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Insights from Mr. Twitter, Evan Williams in the Economist
Economist has an article on Evan Williams, Founder and Creator of Blogger, Odeo and Twitter: The accidental innovator
Some snippets with minor grammer changes for continuity:
Ideas:
First insight, that genuinely new ideas are, well, accidentally stumbled upon rather than sought out; second, that new ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known;
Controlled Passion:
Mr Williams’s passion is solving new problems. In theory he could have done this at Google with his “20% time” on the side, but in practice he found it tedious to pitch ideas to the Google bureaucracy. Left and right brains clashed in other ways.
Radical Constraints:
One mental trick is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.
Loves Frustration:
For the same reason, Mr Williams loves frustration. Blogger revealed itself when he was frustrated with something bigger: collaboration software.