Evan Williams Quotes

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.

Assume the best but hire paranoid people.

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.

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.

Take care of yourself: When you don't sleep, eat crap, don't exercise, and are living off adrenaline for too long, your performance suffers. Your decisions suffer. Your company suffers. Love those close to you: Failure of your company is not failure in life. Failure in your relationship is.

Marketing, when done well, is about story telling.

Hard things are valuable; easy things are not so valuable. Reaching the mountaintop is rewarding because it is hard. If it was easy, everybody would do it.

Change the world. Build a business. Have fun.

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

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

The vast majority of things are distractions, and very few really matter to your success.

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.

I tried to be a ski bum when I stepped away from Twitter, and I wasn't a very good skier.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.