At Blogger, they ran out of money, the entire team left, and Ev ran it alone for a year or two. For part of that he was relying on donations to eat. That's what I was calling persistence. If it was such a great idea, why didn't other people on that team try to keep helping, even if just in the evenings? (I'm not actually positive that they didn't try--that's a flaw in my narrative here).

Similar when Twitter started inside of Odeo. Odeo was struggling, Twitter was an interesting Odeo side project with a hundred users including all of the Odeo investors. Ev (with his blogger money), bought back all Odeo assets including Twitter basically out of shame for wasting the investor's time and money. The only pushback at that time was from investors who thought there was no need to make them whole and that they would have been fine if he'd just shut everything down. If Twitter really looked all that promising, then there's no way those investors would have let that happen. But Ev saw some potential and persisted even when other people didn't understand why. I was on the Odeo team so I saw a lot of that first hand.

Medium's a longer case. I shared offices with them a couple times and that's why I push back on this "pet project" or "vanity project" so hard. It's more like his "White Whale" which I suppose does have some vanity in it. But he's as serious about figuring Medium out as he ever was with the previous two successes. I'd actually seen a really convoluted version of Medium that they called Grids and never released. It was so inscrutable, so bad really, that they had to shut it down and work on an unrelated project for a month just to recover some confidence. (That's what it looked like to me at least).

I think because I've been around for so many failures (Odeo, Grids, something called Standy), that I see Ev as someone who's wrong a lot, but consistent in hunting for something that feels big enough. I saw all the Medium pivots in that light: if they are pivoting then he'd finally concluded that that path wasn't big enough.

If you assume Ev wants Medium to be both big and meaningful (that's my assumption), then this looks like a good pivot. It has the potential to be big (the VC hyptothesis would be the Netflix for Content or something like that) and more importantly, it solves the meaningful problem because it changes the incentives for writers so that content marketers get deprecated and quality gets promoted. A lot of Ev's best public statements the last two years are about how corrupted the free content ecosystem is.

That's something I didn't realize until I got inside this partner program. We'd been publishing free articles that now I'm embarrassed by. Maybe those articles had good ideas, but most of them needed a lot more work to really be valuable to the reader (including articles I wrote). But since we weren't getting paid, it didn't make sense to put in any more work than what we had been doing. Now that we have money and a style guide and deep story edits (about three hours of editing per article), I feel like we're much less likely to be wasting a reader's time. (We publish advice, so we can't claim that we succeeded by entertaining the reader).