Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, executive editor of Recode, and you're listening to Recode Media with Peter Kafka, powered by digital media.

Before we launch Recode Media as its own podcast, you may have heard Peter over at my podcast, Recode Decode.

Here's one of the fantastic interviews he did for Decode. Let's listen.

Recode Radio presents Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, powered by digital media.

Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, executive editor of Recode, and you're listening to Recode Decode, a podcast

about Silicon Valley's key players, big ideas, and how they're changing the world we live in.

This is our special weekly segment with host Peter Kafka, Recode senior editor and producer of the Code Media Conference. Joining Peter each week are some of his favorite movers and shakers in the media world. Peter, this week you talked to Ev Williams, who was a speaker at the Code Media Conference last year and is one of the co-founders of Twitter, but you're talking about Medium, correct? We're going to talk to him about Medium, probably talking about Twitter. Maybe we'll talk to him about BlogSpot, which is his first company. Ev has done three different companies around the idea of communicating ideas to lots of people. So I guess he's got kind of a wild hair about that idea. So we'll talk to him about that and the rest of the world. And you mentioned you talked to him in February at Code Media. That was one of my favorite interviews at that event. It's a great interview. So we want to sort of replicate that. And what do you think the big topics for him are right now? I think he still needs to explain to both readers and users and maybe even investors what he wants medium to be when it grows up. It's only a couple years old. I think it's still sort of vague in a lot of people's minds. And I think he's trying to figure out how to get more people to use his platform, whether it's to read stuff or write stuff. Right. Fantastic. Let's have a listen. Thanks. Hey, I'm here with Ev Williams, who founded blogger and co-founded Twitter and is now the founder of a third company, Medium.

Hi, Ev. Hi. Thanks for joining us. My pleasure. You were with us on stage in February of this year. It was one of my favorite interviews at the Code Media conference. He did with Kara Swisher, so I was very jealous. I wanted to do one my own, so thanks for indulging me. My pleasure. We were saying off, Mike, that she spent a lot of that interview talking to care about whether Medium was a publisher or not.

I think we've resolved that medium publishes stuff, but that's not your core business.

Your core business is...

We are a platform for people to publish stuff.

I saw an ad.

I was doing some Googling today in advance of the interview, and you guys had an ad pop

up on one of my screens.

And I think it said, buy writers, four writers. Am I getting the tagline right? I don't know. I'm not charged in the ads. You're not charged of marketing. No, but that does sound familiar. That's something we were playing with. that it's not a tagline per se, but I think that did show up in an ad.

So this is really interesting to me because you've done three startups, and they're all based around the same. with it. It's not a tagline per se, but I think that did show up in an ad.

So this is really interesting to me because you've done three startups and they're all based around the same idea, which is making it easier for people to publish stuff digitally.

Right? So blogger, you kind of kicked off the idea of blogging. It was difficult to publish

on the internet. You made it relatively easy to do so. Then you went to Twitter.

You made it really easy to publish 140 characters on the internet over your phone. And so when you launched Medium, I was a little confused because I thought, well, what is Ev trying to solve here that he hasn't already solved? There must be doing something else. I must not be understanding what he's doing. That was some of the confusion around when you launched initially. Yeah.

What is the thing that makes you want to figure out how to make it easier for me to publish on the Internet? It seems like that problem is solved. Yeah, I got a lot of that, especially from my friends when I started Medium, which was three years ago now. They're like, you're going to do what now? You're going to make it easy to publish right on the interwebs. Yeah, that seems like a thing that would be cool. And so, well, isn't that possible? And did you do it?

Yeah. I played in that box for a while. But yeah, it just seemed like there's more to do. And it seemed like you could certainly publish, you can put your thoughts out there very, very easily.

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