While working from home today, I got a little cold. Rather than adjust the thermostat, I just dug in my closet and found…a Blogger hoodie. Blogger you’ve probably heard of, but it wasn’t always a Google product—originally it came from a startup called Pyra Labs (courtesy Wikipedia):

Pyra was co-founded by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan…. Their coder Jack Dorsey altered an ftp program to work on a web page, enabling online users to upload to a webpage web-log…. The [Blogger] service was made available to the public in August 1999…. Initially, Blogger was completely free of charge and there was no revenue model. In January 2001, Pyra asked Blogger users for donations to buy a new server…. On February 17, 2003, Pyra was acquired by Google for an undisclosed sum.

I was one of those users who donated in 2001 (my memory says I gave them $100, but that could be wrong). When the Google acquisition happened, they sent us a hoodie as a thank you (the sleeve says “Powered by Google”).

So yes, in a small way, Twitter and Medium—both later founded by Williams—are in some sense my fault. Sorry about that.

The hoodie’s warm, though.