Saturday, October 10, 2009

An interesting read...


... sooner or later I get curious about how things have their beginnings. I found this to be interesting. Thanks Blogger Pioneers!


The Story of Blogger

Blogger was started by a tiny company in San Francisco called Pyra Labs in August of 1999. This was in the midst of the dot-com boom. But we weren't exactly a VC-funded, party-throwing, foosball-in-the-lobby-playing, free-beer-drinking outfit. (Unless it was other people's free beer.)
We were three friends, funded by doing annoying contract web projects for big companies, trying to make our own grand entrance onto the Internet landscape. What we were originally trying to do doesn't matter so much now. But while doing it, we created Blogger, more or less on a whim, and thought — Hmmm... that's kinda interesting.
Blogger took off, in a small way, and eventually a bigger way, over a couple years. We raised a little money (but stayed small). And then the bust happened, and we ran out of money, and our fun little journey got less fun. We narrowly survived, not all in one piece, but kept the service going the whole time (most days) and started building it back up.
Things were going well again in 2002. We had hundreds of thousands of users, though still just a few people. And then something no one expected happened: Google wanted to buy us. Yes, that Google
We liked Google a lot. And they liked blogs. So we were amenable to the idea. And it worked out nicely.
Now we're a small (but slightly bigger than before) team in Google focusing on helping people have their own voice on the web and organizing the world's information from the personal perspective. Which has pretty much always been our whole deal.
For more on Google, check google.com. (Also good for searching.)

4 comments:

  1. Yes, it is interesting. I love finding out how things started. You know, like Bill Gates in a garage.
    Shame I never have been able to come up with something like that.

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  2. I guess the difference between the likes of Bill Gates, the original 'Blogger Boys' and us is that they were pioneers and we are settlers!

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  3. Yep, I lost the pioneer gene somewhere along the family line. Had lots of them way back when.

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