What I hated about blogger was that for a "group" blog (say, the reddit blog, where different admins might post), any images added to the post get shown from the poster's google account (somehow). Which means if someone leaves the group, the images get hosed.
    - marktolson 11y ago
      I wouldn't say excessive use of JS was the problem. JS provides the foundations to tons of extremely fast websites and should (in most cases) assist with improving performance. I'd blame the overall implementation / design which led to scaling and performance issues.
    - xerophyte12932 11y ago
      Exactly. Blogs are mostly text sites and one would expect such to open at rapid speeds. That's one of the things I like about Svbtle, they load the blog as one single request/response with all the text, styles, JS(barely noticeable) inline making for very rapid load times

seiji 11y ago

You missed a step. Blogger (text posting on internet). Twitter (text posting on internet). Medium (text posting on internet). Nice hat trick. But, if anybody deserves internet funny money, it's ev. He's the most genuine and least evil founder of internet things I've seen.

angdis 11y ago
While those are all "text posting on the internet", they're VERY distinct forms of text. He certainly has a deep understanding for writing and how writing can work on the internet. More power to him !
vas1 11y ago
am I the only one that read that as "least evil founder of internet of things" ?
volaski 11y ago
yeah i guess, to you, nonfiction (text writing on paper), fiction (text writing on paper), poetry (text writing on paper), short story (text writing on paper), biography (text writing on paper), diary (text writing on paper), they're all the same old same old.

open-source-ux 11y ago

"Found successful startup (Blogger)" Speaking of Blogger...what's hapened to it? Wordpress, Tumblr and Medium are perhaps the three most popular blog platforms. Blogger, however, seems to have completely fallen off the radar. If you go to blogger.com, you don't even get a landing page for the service, just a Google sign-in. This gives me the impression that Google doesn't want to promote it or encourage new sign-ups. Perhaps they don't know what to do with it? Or perhaps they'd like to retire the service but can't because of all the sites and users that currently exist?

austenallred 11y ago
> Speaking of Blogger...what's happened to it? Google bought it. RIP.
gohrt 11y ago
G+ happened to it.
gibrown 11y ago
Blogger has 2.8% marketshare and mostly flat growth based on number of domains: http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/...

austenallred 11y ago

I think Ev is pretty clear about how this is different than Blogger. You may not buy it, but I appreciate his thinking, and find it very interesting. From https://medium.com/the-story/medium-is-not-a-publishing-tool-4c3c63fa41d2 https://medium.com/the-story/medium-is-not-a-publishing-tool...: > Understanding Blogger as we did at the time — as a software tool for creating and publishing web sites — we found ourselves in the race many software makers know well: Add features, get more users. Competitor adds more features, lose users. (Marketing and others factors have some effect, depending on the market. In blogging, that was minimal.) (skipping a few paragraphs) > Chris Dixon had a great post a while back — Come for the tool, stay for the network — describing how, unlike Twitter, some platforms started out with tool value and transitioned into network value (which, ultimately, became a much bigger part of the equation, such is the case with Instagram). We had an inkling of this and were just getting started on the network piece of Blogger when I left 10+ years ago. It’s not that Blogger immediately suffered. Its ease-of-use continued to attract users in the tens of millions for many years. (According to Compete, blogspot.com had 63M visitors just this March.) But it was a pretty big missed opportunity for Google. (Don’t worry, they’ve done fine.) > It will not surprise you that these observations reveal a lot about what we’re trying to do with Medium. We started out by building a great tool for writing. And it’s not even the editor itself that created the main value. It was the fact that you could easily write and share a story without the setup, overhead, or commitment level of starting a blog. It’s clear that there are many more people who occasionally have valuable perspectives to share than there are people who want to be “bloggers.” These people love writing on Medium, even if they see it as just a tool to create a nice page to point people to from Twitter. > However, that’s not the point. Or, at least, that’s not the end. In the last few months, we’ve shifted more of our attention on the product side from creating tool value to creating network value. What does this mean? Obviously, one form of that value is distribution. And there’s no doubt that something published on Medium has a higher likelihood to find an audience than the same thing published on an untrafficked island on the web. I think that makes sense. You can use Blogger or Wordpress or whatever to create a blog, but the difficult part is getting traction. Similarly to how Github is not only a place to host your .git repo, but also a "network" for finding/distributing those repos, Medium is not only a place to host your content, but a place to find and distribute that content.

11y ago