Twitter co-founders clarify Obvious Corp. structure, say Medium now operates independently

Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams re-launched the Obvious Corporation in June 2011, bringing back the umbrella organization from which they’ve launched startups like Blogger and Twitter. On Friday, Williams explained in an update how Obvious is currently structured and operating, as well as what’s up with Medium, the group’s most prominent current venture.

Medium is the publishing platform that came out of Obvious. It has been recently growing and hiring staff, and it will now operate as an independent business from Obvious. Williams wrote that he is spending about 98 percent of his time working on Medium, which is adding an editorial-minded staff and encouraging a wide variety of writers to publish posts on the site.

Meanwhile, Biz Stone will be working on his recently-announced mobile platform called Jelly, and Jason Goldman, who was profiled exenstively by Buzzfeed recently, will be working on Branch, another publishing platform.

Williams wrote how they’re currently viewing Obvious in the blog post Friday:

“Turns out, we like focus. We rebooted Obvious in 2011 with a vague plan. We started investing, incubating, and experimenting to figure out what worked and what we wanted to do at this stage in our careers; we just knew we wanted to work together do stuff that mattered.

Among other things, the first few months taught us that we gravitated toward diving in more deeply on a small number of things — rather than having a lighter touch on many ventures.”

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