Evan Williams, Biz Stone Launch Obvious Corp

Posted on October 28, 2006

Valleywag reports that Evan Williams has bought back the Odeo podcasting website from the vc firm Chares River Ventures.

Odeo, a podcasting site started by Evan Williams, who already made a tidy little fortune selling Blogger to Google, is buying back the share owned by investment firm Charles River Ventures. A source told Valleywag, Evan made the decision to dump investors (the venture capitalist aren't happy), which leads us to believe Williams still greatly cares about the company and has plans for Odeo's future. The source also says Evans never needed the money but was scared not to take it, and Charles River is now shopping around for a new podcast companies to invest in.

GigaOM reports that Evan Williams has founded a new company called Obvious Corp with Biz Stone and other Odeo employees. The new company owns both the Odeo and Twitter services. The Obvious website says Obvious will create a "network of web-based services, each with a distinct purpose and brand." In a longer post on his blog Evan Williams says he wants to "create a new model for building and running web products." It also lists bullet points for the Obvious model.

Build things cheaply and rapidly by keeping teams small and self-organized.
Leverage technology, know-how, and infrastructure across products (but brand them separately, so they're focused and easy to understand)
Use the aggregate attention and user base of the network to gain traction for new services faster than they could gain awareness independently

It doesn't sound like there will be any new products right away. The Obvious site says the company first wants to get their "current projects on the right path and also find the right people."