Evan Williams (Twitter)

Evan Williams (Twitter)

Ignacio Muñoz Zugasti

MNP017FE – MANAGERIAL WORK

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction...................................................................................................P. 3
2. Biography and company history........................................................... ..P. 4-5
3. People skills................................................................................................... P. 6-8
4. Conclusion..................................................................................................... .P. 9
5. References......................................................................................................P. 10

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1. INTRODUCTION
Since the very moment of its foundation, Twitter has served as a vehicle forinterpersonal relationships through the internet . The opportunity to make known one's
thoughts or “retweet” those from others has been used by millions of people. This social
network has forever changed the way people communicated with each other.
Twitter is a product focused on people, so it would be interesting to analyze how it
relates to them at various levels, from the internal, formed byengineers, designers and
other staff, to the external, consisting of the general public and their use of Twitter.
To analyze this relationship, we will use the figure of Evan Williams, co-founder and
CEO for several years. Through him, we will make a review o f the history o f the
company and see how the different people skills tools were used throughout the years
and how Twitter has become inan influence in the way of communicate for a part of
world.

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2. BIOGRAPHY AND COMPANY
HISTORY
“Williams has a knack for figuring out how people want to keep in touch—even before
they seem to know it themselves.” Business Week 1
Evan Williams was born in March 31, 1972 in Nebraska, United States. He grew up in a
farm in Clarks, NE. After high school he enrolled in the University ofNebraska, but he
left one year and a half later, disenchanted and feeling he was wasting his time. A fter
that, Williams focused his work in the new technologies´ field, because he thought that
the internet was going to be a huge business opportunity.
During the first years of his career, Mr. Williams found himself lost in the business
world, due to the inexperience in how to manage a company,years later he admitted : “I
didn’t know how to deal with people, I lacked focus, and I had no discipline. ” Evan
Williams2.
The moment he moved to California was a change in his life and in his career. In 1997
he started to work for O`Reilly Media and by 1998, he had acquired the skills to be a
freelance web designer. Afterwards, in 1999 he founded Pyra Labs and the most
important projectfor the company was Blogger.com, the pioneer of the Blog movement,
took place in the early 2000. After selling the idea to Google in 2003, Williams worked
for them until 2004, when he le ft the company to create Odeo, a podcasting company.

1

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/09/0929_most_influential/25.htm

2

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/jobs/08bosses.html?_r=3

4Unfortunately, Apple´s competence was too strong and Odeo was not successful. In
contrast, during he ran Odeo, an engineer hired for the company, Jack Dorsey, presented
to Williams a communication project called “TWTTR”. Williams, Dorsey and other of
the owners of Odeo, “Biz” Stone, bought the project and started to develop it as a side
project, until the sold of Odeo in 2007; one year before theyhave founded Obvious
Corp. With the entire freedom to drive the project where they wanted, Twitter was on
the road.
Like most of the internet companies, Twitter is very young , but it has outstanding
results. Created in 2007 as a free social networking and micro -blogging service, by
2009 Twitter was ranked as the third most used social network, with 6 million unique
monthly visitors and 55...