Twitter founder Ev Williams on the importance of startup founders not losing their inner compass

There's such pressure for growth and for success. And when things aren't going right, it's very easy to lose that inner compass and then start saying, like, our investors are telling us this or a board is telling us this. It's so easy to start being guided by other people's compass instead of your own. One example I did at Medium was, you know, we wanted to grow, we wanted the numbers to go up, and we had a product team whose job was to get more people to sign up. And so what they found is that if you visit a Medium page and you put a pop up in people's face before they could read the article and give them sign up, guess what? Signups went through the roof. And when I first saw that, I was like, that's too aggressive. I don't like that. As a user, that doesn't feel right to me. And so they made it more subtle and we made a compromise. And so sign up still went up a lot. And then several months later, I had a new marketing come in. And one of the first things she did was read what people on Twitter were saying about Medium and there were all these complaints like, oh, spammy is like doing these pop ups and paywall and like, well, that's terrible. It's not worth it. And I was kicking myself because I strayed from that gut instinct. We did something that as a user, I didn't want. And so I think that is now always the guiding compass is whether it's at the company level or the specific product, just do the thing you want to exist.