There's been a bunch of stories lately about Ev Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter upon the occasion of him leaving Twitter to do his own thing. Some are outright calling him an asshole. This Business Insider story of Noah Glass and Twitter's early days has a whole speculative piece on how Ev might be a calculating evil genius, cut from the same cloth as Monty Burns in the Simpsons, that cut investors out of the Twitter pie as soon as he could apparently by deceiving them about Twitter's potential (and mentions that an investor or two is thinking of legal action against him). That piece references the old NYT piece about Ev being "pushed" out of Twitter and recounts the whole Pyra/Blogger implosion at the start of 2001, which I was a player in.
I read all this stuff, and I have to call bullshit on quite a bit of it.
First off, I worked with Ev for almost a year and I saw him as a really amazing idea man and has the drive you want in an entrepreneur. His dream setup he talked of early on was building Pyra "Labs" where every awesome idea he came up with could be prototyped by a small team and spun off into products by other people or sold to other companies that are more into the execution side of things (Blogger was a spin-off from Pyra, the project management app). If you look at the past ten years, Ev's time after Google is much like that. Odeo was a good idea (I never got the appeal of phone-to-blog-post Audioblogger, Noah Glass' predecessor app) because podcasting was just taking off and I was most interested in the piece that let you record and mix audio using a browser instead of expensive audio software. Odeo went the way of the Dodo because iTunes simply added Podcasting natively and crushed it overnight. Ev went on to form Obvious, which seemed like another take on the Pyra Labs model, and Twitter was a product spun out from there.
Again, Ev is great at ideas, making prototypes and letting ideas blossom into things over time. He doesn't seem like a CEO type to me, and that's not a dig on him -- I'm a CEO myself, even though I'm not a CEO type of guy either. Running a day-to-day corporation with tons of employees is a lot different than being an ideas guy, and it requires different skills.
So Ev leaving Twitter to try something new didn't come off as unexpected when I heard the news from the man himself.
This is my own speculation, but I think the core issue on the Odeo/Twitter thing between Noah and Ev was that their personalities clashed. I remember meeting Noah and him being a pretty intense guy and Ev was a quieter, mellower dude. I remember being surprised when I heard they were rolling Audioblogger into something new together but then I remember they used to be next-door neighbors and I thought maybe I was too quick to judge Noah from seeing him at a couple parties.
One key point that deflates pretty much the whole Business Insider piece on Twitter and Ev buying out his Odeo investors is this: I've spoken with a number of Odeo investors and one mentioned to me that when they were offered the buy back plan, there was an offer to roll your shares into Twitter, though Twitter was so new, no one really knew the potential (seriously, twitter wasn't a killer app at first. I hated it. Merlin hated it.). Ev didn't "slow play" his hand and dupe investors so he could own more of Twitter later on, Ev gave them a pretty amazing offer of continuing their investment and if I remember correctly I heard that everyone but one or two investors took the cash offer out of Odeo and turned down the Twitter shares.
That's an important distinction because it means the investors in the story aren't pissed that they were hoodwinked by Ev, it's because the investors passed on Twitter and combined with today's 20/20 hindsight, it looks like a bad move by almost every investor to take their short term cash back.
Going back to the NYT piece from last Fall, I was a little bit bitter for the immediate few months after i was laid off from Blogger in 2001 because I knew Blogger was a much bigger idea that had so much world-changing potential I didn't want to see die on the vine. By 2002 I buried the hatchet with Ev and admired his drive and hard work at keeping it alive by himself, and eventually growing it into something Google snapped up and improved upon (The NYT story says that unnamed former employees got nothing out of the Google deal. I'm one of the folks they were talking about, and still, there's sincerely no hard feelings).
I look forward to whatever Ev does next because he has tons of great ideas and can build a prototype faster than you think, but one thing he isn't is a calculating evil genius asshole hellbent on screwing over investors.
That's just melodramatic bullshit.
