EVAN WILLIAMS

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 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.

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.

When I meet with the founders of a new company, my advice is almost always, 'Do fewer things.' It's true of partnerships, marketing opportunities, anything that's taking up your time. The vast majority of things are distractions, and very few really matter to your success.

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.

The promoted tweet is a real tweet that a company may have sent out that they want more distribution for. They will buy key words for it. If people are looking for something related, it will show up.

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.

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.

Twitter was designed to be this system that you just scan for information that's important or useful to you and then walk away, and if you wanna take a break you take a break.

The things that keep nagging at you are the ones worth exploring.

After high school, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but I stayed only a year and a half. I felt college was a waste of time; I wanted to start working.

My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I've always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism.

Google started out when the dot-com boom was happening. It grew under the radar of big companies that were competing in but basically ignoring search. Then they were able to really invest during the bust for a long time.

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.

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.

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.

Twitter isn't a social network, it's an information network.

Blogging and traditional media work together. Twitter complements traditional media.

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

Blogging got the concept of personal publishing, but it didn't really take advantage of the network.

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

Most of the great businesses of our time have experimented. Like Google.

Twitter is a very easy way to keep in touch.

What the Internet is great at is building networks.

Where you are defines what you're interested in.