He co-founded Blogger.
He also co-founded Twitter — of which he became CEO in 2008.
Oh, and he created Medium.
Yet, chances are you never heard of Ev Williams.
The Forest Gump of the Internet is a fierce advocate of the open web — and he is now worried about the whole thing following a similar pattern to railroad, electricity, cable and telephone towards closedness and monopoly:
“Primarily what we’ve seen is that the social networks have gotten really, really big, and they drive more and more of our attention.”
and Robinson Meyer, Associate Editor at The Atlantic, to add:
With this size, they also collect more revenue: 85 cents of every new dollar in online advertising went to Google or Facebook in early 2016, according to a Morgan Stanley analyst quoted by The New York Times.
Before Ev Williams explains:
“It’s probably bad if all our media and communications are going through services that are controlled by profit-driven corporations.”
Counter-intuitively, he aims at solving this problem through Medium, a venture-backed company.
In this fascinating piece, not only will you get to know one of the most influential entrepreneurs of the Silicon Valley, but you will also get a crash course in Internet history and an idea of what the web could become in the future.
Happy reading 😉
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