Paul Buchheit was Google’s 23rd employee. He was
the creator and lead developer of Gmail, Google’s
web-based email system, which anticipated most
aspects of what is now called Web 2.0. As part of his
work on Gmail, Buchheit developed the first prototype
of AdSense, Google’s program for running ads
on other websites. He also suggested the company’s
now-famous motto, “Don’t be evil,” at a 2000 meeting
on company values.
Although not a founder, Buchheit probably contributed
more to Google than many founders do their
startups. Gmail was...

like email was strange. A lot of people were kind of unsure. At this point,
it wouldn’t seem like a big deal, but at the time it was a little bit controversial.
For quite a while I was just working on it by myself. I actually started out
with some of the Groups code, just because I was familiar with it. I built the
first version of Gmail in 1 day, just using the Groups code, but it only searched
my email. I released that to some Googlers and people said it was useful, so...

but it got people thinking because it proved that it was possible, and that it
wasn’t too hard because I was able to do it in less than a day. After that, other
people took over and did all the hard work of making it into a real product.
Livingston: You have done two groundbreaking things at Google.
Buchheit: Probably. I’ve done a lot of random things. Mostly what I do doesn’t
turn into anything, because I like to just try out ideas and a lot of them don’t go
anywhere.
Livingston: So...

is one difference between a regular startup and starting within Google—I think
it’s a little bit different now, but at that time there was still this vision that, “We
only do web search.” Now we do lots of neat products that go beyond that, but
at the time, a lot of people inside the company were sort of unsure. The idea of
doing this product that was receiving all the email—and we had to store the
email, which is a different systems problem, really, from web search, because
Paul Buchheit 163
in web...

don’t really even think about it, but it makes a big difference. You can send
email so fast and you don’t have to remember the addresses. To my knowledge,
we were the first web mail provider to do it. Desktop products would have
things like that sometimes, but no web mail was doing that at the time.
Livingston:Was it always your plan to archive everything and not delete emails
and have the massive storage needs?
Buchheit: You can delete email. The idea was that there’s valuable information
in email and we thought, “Why...