Evan Williams

In the best cases, Twitter makes people smarter and faster and more efficient.

Every time you start a company - and I've started five or six - you have the opportunity to screw up in whole new ways.

I tried to be a ski bum when I stepped away from Twitter, and I wasn't a very good skier.

I like to think of the world as a sort of a casino, except the house doesn't have the advantage. If you're smart, you have an advantage. It behooves you to place a lot of bets.

I mistrust anyone... if they're saying, 'Well, that market wants this,' and you're not part of that market.

People want to do good things, they just need a prod sometimes, and what Twitter and other technologies that connect people are showing us is that if you make it a little easier for people then you will enable them to do what they want to do, to help people out, to form groups and do good.

Traditional news is often full of mistakes, but I think that people are getting more sophisticated in knowing what to trust and what not to trust.

My strong belief - in being in blogging before Twitter - is that in trying to create more information out there, in trying to create the democratization of media in general, is that the more voices there are out there then the likelihood is that the truth bubbles up to the top.

Every major communication tool on the Internet has spam and abuse problems. All email services, blogging services and social networks have to dedicate a significant amount of resources and time to fighting abuse and protecting their users.

I think there's few cases in history where the C.E.O. steps down and is also the founder and reports to someone and that works.

My brother was the consummate Nebraska boy - the football star who went to the university, was president of his fraternity, hunted with my dad all the time.

Where you are defines what you're interested in.

I had a blog for many years. Once you develop your readership on your blog, and you can put something out there or direct traffic or get attention - it's like a super power.

While GeoCities isn't cool, it isn't a bad thing. It did a great thing - enabled great people to instantly publish to the Web.

'Vanity pages,' is somewhat of a derogatory term; personal pages are still the heart of blogging, but now there are more topic-oriented blogs. It's really about personal expression, and that's just gotten bigger and broader.

A key element of Web blogs is the community element. Most blogs are not self-contained; they are highly dependent on linking to each other.

I believe that companies that are independent are more competitive, ultimately.

I think Twitter will be a fundamental part of how people interact with their government.

People are fans of Dunkin' Donuts. They have a relationship with the company, they go there every day. Dunkin' Donuts is using Twitter to communicate with those people. There are people who are finding value in that. There's thousands of people, I don't know how many thousands now, following Dunkin' Donuts.

I've always had a tendency to be much more optimistic about people than I should be. I'd like to be a little shrewder.

I subscribe to about 200 blogs. I look for insights and good writing, and I look to get smarter.

Unfortunately, 'climate' has become a dirty word - obviously in politics, but even to some degree in my world, in venture capital. People hesitate if they see something that's purported to be green. That's not a reason to invest for many people.

If you look at the Internet, the vast majority of start-ups are not successful. But the ones that are, are very very successful. So you can't point to the unsuccessful ones and say, 'There's no hope for this field.' It's just that they had the wrong idea or they had bad execution.

I used to tweet about the most mundane things - like 'I just bought a soya latte' - but now I try and make it a bit more interesting.

I suspect there's a lot of validity to the premise that big companies aren't going to attract entrepreneurial talent.