Twitter Co-Creator Ev Williams Stretches the Medium

The Internet’s last decade and a half of development as a forum for short, zippy, and often snarky writing has taken place in large part on platforms built by Ev Williams. A farm boy from Clarks, Neb., Williams, 41, dropped out of the University of Nebraska and worked his way west to California, first as a copywriter and then, once he’d taught himself enough, as a freelance coder. He founded the pioneering blogging network Blogger in the late 1990s, giving anyone with a stray thought a way to express it to the vast audiences flocking online. He sold that company for an undisclosed amount to Google in 2003 before going on to co-create Twitter, which initiated the era of disembodied 140-character snippets.

Now Williams, who left Twitter three years ago yet remains on its board, is trying to push the Web the other way. Medium, his year-old startup, seeks to create a home for something all too rare online: well-reasoned articles that can generate meaningful compensation for their authors. (In most cases so far, though, that doesn’t include pay.) “We are trying to make it as easy as possible for people who have thoughtful things to say to get those ideas and stories out there, and to tie it into a network where it has more than a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the audience it deserves,” he says.