Evan Williams: What I Learned Building Medium (So Far)

Evan Williams: What I Learned Building Medium (So Far)(medium.com)

51 points by paulitex 13 years ago | 11 comments

brackin 13 years ago |

I know a few founders that have had to let people go after aggressively hiring. They've ended up fine but when they first raised their seed round they went out and hired a load of people. I do also know a few that are incredibly slow at hiring and it's lead to slow product development and an odd balance in the team (They have more designers than developers). I think sometimes if you hire too slowly it's hard to add more people when you start to need them. Because you have such a tight knit team that can't really change how they work to allow a few other people into the mix.

Somewhere in between seems best, only hire folks that really understand and fit in your vision and hire people that are going to be key for where you are slightly ahead of now over the people you needed a month ago. The team I spoke about needed designers then but now that the team has more designers than developers there's an odd balance that has lead to a beautiful but not very functional product. Their homepage changes more than their product.

prlambert 13 years ago |

I really admire Ev's transparency. It's relieving (and a little scary) that starting a new company seems only slightly less difficult for him as for the rest of us. Money, team, reputation, network are all nice things to have. But none of it matters if unless you make something new that people want.

benjaminwootton 13 years ago | |

Which is also a great leveller. I always think that if you do build something that people want on a deep enough level then you can overcome those other things. No amount of money or developers will make a mediocre product spread at web scale.

Agreed Ev is a class act. Im really looking forward to seeing what Obvious come up with.

citricsquid 13 years ago |

clicking the "looking to grow" link to their jobs page with middle click (which means it should open in a new tab) causes it to open in the same window (in google chrome). It seems that medium is hijacking clicks and forcing them into the same window, I wonder why...

dasil003 13 years ago | |

Command-click works fine for me in Chrome. Is this a Linux thing?

b6 13 years ago | |

I noticed the same thing in Firefox on Linux.

staunch 13 years ago |

He mentions Steve Jobs, and the parallel I see is NeXT. Too many people, too much money, and too much focus on one-upping his previous success.

Then again, maybe in a few years Twitter will end up buying Medium. We'll have a second coming of Ev, followed a Twitter renaissance, wherein he expands on what he learned doing Medium.

veemjeem 13 years ago | |

Why would he want to be purchased by twitter? I assume he still has equity there, so it wouldn't make too much sense to keep all the eggs in one basket. Increasing his equity share at twitter would be somewhat meaningless, since I'm sure he could always go back to twitter and continue working.

1123581321 13 years ago | | |

If he sells Medium to Twitter for stock and cash and the cash portion of his stake in Medium is worth more than what it would add to the value of his stake in Twitter, or he is for some reason unable to cash out some of his Twitter stake, then he might have good financial reason to sell to Twitter.

However, I agree that is unlikely to be his goal since he has taken enough off the table in Twitter fundraising rounds that he likely wouldn't need to sell just for the money and re-entry into Twittrr, which would likely be the purpose of such an acquisition.

tcohen 13 years ago |

He has access to everything he could ever want... While it's a nice piece, this isn't the startup life everyone else lives. Hopefully this isn't another Airtime.

zerni 13 years ago |

Sounds like scrum would fit you