From Blogger to Healthcare: Innovating in a Landscape of Possibilities

Evan Williams and I grew up in Clarks, Nebraska, in the late 1980s and early ’90s, in a small, rural community where most families, including ours, were tied to farming and agriculture. Our classes were small—generally 10 to 15 students—and life was grounded in hard work and simple values. Yet from this modest background, Evan went on to co-create platforms that reshaped how the world communicates: Blogger, Twitter, and, most recently, Medium. Today, I find myself writing blog posts in healthcare, an industry in dire need of the same type of forward-thinking innovation that Evan pioneered in technology. There’s a certain irony in that, and it’s this contrast that I want to explore—how Evan’s remarkable ability to create what wasn’t even available can inspire the healthcare sector to reimagine its own possibilities.