Evan Williams quotes:

I was broke for more than 10 years. I remember staying up all night one night at my first company and looking in couch cushions the next morning for some change to buy coffee.

When I meet with the founders of a new company, my advice is almost always, 'Do fewer things.' It's true of partnerships, marketing opportunities, anything that's taking up your time. The vast majority of things are distractions, and very few really matter to your success.

Every major communication tool on the Internet has spam and abuse problems. All email services, blogging services and social networks have to dedicate a significant amount of resources and time to fighting abuse and protecting their users.

Take care of yourself: When you don't sleep, eat crap, don't exercise, and are living off adrenaline for too long, your performance suffers. Your decisions suffer. Your company suffers. Love those close to you: Failure of your company is not failure in life. Failure in your relationship is.

After high school, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but I stayed only a year and a half. I felt college was a waste of time; I wanted to start working.

Failure of your company is not failure in life. Failure in your relationships is.

Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.

I tried to be a ski bum when I stepped away from Twitter, and I wasn't a very good skier.

What the Internet is great at is building networks.

My brother was the consummate Nebraska boy - the football star who went to the university, was president of his fraternity, hunted with my dad all the time.

User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's undervalued and underinvested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board.

There's something about just hanging around when it comes to success on the Internet.

Traditional news is often full of mistakes, but I think that people are getting more sophisticated in knowing what to trust and what not to trust.

A key element of Web blogs is the community element. Most blogs are not self-contained; they are highly dependent on linking to each other.

The promoted tweet is a real tweet that a company may have sent out that they want more distribution for. They will buy key words for it. If people are looking for something related, it will show up.

People are fans of Dunkin' Donuts. They have a relationship with the company, they go there every day. Dunkin' Donuts is using Twitter to communicate with those people. There are people who are finding value in that. There's thousands of people, I don't know how many thousands now, following Dunkin' Donuts.

Twitter was designed to be this system that you just scan for information that's important or useful to you and then walk away, and if you wanna take a break you take a break.

Google started out when the dot-com boom was happening. It grew under the radar of big companies that were competing in but basically ignoring search. Then they were able to really invest during the bust for a long time.

I'm not a big-company guy. I need freedom and control.

Blogging got the concept of personal publishing, but it didn't really take advantage of the network.

I like to think of the world as a sort of a casino, except the house doesn't have the advantage. If you're smart, you have an advantage. It behooves you to place a lot of bets.

Every time you start a company - and I've started five or six - you have the opportunity to screw up in whole new ways.

I subscribe to about 200 blogs. I look for insights and good writing, and I look to get smarter.

My strong belief - in being in blogging before Twitter - is that in trying to create more information out there, in trying to create the democratization of media in general, is that the more voices there are out there then the likelihood is that the truth bubbles up to the top.

Anything I've done that really worked happened because, either by sheer will or a lack of options, I was incredibly focused on one problem.

Vanity pages,' is somewhat of a derogatory term; personal pages are still the heart of blogging, but now there are more topic-oriented blogs. It's really about personal expression, and that's just gotten bigger and broader.

I had a blog for many years. Once you develop your readership on your blog, and you can put something out there or direct traffic or get attention - it's like a super power.

The things that keep nagging at you are the ones worth exploring.

People want to do good things, they just need a prod sometimes, and what Twitter and other technologies that connect people are showing us is that if you make it a little easier for people then you will enable them to do what they want to do, to help people out, to form groups and do good.

If you look at the Internet, the vast majority of start-ups are not successful. But the ones that are, are very very successful. So you can't point to the unsuccessful ones and say, 'There's no hope for this field.' It's just that they had the wrong idea or they had bad execution.

Twitter isn't a social network, it's an information network.

What is Twitter?' has always been a tough question to answer.

Blogging and traditional media work together. Twitter complements traditional media.

I mistrust anyone... if they're saying, 'Well, that market wants this,' and you're not part of that market.

Where you are defines what you're interested in.

My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I've always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism.

Hard things are valuable; easy things are not so valuable. Reaching the mountaintop is rewarding because it is hard. If it was easy, everybody would do it.

Assume the best but hire paranoid people.

Marketing, when done well, is about story telling.

The vast majority of things are distractions, and very few really matter to your success.

News in general doesn't matter most of the time, and most people would be far better off if they spent their time consuming less news and more ideas that have more lasting import.

Change the world. Build a business. Have fun.

When you're obsessing about one thing, you can reach insights about how to solve hard problems. If you have too many things to think about, you'll get to the superficial solution, not the brilliant one.

Our problem wasn't that it blew up and was impossible to scale, but there were some bad choices made. One of the biggest lessons time after time was to focus. Do fewer things.

I suspect there's a lot of validity to the premise that big companies aren't going to attract entrepreneurial talent.