Evan Williams, a serial technology entrepreneur who co-founded Twitter, said: Posted on Tuesday He resigned as CEO of Medium, a company that tried to reinvent publishing on the Internet.
In his post, Williams, known as “Ev” in the tech world, “plans to set up a new company in the coming months (or years) where I can learn as much as I can about what I can do. I’m doing it. ” I’m not sure. “
Medium refused to make Williams available for interviews. He said in his post that he would leave medium because “changes and updates are sound” and that August will be his 10th anniversary as CEO.
“For the sake of clarity, the medium story isn’t over yet,” Williams wrote.
Medium said Williams will be replaced by Tony Stubblebine, who is now CEO of online coaching company Coach.me. Williams will assume the post of Chairman of the Board of Directors of Medium and will assume a new position.
Williams had great ambitions for medium when he founded the company 10 years ago. In a 2014 interview with The New York Times, Williams said he wanted to create a company that rewards writers for producing quality content that balances trends in the speed and quantity of the Internet.
Medium succeeded in creating a sophisticated online canvas for independent publishing, but did not achieve Williams’s biggest hit, Twitter’s huge popularity. Medium has taken various strategic paths, sometimes afflicting writers with sudden shifts in focus.
For example, in 2017, Medium was one of the first online publishers. Stay away from advertisingA move that shocked publishers, which brought about 50 layoffs and relied on guaranteed funding from the company. That same year, the company put more emphasis on subscriptions and launched a program to reward writers with an algorithm that takes into account the number of “applause” received from readers. Reading time, not applause, was the main factor in determining compensation.
Other start-ups such as Substack and Ghost have attracted online writers as independent digital publishing has moved from blogging to email newsletters. (Medium also offers an email newsletter tool.)
A spokeswoman for Medium, a privately held company, refused to provide detailed financial information for the company.
Stubblebine has a CEO who is familiar with the company and its founders at Medium. Williams hatched Twitter and met Stubblebine at Odeo, a podcasting service that Stubblevine was engineering. Stubblebine is also the publisher of Better Humans, Medium’s most popular self-improvement publication.
In a post, Williams said he was proud of the company’s decision to “pioneer a healthier model of content that doesn’t hijack or sell people’s attention or data.” He added that he is still medium and bullish, stating that he will continue to be involved in the company as an investor.
Williams said he plans to write about medium (where else?) As he is no longer doing day-to-day activities.
“I will write more if I have time to ponder what I have learned, as it deserves to be medium,” he writes.
