Evan Williams

Evan Williams is married to Sara M. Williams and has two children.

Evan Clark Williams was born on March 31, 1972, in Clarks, Nebraska, United States, to Monte Williams and Laurie Howe as their third child. He was raised on a farm and thus developed an early interest in farming.

While studying in school he used to assist with crop irrigation in summers. After completing high school he joined the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and studied there for a year-and-a-half before dropping out. As a university student he joined the FarmHouse Fraternity, a professional agriculture fraternity.

From a young age, Evan Williams wanted to be an entrepreneur. After dropping out of college he set up a company with his father to provide instructional material about the World Wide Web.

He then decided to get some experience working at computer companies and start-ups. Over the next few years he worked in a series of jobs as a web developer in companies at Florida and Texas before returning to his family farm at Nebraska.

Williams moved to Sebastopol, California in Sonoma County to work for the technology publishing company O'Reilly Media in 1996. Even though he was initially appointed in a marketing position, he worked his way to become an independent contractor writing computer code. Eventually he was also able to grab freelance opportunities with companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard.

By the late 1990s, he decided it was time to establish his own company and teamed up with Meg Hourihan to co-found Pyra Labs to make project management software. At Pyra Labs he created many projects, one of which was spun-off as Blogger, one of the first web applications for creating and managing weblogs. The software became an immediate success and attracted the attention of Google who bought Blogger in 2003.

But Williams was not happy at Google. He once again sought the thrill only entrepreneurship could offer and left Google in 2004. He now co-founded a podcasting company, Odeo. Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone joined Odeo the following year.

His company Pyra Labs launched the blog-publishing service Blogger in 1999. It became immensely popular as one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools, and was soon acquired by Google. Blogger is available in several languages including Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Vietnamese, Nepali, and Farashi.

Evan Williams is one of the co-founders of Twitter, the micro-blogging site and online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called "tweets". It is one of the most-visited websites in the world and as of May 2015, has more than 500 million users.