Evan Williams: Committed to the vision, not the product

I’m a big fan of Stanford’s podcast series featuring entrepreneurial thought leaders. Lately, I’ve been catching up on the old (”classic”?) installments which is interesting because – if they are 3-4 years old – you know whether the projections for the future of a certain business or market played out as the entrepreneur predicted. Since he is going to be a keynote speaker at the Online News Association conference in October (I’m moderating a session on entrepreneurial journalism), I wanted to learn a little more about Evan Williams.

I discovered Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter, completely missed on his projection of where podcasting was heading in this session from May 2006. But, interestingly, he was dead on with where digital communication was heading. Check out his answer to a question about the potential of his company  at the time, Odeo:

When I think about the path we are on now, enabling communication and personal expression, I think the biggest setback could be if it’s too hard to do. Which is one of the advantages of audio is that it can be really easy to do. I think people have an insatiable and ubiquitous desire for communication and personal expression. And the more ways that you enable that, as long as it’s easy, are going to be adopted in ways that we really can’t anticipate.

As far as the trend in general, I’m pretty confident. But as I said, I’m always hallucinogenically optimistic.

Take out the audio and it sounds like he’s describing Twitter. So it’s no surprise that, when the concept appeared on the company’s radar, Williams helped the company shift focus and dive in.

The challenge for any startup is determining what constitutes a viable new direction for your company, and which is a “shiny new object” that is not worth chasing. Focus, after all, is critical to success.

It also helps, of course, to be “hallucinogenically optimistic.”