"Next month will be the tenth anniversary of the launch of Medium. As we gear up for the next decade, I’ve decided to hand over the CEO reins."

"Now that we’ve made sharing information virtually effortless, how do we increase depth of understanding, while also creating a level playing field that encourages ideas that come from anywhere?"

"we’ve never taken our focus away from our core beliefs: That people from everywhere and from all kinds of circumstances have valuable perspectives to share and are capable of doing so in thoughtful, articulate ways. And, also, that the world is better if they do."

"We aim to make it simple to share deep thinking and easy to find the thinking that’s valuable to you. In a world of endless complexity, I believe those needs are universal and not going away."

"every new company is like climbing a new mountain no one’s ever been on. Just because you have some basic skills doesn’t mean you know what lies ahead. There are always new mistakes to make — new ways to die. Navigating those is what makes this job endlessly challenging and rewarding."

"The primary pursuit of my adult life has been building systems that enable the exchange of knowledge and ideas."

"The internet used to be about the internet. Now it’s about everything. And it affects everything."

"I plan to spend the next few months (or years) learning as much as I can about things I don’t know a lot about. I also plan to start a new holding company/research lab to facilitate this learning, to be helpful to Medium and other companies I believe in, and to keep doing what I’ve always found most interesting"

"Evan Williams, Blogger/Twitter/Medium - XOXO Festival (2013)"

"As I wrote over here, I believe bundles are a large part of the future of content monetization."

"I sometimes describe Medium as a system for moving ideas between brains. You could describe most of the internet that way, but at Medium we specialize in ideas that require a little space and thought — or, as we also like to say, smart thinking on things that matter."

"More than 50,000 writers publish on Medium every week: politicians, professors, storytellers, experts in your field, and people you’ve never heard of. The best of these stories contain knowledge and insight that can’t be found anywhere else."

"Our goal is to offer the best selection of insightful stories — not news — you can get anywhere."

"We want to promote the good stuff. Therefore, we’re doubling down on human curation. We’re revamping the algorithmic part of our recommendation systems, as well, to give people more of what they want and less of what they don’t."

"“I think more people would be in a better place if more people shared their ideas,” says Williams."

"Medium wants to make viral information more substantive — the hope in the Pandora’s box of communication. “It’s also an optimistic stance to say that we can build a system where good things can shine and get attention. And there’s an audience for ideas and stories that appeal to more than just the most base desires of human beings.”"

"the fundamental idea is that Twitter lets people share moments of their lives whenever they want, be they momentous occasions or mundane ones. It is by sharing these moments as they're happening that lets people feel more connected and in touch, despite distance, and in real time. This is the primary use we saw of Twitter from the beginning, and what got us excited."

"One of the many ways that users shaped the evolution of Twitter was by inventing a way to reply to a specific person or a specific message. So, this syntax, the ""@username"" that Shaquille O'Neal's using here to reply to one of his fans, was completely invented by users"

"Another is via the API. We built an application-programming interface, which basically means that programmers can write software that interacts with Twitter."

"when you give people easier ways to share information, more good things happen."

"That people from everywhere and from all kinds of circumstances have valuable perspectives to share and are capable of doing so in thoughtful, articulate ways."

"As would be appropriate for Medium, I do plan to write more about my learnings when I have some time to reflect."

"A major thing that’s come to light since the early days is that democratizing media is a lot more complicated than we anticipated. I.e., there’s a lot of bad that came with the good. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying to create a better information ecosystem."