Livingston: Most startup...
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 for me, coming
to Google, was that it was the first time that I would tell people my crazy ideas
and they’d say, “Oh, yeah, that’s a good idea. I was thinking the same thing.” So
it was an environment with many people who are open to these kind of unusual
ideas, and this is especially true with Larry and Sergey.
Livingston: So they aren’t “risk-averse” like so many investors.
Buchheit: Obviously they consider risk and so forth, but they are definitely
more open to the idea of something unexpected or different. Which I believe is
very much their own thinking.
Paul Buchheit 171
Livingston: What advice would you give someone who was working at a big
technology company (that wasn’t like Google in terms of encouraging new
ideas) if they had a great idea that they thought could help the company?
Buchheit: It depends on your situation. It depends how risk-averse you are.
You should consider going to work at Google, start a startup, or go to another
place where you are going to have that opportunity. For someone who’s pretty
far down in a company, if they are going to try to change the whole culture of
the company, I’m skeptical. When I was leaving Intel, one of my managers
there was trying to convince me, “You don’t have to leave to do the startup
thing. There are startup opportunities inside of Intel.”
Livingston: When you were working on it, were you working startup hours?
Did it feel like a startup?
Buchheit: Oh yeah. We had a pretty tight little team. We have really smart people
and they are fun to work with. I’m not a morning person, so I’m always here
at night. My normal hours were something like noon until 3:00 a.m. It’s hard to
go home at night, because you get working and you say, “I’m just going to make
this one last improvement.” Then, the next thing you know, it’s 3:00 a.m.
Livingston: Did it affect your relationship with your wife?
Buchheit: No, it was nothing new. I’ve always been like this, so she was used to
it. It’s actually a much bigger change now, because I see her every day. But, as I
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