| Pyra Labs | |
| Owner: | |
| Company Type: | Subsidiary |
| Location City: | San Francisco, CA |
| Location Country: | United States |
| Products: | Blogger |
| Current Status: | Offline, February 17, 2003 |
Pyra Labs is a subsidiary of Google (Alphabet) that created the Blogger service in 1999. Google acquired Pyra Labs in 2003.
Pyra was co-founded by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. The company's first product, also named "Pyra", was a web application which would combine a project manager, contact manager, and to-do list. Their coder Jack Dorsey altered an ftp program to work on a webpage, enabling online users to upload to a webpage web-log. In 1999, while still in beta, the rudiments of Pyra were repurposed into an in-house tool which became Blogger. The service was made available to the public in August 1999. Much of this coding was done by Paul Bausch and Matthew Haughey.[1]
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.[2] When the company's seed money dried up around the same time, the employees continued without pay for weeks or, in some cases, months; but this could not last, and eventually Williams faced a mass walk-out by everyone including co-founder Hourihan. Williams ran the company virtually alone until he was able to secure an investment by Trellix after its founder Dan Bricklin became aware of Pyra's situation. Eventually advertising-supported Blogspot and Blogger Pro emerged.
In 2002, Blogger was completely re-written to license it to other companies, the first of which was Globo.com of Brazil.
On February 17, 2003, Pyra was acquired by Google for an undisclosed sum.[3]