Roundabout Beginnings Our relationship with Obvious Corp, began when @ev started following us. It seemed only natural that the founder of Twitter would communicate this way. A few days passed and we got the DM. Geoff, just wanted to say your company’s work looks stellar. Would be cool to work on something with you guys some time. ev Evan Williams It was September of 2011, and that DM quickly led to others where Ev asked if we’d be in San Francisco anytime soon. The following week Geoff Teehan found himself standing outside a most unassuming US Bank building in the city’s Mission district. The Meeting We didn’t really know what to expect. There wasn’t an agenda. Just an hour blocked in a calendar for a chat. Ev had hinted that we would talk about what he may be working on next. It was intimidating to meet the guy who is partly responsible for blogging (Blogger) and of course, Twitter. For a good portion of the meeting we talked about what we did, how we did it, our company structure, who we worked with and what we were working on; We had recently released TweetMag and had a prototype of Readability for iPad that we gave a quick demo of. The last 20 minutes were spent talking about what Obvious were thinking about. Most of it revolved around the future of publishing. It wasn’t clear to us just yet, but it would be soon enough.

Side Story An Obvious Next Step It may not be widely known that Obvious is the company that created Twitter. “Twitter has a funny history. It spent its first six months as a side project of Odeo, a company I was running that didn’t have a lot of traction. Twitter didn’t have much traction either, so we shed Odeo, Inc. and pulled them both into Obvious Corp. When Twitter started to really take off, a year after it started, we spun it into its own corporation and made Jack the CEO. In theory, Obvious could then pursue new projects, but I spent more of my time as active Twitter chairman, which included everything from helping raise funds to coding. In spring of 2008, I was fully sucked in by the Twitter tornado, serving full time as chief product officer at first and then CEO, which I did for two years.” –Ev Williams “Obvious Next Step” evhead, March 29, 2011 In 2011, after stepping away from the day-to-day running of Twitter, Ev “re-started” Obvious with longtime collaborators Biz Stone and Jason Goldman. The three of them all recently liberated from their senior roles at Twitter. —

The meeting ended with Ev saying, “Well, it was great to meet you. While I don’t have anything right now, I’m excited at the prospect of finding something to work on together”. A meeting that ends without a next step is usually not a good sign, but it was hard not to be pleased (and thankful) to have spent the time chatting about things we were both passionate about. A month or so passed and we eventually heard back from Obvious. This time it was about doing some work together. Geoff and Jon Lax flew out to San Francisco to meet with Jason Goldman and Ev to hear more about what Obvious was doing and how Teehan+Lax might be able to help. In the meeting, they explained they were exploring ideas around publishing platforms. They had been building this new product for a few months. It was incredibly sophisticated and complex and had taken on a few forms already, none of which felt quite right. They wanted to try something new. It didn’t need to be a full working product, a prototype would suffice. Ev believes product decisions need to be made from actual usage. Even though we wouldn’t be building a fully working product, this prototype would give them a better sense if their new product idea was worth pursuing further. Jason came to Toronto for 2 days and we began roughing out the prototype. For the next two months we worked on designing and building out various approaches. We had weekly contact with Obvious. We were working on this like a traditional client: Sprints of work presented on a weekly basis for feedback.

“prototypes allowed us to see things in one of two ways: Things that don’t work, and things that need work”

Sometimes we’d just build small elements of an interface, like a new take on a scrollbar. Other times, we were exploring completely new interfaces for consuming long-form content. These prototypes allowed us to see things in one of two ways: Things that don’t work, and things that need work. Just before Christmas of 2011 we wrapped up the prototype. The guys at Obvious thanked us for the work and that was that.