Early Employees: Jason Shellen & the Path to Blogger

A series of conversations with early employees of iconic tech companies. If you have recommendations for future interviews, tweet them to me via @hunterwalk.

Jason Shellen, Blogger/Pyra Labs (@shellen, working on @boxer)

Q: How many people were at Pyra/Blogger when you started and how did you get connected with the early team?

A: I had been using Blogger for a few months in mid-2000 when I happened to meet Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan at the Web 2000 conference in San Francisco. There were five or six people working on Blogger at that time. Not long after the conference, I visited the Pyra Labs basement offices on Townsend in San Francisco. I had a candid conversation with Ev about Blogger. I asked if they were making any money yet and if not why not! I saw a huge potential in Blogger and thought the message of Blogger needed to get out there. About a week later I started answering all business development inquiries for Blogger on an unpaid, “friend of the company basis” until they could afford to pay me.

Q: What was your initial role at Blogger and how'd this change over time?

A: Like most start-ups at the time Pyra Labs was running out of financing and Ev ended up laying off all of the initial remaining team members by late January 2001. However, as an unpaid, friend of the company I continued helping on the business development side and then started working on business & product strategy & marketing. In time I pitched in everywhere else at some point or another. I was pressed into service to reboot servers, light design work and at one point even redesigned Blog*Spot myself. I really shouldn’t be relied on to code anything beyond HTML and a little CSS, but for most of 2001 it was just the two of us and there wasn’t money or people to help beyond that.

Q: Pyra Labs went through some ups and downs on their way to joining Google. Did you ever think it was going to be a failure?

A: Pyra Labs was able to pay me a little here and there but 2001 was a rough year. I was still consulting for other companies during that time but the end of the year I was spending all of my time on Blogger & Pyra even when I wasn’t paid. My wife Allison remembers vividly the day I came to her in December 2001 and said “I know I’m not being paid and there isn’t any money in sight but I think Blogger’s going to be huge and I want to work with Ev on this thing.” She was five months pregnant with our first son and we only had her salary as a teacher to fall back on. She cried, but said she trusted my judgement and believed in me. Two months later, Ev and I flew to Brazil and signed a licensing agreement that meant Blogger could pay salaries and even bring on more employees. It was an exciting and somewhat harrowing time, but I never thought it was going to be a failure. Maybe that’s because I had witnessed Pyra’s darkest hour and knew we could only go up from there.

Q: What was the Google acquisition like?

A: In the summer of 2002, Ev and I took a day trip up to O’Reilly headquarters in Sebastopol. They were some of Pyra’s original angel investors and invited us to talk about the future of the company. They asked us how they could help and if they could make any introductions. We told them we we’re fans of Google, Amazon and Apple and would love to talk with any of them.

A few weeks later they let us know that they had chatted with Sergey Brin at Google at one of the O’Reilly Conferences and that he was a big fan of blogging and wanted to talk soon. Not long after that, Ev and I visited Google’s offices in Mountain View with some of the O’Reilly folks a few weeks later. We thought we were going to pitch them on integrating blogs into Google News and other potential collaborations. Within two minutes of sitting down with their head of corporate development and VP of Legal they said “We like what you’re doing and think you should do your thing down here at Google”.

We were a little blown away and needed to digest the initial offer. We had grown the business to a point where we received an offer of venture funding about a week after the Google discussion and kept coming back to the same question “What would really catapult Blogger and blogging to the masses?” The only other outcome we could imagine was taking funding and selling to someone else in a few years anyway, but we thought if Google bought us now that they would help take blogging from an obscure online form to promoting it as a first class citizen of the internet.

Obviously, we bet on Google. I think it was the right choice but it was a bumpy entry into Google. Four months had passed between our first meeting and our start date at Google. We were their first acquisition of live human beings so they didn’t quite know what to do with us. Previously, they had acquired the assets of companies but Pyra Labs was breaking ground for Google. We joined in February 2003 and there were about 600 employees. By the time I left in mid-2007 there were 13,000. It was an incredible time of growth for Google and blogging since it did help us achieve our goal of legitimizing blogging and making it universally available.

Q: What was your most meaningful contribution(s) to Blogger's success?

A: I doggedly pursued the Globo licensing deal in Brazil. I argued that even if it was a good portion of laborious contract work, it would still improve our core product and would pay dividends beyond the licensing fee. It changed the course of our company so it’s probably my most meaningful business contribution. It helped us expand at a critical time.

There were things that came later that contributed to Blogger’s success like the header on top of all of the Blog*Spot blogs with the “next blog” button for discovery and being the product champion for the Picasa acquisition at Google to help expand blogging beyond text-only to easy photo sharing too.

Q: Did you have any traditions or rituals that helped define Blogger's culture?

A: In the fall of 2002, we were finally able to move out of Ev’s kitchen in Noe Valley and took a tiny space on Market Street. There were six of us and probably space for four comfortably. We even made up a schedule for which days of the week we would be in the office because it was ridiculous to try to fit all at once.

Despite the physical limitations, we were still able to maintain a sense of company togetherness through the use of our own private, internal blog named “stuff”. On “stuff” we tracked industry developments, crazy business development inquiries; anything that was important for the entire team in order to stay on the same page. We took that tradition with us to Google and released “BIG” (Blogger in Google) as an internal service for all Googlers. It was a great way to collaborate & dream up new ways to use Blogger as well as spread Blogger culture within Google.

Q: When you look at how blogging has evolved, what's consistent with your original thinking and what surprises you?

A: When I first started blogging I was struck by the immediacy and ease of use. It was truly, as advertised, “push-button publishing”. The quality content was often written by other technically minded individuals and thus ended up being somewhat similar. I remember thinking how great it would be if it were more widely adopted by people from all walks of life describing their world, adventures and gaining more insight. Now almost anyone on the planet is only a few inches away from sharing long-form content, uploading photos and recording their thoughts for themselves or others, which is really what we had in mind all those years ago.

The surprise however, came for me after I spent time creating Google Reader. The idea that a writing interface (Blogger) and a separate consumption interface (like Reader) could be elegantly blended, abbreviated and transformed into something as fun and easy to use as Twitter or the Facebook Newsfeed was unexpected. Sometimes I do miss more in-depth blogging, but the essence of link sharing lives on in the largest forms of social media today.

Photo: Joi Ito/Flickr

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