Find out what people want, then make it easier for them to do it

Photo by Andrew White/Wired

Who is that guy? His name is Ev Williams. He invented Blogger, then helped create Twitter. Williams gave a speech recently to tech heads in Portland, Oregon. Ryan Tate of Wired covered the speech. Williams said,

“Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company,” he said. “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.”

“The internet is not what I thought it was 20 years ago,” Williams said. “It’s not a utopian world. It’s essentially like a lot of other major technological revolutions that have taken place in the history of the world.” He compares it to, well, agriculture. “[Agriculture] made life better. It not only got people fed, it freed them up to do many more things — to create art and invent things.”

The rub is that we often take convenience too far. “Look at the technology of agriculture taken to an extreme — where we have industrialized farms that are not good for the environment or animals or nourishment,” he says. “Look at a country full of people who have had such convenient access to calories that they’re addicted, obese, and sick.” He likens this agricultural nightmare to our unhealthy obsession with internet numbers like retweets and likes and followers and friends.

Update: Twitter is going public in November. Williams owns 56,909,847 shares. Twitter values its shares at more than $20 per share. If I did the math correctly, Williams may be worth over a billion dollars.