you give me the background?
Buchheit: I believe that it was sometime in early 2000, and there was a meeting
to decide on the company’s values. They invited a collection of people who had
Paul Buchheit 169
been there for a while. I had just come from Intel, so the whole thing with corporate
values seemed a little bit funny to me. I was sitting there trying to think
of something that would be really different and not one of these usual “strive
for excellence” type of statements. I also wanted something that,...

own ideas about what’s possible than what really is possible. So they just get
uncomfortable, and they kind of tend to attack it for whatever reason.
But for me, I am more interested in things that are new, and so I’m always
excited just to see what will happen. That was actually one of the biggest reasons
I joined Google in the first place. It wasn’t so much that I was convinced
that it was a good business; I just thought it was interesting and I was excited to
see what would happen.
...

Livingston: Most startup founders have investors, but you had Larry and
Sergey to answer to. What’s it like having them as your investors, in a way?
Buchheit: I think it’s probably reasonable. I’ve never had other investors so I
don’t have a lot of perspective, but they are very open to crazy ideas—more so
than almost anyone I’ve ever met. I used to tell people my ideas, and then
they’d explain to me that I just didn’t understand how the world worked and
why I was wrong about whatever. One of the exceptional things...

say, for these people, it depends on their situation if they can take that risk of
joining a startup or moving to a new city if they don’t live in the right place. For
me, I was actually single at the time, I didn’t have a mortgage, so the idea of
joining a little startup that may well be destroyed was just like, “That will be
fun.” Because I kind of thought, “Even if Google doesn’t make it, it will be educational
and I’ll learn something.” Honestly, I was pretty sure AltaVista was
going...