Serial entrepreneur Evan Williams spoke onstage at Wired’s Business Conference, about going from Pyra Labs to Blogger to Obvious to Odeo to Obvious to Twitter to Obvious to Medium. Whew! “Turns out I’m bad at parallel entrepreneurialism,” Williams laughed, joking about why he just can’t stop focusing when a particular startup takes off within one of his many umbrella companies.

The most recent bright, shiny object in Williams’ purview is Medium, the publishing platform that’s focused on “ideas and stories with a longer shelf life.” Williams is now spending most of his time helming the 30 person team of former Obvious and now Medium employees. Curiously, the still invite-only publishing company is paying freelance writers to write for it, much like a traditional media organization.

When asked by Wired senior writer Steven Levy when the time was right to pull the plug on a company or when to stick with a project like Blogger, Williams said it was basically a gut check every time: “There’s something about just hanging in there, on the Internet. If you don’t die, then you win sometimes.” Google acquired Pyra Labs and Blogger for a rumored eight figures in 2003. You probably first started blogging on a Blogger blog. I sure did. And it is still around.

Twitter is another one of the wins. When asked what surprised him the most about Twitter’s hanging in there (seriously), to an eventual IPO in 2014, Williams, who still is on the Twitter board, said, “Everything.”

“I’m impressed and amazed every time I have a board meeting there. You zoom out and you think it’s pretty much the same as it was two years ago, but in other ways it’s just more and more indoctrinated into the culture. And everywhere you go, at least things I pay attention to, it’s like Twitter’s built into everything … It’s been really educational for me to see the evolution of a company that I was involved in from the very beginning now grow to be almost 2000 people. When I stepped down as CEO [two and a half years ago] it was 300 people, which felt like a big company.”

Eventually if you stick around enough, the wins will add up. To close the talk, Levy brought up one of Evan’s recent tweets, a quote from Nassim N. Taleb’s ANTIFRAGILE, a book that Williams is “obsessed” with, “Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain.”

“Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain.” – @nntaleb—
Evan Williams (@ev) April 30, 2013

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Medium, the content creation platform started by Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone, has acquired Matter, the science and technology journalism startup cofounded by former long-time Guardian technology correspondent and GigaOm writer Bobbie Johnson last year, for an undisclosed sum. This is Medium’s first acquisition.

The innovative Matter was initially backed by a Kickstarter campaign, raising $140,000 and attracting Williams as one of its 2,566 backers. It publishes long form journalism articles (over 5,000 words) and sells them on subscription for $0.99 per month. As an example it recently published Amputees & Wannabes.

The company will remain a standalone company post acquisition but Johnson and cofounder, Jim Giles, will work with Medium’s editorial team.

In a blog post Johnson and Giles explained there are no plans to stop publishing or to change the business model: “One of the things that made it easy to join Medium was the knowledge that the company believes in great storytelling as much as we do, and is prepared to support what we do.”

Medium – still in closed beta – lets users write, annotate, read and recommend content in a simple magazine like interface.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, Ev Williams’ latest startup Medium added some tools to bring people together while they’re writing. The collaboration tools are similar to what you’d find in Google Docs, but clearly the key is to working on something to share publicly, together.

The service isn’t open to the public yet, but it’s a beautiful set of tools to help you write about the things that interest you and then file them away in collaborative groups and categories called “Collections.” You can add your own posts to someone else’s collection, creating a fun, and social, environment for writers.

In a post called “Don’t Write Alone,” Williams discusses the new features and the philosophy behind what Medium is building as a whole:

Since starting Medium, we’ve maintained a focus on collaboration. We’ve touched on it with collections, which allow many people to contribute to the same idea. But today we’re taking it a big step forward with pre-publish collaboration.

Within your post, you’re now able to click a “invite collaborator” button on the top-right of the page once you’ve saved a draft, which gives you a link to send to friends:

Once you’ve done that, the person can then come in and add notes to certain sections on your post:

After the post is published, the people who worked on it with you get their due credit automatically:

Even posts that are public can be annotated, with the author having the choice of whether to make your additions public or not:

In a way, this is a complete re-imagination of commenting systems, where instead of a slew of comments showing up below a post, points can be made about particular passages, which open up a brand new avenue of discussion.

It’s extremely interesting to watch Medium evolve, as we know that Williams has come from creating Blogger to shoving Twitter into the mainstream. It looks like all of the little things that Blogger never had as a publishing platform are now being put into the Medium product.

The interesting use-case for something like this is when your friends take a look at your posts and catch some typos, or perhaps a link that doesn’t work. Instead of firing off an email to you or an instant message, you can see notes in-line and then take action on them before or after you’ve published. You really get a sense for how useful this is once you see notes dropped into your own posts:

Imagine being able to write an article together and then publish it, which is something that you can’t do on any other competing service. That would be quite amazing and something I wouldn’t mind trying out. Secondarily, I wouldn’t mind being able to launch a note into a brand new post, giving that person the credit for sparking a new idea for me.

Williams says that Medium’s mantra is that “People create better things together.” That’s certainly a different approach than the solo nature of tweeting and blogging as we know it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Obvious Corporation, the startup incubator and investment vehicle headed up by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and former Twitter exec Jason Goldman that has become an umbrella company of sorts to a number of buzzy startups including Medium, Branch, and Lift, is shifting gears, according to a blog post written today by Williams.

What exactly is happening comes across as a bit vague — which is fitting, as Obvious’ mission was purposefully vague at the time that it was launched (or rather, re-launched) in 2011, and over the years those involved have mostly preferred to let the corporation’s work and products speak for themselves. But the general gist is that as far as the focus of its founders, Obvious as an entity is taking a backseat to the individual startups it has produced and funded.

Medium, the Obvious-incubated next-generation publishing platform, is now operating as its own standalone company with Ev Williams spending “98 percent” of his time there. Some 30 staffers who previously were hired as Obvious employees are now working as full-time Medium employees.

Meanwhile, as we’ve reported previously, Stone is working on a new company called Jelly. Goldman, for his part, is spending the bulk of his time helping to lead Branch from New York City and currently looking for an additional company to work with.

The more general collaborative relationship between Goldman, Stone, and Williams will continue to be called “Obvious,” the blog post says, but the entity as a corporation seems to be winding down, or at least scaling back. He explained how they will continue to work together and detailed Obvious’ affiliations like this:

“…the collaboration between Biz, Jason, and myself — which we call ‘Obvious’ — continues… Besides Medium, Branch, and Jelly, we have working relationships with Lift (of which I’m on the board), Beyond Meat and GoodFit (of which Biz is on the board) and Neighborland. We also have a handful of less-active partnerships with entrepreneurs we were lucky enough to angel invest in, like Findery, LaunchPad Toys, and Faraday Bikes. (There are a couple more, which we’ll announce when the time is right.)”

Via email today, Williams told TechCrunch that there are no hard feelings involved in the change — that it’s been a natural evolution over the past several months. In his blog post, he elaborated a bit on the reasons for the shift:

“Turns out, we like focus. We rebooted Obvious in 2011 with a vague plan. We started investing, incubating, and experimenting to figure out what worked and what we wanted to do at this stage in our careers; we just knew we wanted to work together do stuff that mattered.

Among other things, the first few months taught us that we gravitated toward diving in more deeply on a small number of things — rather than having a lighter touch on many ventures.”

It’ll be exciting to see what the next chapter will bring for all involved here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

At the Launch Conference in San Francisco today, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams took the stage to talk to conference founder Jason Calacanis about everything from his experience at Twitter and the rise of Vine to sharing his take on Google and Facebook as well as the latest from Medium, his latest effort to shape the future of digital publishing.

For those unfamiliar, a serial entrepreneur, Williams has played a key role in helping to shape the way we create and share content on the Web, as the co-founder of Pyra Labs, which produced Blogger — and was bought by Google in 2003. In doing so, Williams is often credited with coining the term “blogger” and helping to popularize both the term “blog” and the medium itself. After leaving Google, Williams went on to co-found Odeo and “idea incubator” Obvious, which produced both Twitter and, most recently, Medium (among others).

Through his experience at Obvious, Williams said that he learned two important things about himself. After departing from Twitter, he found himself stuck in a rut, so he, Biz Stone and other early Twitter employees revived Obvious, but thereafter he found himself “stuck in a rut,” he told Calacanis. In helping to incubate (and finance) startups like Medium, Branch and Lift, he came to realize that he wanted to focus on building a company and a product — not simply to play the role of investor and advisor.

Seeing a market opportunity, a problem that “mattered” and leveraging his experience at Twitter and Blogger, he took a more active role at Medium, because “having an impact is at the top of my list of criteria” when deciding where and how to invest his time, he said. There was also the fact that Medium is a publishing tool, allowing people to create collections of content around a particular theme and/or subject, while inviting others to add their own contributions to those collections, as Drew wrote in November.

The startup focuses on ideas and concepts he had while at Blogger all the way back in 2000, features that he’d even built for the platform but never got around to implementing, he said. The idea with Medium, and what captured his attention — a problem that he says he feels like he has to solve, an idea most entrepreneurs are familiar with — was the opportunity to create a better Twitter for long-form content, a space that’s currently owned by Tumblr.

In a sense, he says, it’s along the same lines as what Twitter has been able to do with Vine, its popular video sharing app (where Williams sits on the board). It’s “still early, and I can’t take any credit for it, but I like it because it captures the essence of Twitter, for video … it’s becoming one of the first platforms to not just duplicate what came before it — the process for every new medium or platform — but create an experience, feel and interface that is unique to the format.

All of his ventures are either directly or indirectly attempting to address the long-standing problems that still exist in online media today, the Twitter co-founder says, particularly in the fact that, as the Web has succeeded in lowering the cost of content distribution, it’s created a flood of new content and information. The new economic model around publishing today incentivizes and rewards frequency, volume and keeping costs low when it comes to content creation, which, in turn, disincentivizes investment in a particular piece of content — and long-form content. It prioritizes lower quality content and burying higher quality content.

While Twitter and Blogger have both played a role in creating and instituting this new model, the first generation of digital publishing has focused on metrics like unique visitors and page views, which, while it’s a good start, he says, the way we measure the engagement around and value of content needs to evolve.

Medium, Williams says, is focused on understanding whether or not people have read the content, whether they read all the way to the end, whether they engaged, shared and commented — whether they actually got something from that content. “We’ve done speed and quick release in publishing, now let’s focus on the other things,” he told the crowd.

When asked how Medium involves and what his product development process is like, Williams said that, for him, “usage is like oxygen for ideas,” and that he tries to focus on what people are doing on the platform, how they’re interacting with it — not doing data analysis or stressing over user feedback. That way, he says, you are able to get a more organic understanding of what’s important (and of what users care about) in realtime, as the product moves forward. Then you can nudge development in that direction.

As it relates to Medium, Williams said that he wants to create a platform that can give context to the content that people create, eventually leading to a system where the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. The idea is to allow people to build a cohort of like-minded ideas and, to measure the value of its content, Medium is recording a rough heuristic for “reads,” Williams said in an attempt to discover whether or not people are reading the content, did they stick with it and get all the way through the post, etc.

That being said, Williams continued, he realizes that there’s more friction for Medium as a publishing tool than there is for, say, Twitter. “It’s not like a tweet, it’s not as easy, and we don’t expect the ratio of creators to consumers to be the same for Twitter and Instagram, for example; the point, instead, is not to lower the barrier to get everyone creating, but to get the maximum audience for the really good stuff.”

It would be great to get back to a system in which accuracy matters, and maybe it’s naive to think that quality can (and will) get more attention, he says, but it’s possible to use the network and great design to build a system that creates a better product — and thus creates more attention. “Most of the web is ugly, and the system is broken, it’s terrible for consumption,” he says. “By giving quality more attention and by creating a better system to create better content, we can solve that problem.” And, naturally, better design is part of that.

While the economics of journalism “is a very tough problem,” Williams says, building an economic model that supports journalism “is a worthy goal” and something Medium is
“definitely going to experiment with,” he concluded. The economics are different building a content platform than it is for a publication, any time you build a content platform, you will have commercial usage, and if it’s sizable than there’s money to be made, which is different than the problem The New York Times faces, for example. The idea is to create a bunch of people who are motivated to create content not because they’re getting paid, but because they want to create.

When asked what advice he would give to aspiring entrepreneurs, Williams said that they should focus on building something that they want to exist in the world and to “focus on it entirely.” Something good will come out of it. Of course, as we get older, he continued, that focus becomes much more difficult to maintain, because there are more opportunities — and distractions. “The only way I can manage that is if I say ‘no’ tons of times every single day.” The only way you can really do your best work, he says, if you learn how to say “no,” something that’s easier said than done.

Calacanis also asked Williams what his impressions were of the biggest Silicon Valley tech companies, like Google, Apple and Facebook. Of Google, Williams said that he’s “still a huge fan” and that most people who have worked their maintain a soft spot for the company. “Their values are real,” he continued, “and I love that Larry [Page] is making big bets. I think they’re going to continue to take over the world.”

As to Apple, Williams said that he, strangely enough, doesn’t know the company very well. “It’s funny that Apple is in Silicon Valley, employs tens of thousands of people, yet I don’t seem to know any of them. That’s strange to me.” The big issue for both Google and Apple is that it’s really hard for a company to create real value and be successful in different markets. The thinking is, he says, that Apple has all these smart people, it has all the money, so they should rule the next big thing. But, generally speaking, that’s not the way it happens.

At Google, Williams said, he realized why these big companies — in spite of all their success, all the buzz and giant market caps — create a landscape in which there will always be opportunities for entrepreneurs. In any field a founder chooses, traditionally the conversation has always been one in which VCs will ask, “but what if Google got into this? What would happen to your company then?” While the Google “danger” has always loomed for entrepreneurs, when he got to Google, he realized that it’s hard to innovate and build internally. In fact, most of Google’s most popular products (like YouTube, Android and Maps) were a result of acquisitions.

I realized there’s plenty of room for startups, not because of inefficiency or incompetence at these companies, but they’re just not focused on creating the best value for nimble companies, flexibility and innovation. So that’s the best part of this system, all of these companies eventually fall, or mature, or slow down, he says, and that means that we get to create new things.

You can watch the whole interview here.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Entrepreneur-turned-investor is a classic story arc in Silicon Valley but recently the plot has earned a twist. Certain operators are foregoing the traditional path of joining a traditional VC to instead create a studio-like holding operation. By doing so, they remain engaged with the grit and grassroots challenges of building a startup. They remain company builders.

John Borthwick and his New York City-based technology studio, Betaworks, was one of the recent pioneers of what Borthwick calls a “new asset class” in the VC world. And Bill Gross started this in the nineties with IdeaLab. But we’ve seen many others follow.

Twitter co-founders Ev Williams And Biz Stone launched the Obvious Corp.; Mike Jones and Peter Pham run the LA-based studio Science; Max Levchin debuted his R&D lab HVF; Snapfish founder and Mayfield partner Raj Kapoor is in the process of launching his studio cofounder.co; Michael Birch has Money Inferno; Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, along with partner Paul Lee, are incubating ideas and startups at Lightbank; Kevin Ryan operates AlleyCorp; and most recently we heard that entrepreneur and Menlo Ventures partner Shervin Pishevar is creating is own startup-creation venture, Sherpa. Even VC giant Andreessen Horowitz is building an army of marketers, business development execs, recruiters and more to help aid in the creation of startups.

Each model differs slightly. Some take bigger chunks of equity than others. Some of the studio creators take co-founder titles on certain startups. Many studios not only create and incubate ideas in-house, but also make seed-stage investments in startups outside of the company. But at the heart of what each of these studios is doing is using entrepreneurial expertise and in-house resources to help generate ideas and build companies at scale.

As this trend takes off, it raises the question why?

Speed

Lee, who has helped Lightbank incubate a number of ideas including loyalty startup Belly, explains that because it is so easy to build startups these days, that there is a need for models that allow companies to leverage certain functions like sales and marketing, hiring, legal and more. It’s important to note that this is probably one of the biggest differentiators between studios and accelerators.

If the studio has some of these functions built in-house, then startups can actually leverage these repeatable services and scale more quickly with less capital. In Lightbank’s case, the firm has built and scaled sales teams across a number of industries and companies and can help startups quickly manage this area.

Borthwick echoes Lee’s thoughts on the value of a shared platform of data, analytics and monetization tools. Betaworks has a layer of tools that its companies, which include Chartbeat, Bitly and others, all use. He compares this to the movie studio model, where companies like Disney and Universal create individual movies but have a layer of services in-house that promote films, and provide other functions across these various content plays.

LA-based Science has a similar approach to Betaworks and has built a number of B2B companies that can provide its other consumer-facing startups with marketing technologies. TripleThread, which launched in November and powers personalization for styling and clothing companies, supports another Science company, Fourth and Grand, which offers a personalized styling service for men.

Andreessen Horowitz has been building its layer of services for startups by hiring an army of talent to help portfolio startups. The firm’s partner, Margit Wennmachers, explains that Andreessen sees entrepreneurs as the epicenter to an idea, and works on helping with everything else that the entrepreneur doesn’t have time to do. So if an entrepreneur is a coding genius, Andreessen will work on helping with go-to market strategies, marketing, recruiting, and more. The firm has developed a network of talent in-house to help with this. Andreessen just brought on Wildfire product exec Tom Rikert and Twitter marketing exec Elizabeth Weil.

While these services help startups get their products built, shipped and marketed in a speedy fashion; speed also has its benefits when things don’t go so well in development of an idea. The ability to quickly scale ideas can also be advantageous when an idea doesn’t work and you need to shut it down.

Borthwick explained to us that part of what makes this studio model work is that there’s the opportunity for rapid experimentation and company development. “Failure is part of the model. The traditional VC model is predicated on the fact that failure happens in the marketplace. But our model is a more flexible platform for innovation. If things don’t look like they will work out, we can easily pivot because there hasn’t been as much capital and investment put in,” he says. “Death and breakage is part of the system.”

“Parallel Entrepreneurship”

Ev Williams refers to this model on a Branch (which is a communications product that is investment and part of Obvious) thread from last year, as “parallel entrepreneurship.” In a lot of ways, this seems like an accurate description of these company building studios.

Stone and Williams, Kapoor, Borthwick, Pishevar, Jones, Levchin and others have all had experience being able to build and grow startups. They can all work in tandem with talent in-house, and help this new generation of entrepreneurs turn ideas into actual businesses. The benefit for the company builder is that they can scale their experience across a number of startups and ideas, take a hands-on approach to helping in product and engineering and take equity stakes in each. The new, young entrepreneur gets to learn how to build a company from someone who has had success and can scale more quickly. As Pham puts it, “collective knowledge is always better than singular knowledge.”

Kapoor, who announced his departure from Mayfield to create his own startup studio, explains that an experienced entrepreneur can give founders an advantage by being able to short-circuit lessons that the entrepreneur learned when he or she founded a company previously. Kapoor co-founded and was the CEO of Snapfish, which was sold to HP for $300 million. His model at Cofounder.co centralizes around co-founding startups and helping in all areas of the company including financing, recruiting, strategy, product development and mentoring the CEO. While he hasn’t yet officially launched, he explained that he found the traditional VC model doesn’t allow VCs to go as in-depth in the trenches with entrepreneurs as with the studio model.

His view is that entrepreneurs are looking for help as much as money, especially at an early stage. “Entrepreneurs are open to and expecting help that goes beyond just investing. In the traditional VC world, it’s done it through mentors and advisors,” he says. “But it is very difficult for someone who isn’t really close to the company to add value on a regular basis.”

Lee adds that for a young entrepreneur who may not have a lot of work and technology experience, it is still extremely hard to build a company on your own, even in a traditional accelerator or incubator. He feels that the company-building model fills a gap in the market.

He also points out that there will always be a class of entrepreneurs who don’t need to participate in the studio model. “There are some entrepreneurs who don’t need to strongly lean on the learnings of those who have succeeded previously, but there are some founders where it makes more sense to have a stronger network surround them,” he says.

In his experience, Borthwick notes that there are certain types of entrepreneurs that the studio model scales well for, and this sort of partnership isn’t for everybody. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all model for the entrepreneur.”

Another area where the studio model can differ from traditional VC investment or even accelerators is in the equity handout. Science takes mid-to-high, double-digit equity in their startups (compared to Y Combinator’s 7 percent). All models are different in terms of how they are breaking down equity allotments, but it can be daunting to give away that amount of equity and it begs the question of whether this is entrepreneur-friendly.

But clearly as more and more entrepreneurs flock to Betaworks, Science, Obvious Corp. and similar companies, it’s clear that some entrepreneurs see that there is a tradeoff in equity versus the value that people like Williams, Jones, Stone, Borthwick, Pham and others provide. Lee says that this exchange may make more sense for younger entrepreneurs who see value in the experience of working under these leaders and founders.

However, it’s still early days and too soon to determine the longevity of the companies that emerge from these studios, as well as how the entrepreneurs that these studios are nurturing will perform in the greater technology market.

The other question is whether this new model will produce the sort of iconic VC firms like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. This will largely depend on whether the bets that these studios and company builders make turn into the next Googles, Microsofts or Facebooks of our world.

Borthwick is confident that this model is succeeding in the seed-stage investment world. He notes in his yearly letter to shareholders. “Our approach allows us to achieve a velocity that other parts of the seed and VC stacks find hard to achieve…betaworks has played a part in the emergence of this larger, more diverse, more independent, and loosely-coupled seed financing marketplace; we believe its existence and growth tends to validate the betaworks model and its emergence as a new asset class.”

In a way, company building allows the experienced entrepreneur to keep playing the game. It’s like when Apollo Creed retired from professional boxing, but then decided to coach Rocky Balboa against Clubber Lang. As Pham explains, for some founders this is the best of both worlds. They get to raise a fund and invest in people they believe in, but also keep their hands dirty in the nit and grit of startup creation. It’s the classic story of an entrepreneur who has been through her own roller coaster ride and now wants to invest in others who have an appetite to do the same — only now, she wants a seat on the ride.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’ve told you a bit about the latest writing and blogging platform from Ev Williams’ new product, Medium, and the team has been incrementally adding things, and talent, to the service to make it a full-featured interactive service. It’s been fun watching it evolve, albeit in private, read-only beta, and you can start to see a fuller picture of what it can be.

In an email to Medium users last night, the team shared some new functionality that will allow writers and readers to dive a bit deeper into the content that they see in front of them. The really interesting thing is that Medium discusses its thoughts on “commenting”, which I think you’ll find refreshing:

Stats: As of this afternoon, you can see what kind of attention your posts are getting and how people are reacting to them. The goal of Medium is to enable and support quality, rather than just popularity, so our philosophy around stats is that we need to provide meaningful metrics. Medium stats provide feedback that normal web analytics don’t give you.

Reader Interaction: One thing you may have noticed about Medium is its lack of comments at the bottom of pages—which seems to have become an unfortunately ubiquitous feature of the web. We believe that normal web comments don’t add a lot of value on average (at least of the type we’re looking to create). However, we do think there is value to be had in reader feedback and interactivity. So, we’re working on a way of allowing reader participation (on an optional basis) that offers something new and different that comments don’t. We hope to have it on the site (at least to test out) by mid-January.

As far as stats go, the Medium dashboard is pretty simple and what you’d expect. Until now, as a writer, you’d only be notified if your post was added to a “Collection,” a way of someone re-sharing your piece. This gives you more of an idea of how many people actually read your story:

But wait, there’s a stat called “reads,” which is different than “views.” This means that the team is working on a way to figure out how many people actually made it through your story and didn’t just click and glance. That’s huge for writers, and, at the end of the day, readers. Knowing what you’ve really read, or even close to it, is an amazing statistic to try and crack. The dashboard also shows “recommendations,” which of course is the action you can take on a piece you’ve enjoyed, which pushes it up to being featured on the site.

As far as reader interaction, as mentioned, something will be coming in “mid-January”, which is definitely something to watch out for.

It’s nice to see Williams with team Obvious try to tackle publishing on the web, as they’ve done before with Blogger, and of course Twitter. There are still things to try out, test and learn from how people write and consume content. It’s a smart bet to watch what this team does because of its experience, but also because they are in a mode of taking their time and seeing what works.

Whenever you see a well-established team, much like Path, taking its time to make beautiful things, you simply have to take notice. They are the most dangerous when it comes to disruption.

Says Ev Williams and the Medium team:

Our goal is to make Medium the best place for you to write. We haven’t reached that aspiration quite yet.

Time will tell, and Medium has a lot of time. They’re not the only ones working on building publishing platforms, as we’ve found that Quora might be doing the same.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We told you a bit about Ev Williams and his vision for the future of publishing with his new product, Medium, the other day. I mentioned in that piece that his company, Obvious, was hiring a variety of interesting positions. Today, Williams announced a new addition, a Director of Content.

The new hire, Kate Lee, is a former literary agent at International Creative Management (ICM).

Here’s what Williams had to say about Lee’s hiring today, which comes after a short hiatus for her:

We’re glad she’s done reading books for pleasure and will now spend time reading Medium posts (also pleasurable!).

I was introduced to Kate this fall, via Obvious’s East Coast compatriots, Josh Miller and Jason Goldman. (Apparently, once you’re in New York, you meet everyone else there. Something about the density.) I thought she would be a great person to pioneer our content development efforts, given her editorially honed mind, business savvy, and demonstrated tenacity at finding diamonds in the rough.

What Williams describes here is a person who has an eye for really amazing content, something that his service, Medium, is working on bubbling up. Medium is still in private beta, but you can create content in different themed collections, allowing others to add to them. It’s a really amazing collaborative experience, because you can come up with a theme, which can then kickstart someone to write the content.

On why Medium felt it needed to hire a Director of Content, Williams had this to say:

Truth be told, there’s only so far that content can be “directed” on a platform like Medium, which will be an open marketplace of ideas, where everyone can participate and publish. After all, great ideas can come from anywhere, and part of our mission is to level the playing field. Also, we expect the world (users of Medium) will play a much bigger role in determining what thrives on the system than we will.

Once again, Williams and his team are setting out to blaze a new path for publishing. He did it once with Blogger, once again with Twitter and now Obvious is taking a full-on swing at the fences with Medium. The difference is that the company will now be more involved with content, clearly creating and curating some itself. Williams states that Lee will be reaching out to talented individuals, be it professors, authors or people with something to say, to bring their content to the Medium community.

Medium answers the problem that has plagued potential writers for a lifetime: “I have nothing to say. Nothing to write about. I have no ideas.” The prompting nature of Medium is extremely innovative when it comes to solving that problem. This is something that the service Plinky tried to work on, which was acquired by Automattic to help WordPress bloggers come up with fresh content.

It’s a gorgeous and inviting platform to write on, and I’m enjoying myself thoroughly thus far. The visual treatment for images on the platform is equally impressive. The best part is, there is both a free-form nature in the community, as well as a very focused mentality, when it comes to collections and themes of pieces. Lee will be based in New York City, and will be building out a team of her own.

It will be interesting to see which pieces Williams adds to the puzzle next.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You might have heard a few things about Ev Williams and crew’s new product, Medium. To some, it seems like “just another blogging platform,” but if you think about where Ev and Biz Stone come from, these folks are pretty hip to next-level publishing.

I don’t have to remind you that Williams’ company Pyra Labs sold a little product called Blogger to Google, which basically helped revolutionize and democratize publishing on the Internet. Then, Williams teamed up with Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone on a little product called Twitter. You’ve probably used it a few times; I know I have.

This latest product, Medium, allows people to create collections of content based on a theme or subject, and then invites others to add pieces to those collections. It’s truly collaborative, and after using it for the past week, it actually excites me to write a personal “blog” again. But it doesn’t feel like a blog, it’s something new altogether.

Many have wondered how that is, but today, Ev Williams put it into words in a post on Medium.

The part that sticks out to me about Medium is the editing interface; it’s unlike other services out there in that you don’t have to click tons of buttons, open up different views and windows and other nonsense. Williams explained this approach:

As I’m writing this, I see not just a WYSIWYG editor, I see the page I’m going to publish, which looks just like the version you’re reading. In fact, it is the version you’re reading. There’s no layer of abstraction. This is a simple (and old) concept, but I haven’t seen it in any other publishing tool—unless you count Google Docs and the like, where you’re basically always in editing mode (versus always in viewing mode). And it makes a big difference. Having to go back and forth between your creation tool and your creation is like sculpting by talking.

There are those who would argue that when you’re writing, you’re creating the words—the story—not the presentation. Certainly, professional writers tend to be comfortable with that (perhaps because they know there’s a production process that will make their work look good). And there’s a good argument that content should be able to flow to many forms and presentations. I agree with that, but I still like writing in at least one of the many possible nice presentations.

The editing functionality in-line is gorgeous. Simply hover over selected text for options:

Williams mentions removing “abstraction” from publishing, and that’s something that Twitter accomplished as well. In 140 characters, you were moments away from connecting with millions upon millions of people all over the world. It feels like Medium could be that for longer-form content. If you think about its name, it even situates the service right between a full-length blogging software and a short tweet. It’s just…Medium.

On Medium, there are no widgets, no share buttons, no comments and no annoyances — it gets out the way of itself. Like a great product does. There’s also a budding community of writers popping up on the service as it lets more people in every day. The topics are anything from technology to more personal matters like relationships. There are no limits and you can collaborate with someone’s collection if they choose to make it public. It’s like sitting down next to someone at a lunch table and starting up a conversation with them sheeply.

Once you post, people can “recommend” what you’ve written, pushing it up to the featured area of the site. But it’s not about getting featured or seen, it’s about getting your words out of your head, somewhere. And that somewhere could be Medium for many.

On what’s coming next, Williams had this to say:

We have a bunch more ideas on how to make this editor even better—allowing people to let their brilliance and creativity flow smoothly onto the screen. We will evolve the editor to add power and flexibility without adding complexity or distraction.

Already, Medium has already become my favorite place to write. (I may be slightly biased.) I hope it will soon be yours too.

Medium is about storytelling, something I’m very fond of. In fact, the company is hiring for a role called “Storyteller.“

I’ll put my publishing trust in the Obvious team, because they know how it’s done. Some of Williams’ old crew is joining him, too, including long-time Twitter employee Luke Esterkyn. The company is also hiring more than just storytellers, so keep an eye out for even more talent to flock to Medium. In fact, Medium was just opened up to all Twitter employees. Maybe for reasons.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Twitter duo are back! We’re excited to announce that co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams are joining us on stage at Disrupt, after their widely publicized departure from leading Twitter to focus on social entrepreneurship. They’ll be speaking about their stealthy social-good incubator, Obvious (which invests in companies such as the recently launched online conversation platform, Branch), and why technology founders can make a huge impact on the world while making money.

And moderating the conversation will be fellow social-gooder Hunter Walk, a long-time Director of Product Management at Google who spearheaded YouTube’s product strategy for years. For anyone interested in the intersection of social disruption, business, and technology, this is a must-see panel.

Tickets to Disrupt SF are on sale here. And if you are interested in becoming a sponsor, opportunities can be found here as always.

Biz Stone
Co-founder, Twitter

As a progenitor of the early social web, Biz became an Internet entrepreneur in 1999 and went on to work for Google. Later, Stone co-founded Twitter which launched in 2006. In June of 2011, Stone co-founded The Obvious Corporation to focus on building systems that help people work together to improve the world.

An adamant believer that when we help others, we also help ourselves, Stone supports a new way of doing business with a higher level of ambition, and a better, more altruistic way to measure success. Beyond immediate needs, Stone advocates selflessness; insisting we follow this path in order to deliver deeper meaning in our work and in so doing, place value before profit.

Along with his wife, Livia, Stone was named a Huffington Post Game Changer for their work and impact in the field of public service. Together, the couple operate The Biz and Livia Stone Foundation supporting education and conservation in California.

Biz lives in Marin County, California with his wife Livia and son Jacob.

Evan Williams
Co-founder/Board of Directors, Twitter

Evan Williams is an American entrepreneur who has co-founded two of the biggest services on the Internet: Blogger (one of the first and largest blogging applications, which he ran for four years before selling to Google in 2003) and Twitter, at which he was the CEO for two years and now serves on the board of directors.

Evan was raised on a farm in rural Nebraska and has been recognized as one of Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneurs of the Decade, one of the 100 most influential people in the world, according to TIME, and named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Evan is currently CEO of The Obvious Corporation, which spun out Twitter, Inc. in 2007. Today, Obvious is working on fostering systems that help people work together to improve their lives and the world.

He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.

Hunter Walk (Moderator)
Director of Product Management, Google

Hunter Walk is the director of Product Management at Google, focused primarily on YouTube.

He joined Google in December 2003 after serving as a member of the founding team of Second Life at Linden Lab from 2001 to 2003.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch