Evan Williams

Mike, thank you so much for sharing all these valuable lessons.

One of the stories that you shared was of Ev Williams coming to you and not having a business plan with Twitter and yet you're still investing.

And it turned out to be a great investment.

Arguably, you know, Twitter wasn't, never found really a sustainable business model.

They've both spent decades in the field doing in-house communications and working at agencies.

Masich recently served as senior vice president of marketing and communications for Ev Williams' venture firm Obvious Venture.

There was a question that she kept asking herself: Is there a way to scale the senior level expertise into AI in a way that actually helps users do the work of comms in the proactive and skilled way that we do? Honeyjar is her answer to that question.

It automates processes like writing announcements, finding the best journalists to pitch, and identifying the most promising speaking opportunities.

And that was a extremely exciting, uh, time.

And it was after doing that for a while that the Obvious team came to me and said, "Let's, let's do this, and, and you can be a key part of it." The team that came together to form Obvious was Ev Williams, who was the founder of Twitter.

When they shared that idea with me, looking at these three big pillars of planetary health and human health and economic health, there are so many opportunities to do huge things.

I just knew that these were the kinds of big idea founders that we wanted to go find.

And I remember you and Logan were launch partners.

Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone were launch partners with their new app called Twitter, which was a way to update your Facebook status using text messages and Aaron Levy had this idea called Box, which was a profile box that you could put a file in on your Facebook profile.

What was funny is we didn't have a single launch partner that was a game.

And within a year, everything on Facebook platform was games.

... for anyone listening, has become the bigger name in our society of tech.

But for me, it was Ev Williams-

Yeah

... that was kind of like, you know, especially that early Twitter at that point, you know, it was kind of, like, interesting how they...

And so it was very chaotic, and I think in a good way, but also it was quite chaotic.

Every six months or so, there'd be a big reorg where they'd change the organizational structure because it was growing so fast that if you had fifteen hundred, and then three thousand, and then six thousand, and then twelve thousand people, it was a different organization every year.

And so that needed a different org structure.

And so suddenly the person that was working for you became your boss's boss, and they'd switch divisions, and things would change so rapidly.

And if you look at the biggest companies in the world, they were started by very young people, and so they didn't know that much, right? [laughs] If you're a college dropout, it's not like you have 30 years of experience or something.

And so I, I believe much more in lifelong doing than lifelong learning.

Everybody always talks about lifelong learning.

I think you learn more by doing than just by, like, learning or talking about something.

But I'd say, you know, after Support.com and, and when that was in the nuclear winter for consumer internet, um, that was kind of a long, dark abyss.

I only got out of it because I started meeting with Reid Hoffman and Ev Williams and these other, these other guys that were really turned on still by this consumer internet and talking about what it could be.

Um, and, and then I invested in Napster and Friendster, and I, and I started to see this, the seeds of, of what became social networking.

My second huge abyss was, was after my social network, Tribe.net, had failed, and it was like three years of just...

I've now released 500 podcast episodes across five years.

Some of my guests have included Mark Randolph, who founded Netflix, Ev Williams, who founded Twitter, people like Amr Shah, who co-founded Wave.

I've also interviewed more investment-backed women in the UK than anybody else.

So what have I learned over the course of 500 episodes? This episode is going to give you loads of gossip, loads of dirt, because I know that nobody's going to watch this episode.

So this podcast now, this is actually my third podcast.

So Bay HQ, this will be episode 342. which is insane, right? And we then have what I have the previous podcast I did, which Entrepreneur's Handbook, which had 90 episodes.

And that's where I interviewed Ev Williams, Mark Randolph, like Greg Jackson, fans of Octopus Energy, and some of the biggest VCs in the world.

And I had another podcast I just started with called Mindful and Driven.

They're telling you and like, you need to sort of, and so I think you have to make calculations along the way.

If you've got, I mean, I wouldn't say this for every single company that goes public, but a company like that, that controls the narratives and information that's so valuable that, that Ev Williams and Jack Dorsey and all those guys that were involved in the beginning of it, like, if they weren't intel'd up beforehand, they certainly were at some point along the way.

You just...

Then you get people like Elon Musk, who I still can't figure out.